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When Professor Laurie Stras, co-director of the early music female vocal ensemble Musica Secreta, came across a collection of settings of Lamentations in Florence's Biblioteca Nazionale, it was not immediately clear that what she had in her hands was the complete score of Antoine Brumel's Lamentations of Jeremiah for Good Friday.

Brumel's Lamentations allude to the Tenebrae (Lat. darkness) services in which verses from the biblical Lamentations of Jeremiah were intoned.  Central to the Tenebrae is the belief that the most forbidding darkness can still be pierced by light. Brumel’s work is akin to a vast painting or tableau vivant telling the tragedy of the destruction of a city as seen through the eyes of Christ on the cross in a way that is both completely personal and at the same time universal. 

The symphonic proportions of the five 'acts' totalling approximately forty-five minutes, make the composition both impressive and unique in Renaissance repertoire. The Lamentations have no apparent liturgical function but, are likely to have been composed for performance during Holy Week, when every Christian worshipper would re-live the story of Christ's last days through the Tenebrae liturgy.

For the recording, Musica Secreta have paired Brumel's Lamentations with a collection of vocal music copied by Fra Antonio Moro, the same monk who was responsible for copying the Lamentations.  Compiled for a Florentine nunnery, the Biffoli-Sostegni manuscript belonged to two nuns: Suor Agnoleta Biffoli and Suor Clemenzia Sostegni whose names can be found both on the book binding and embedded in its extensive decorations. The manuscript documents the entire liturgical year of a convent in 76 works of which only nine - including Moro's own Sancta Maria succurre miseris – can be attributed.

In the press

Shortlisted for the Gramophone Awards 2020
“A tale of two Florentine manuscripts copied by the scribe Fra Antonio Moro leads the intrepid musicologist Laurie Stras to create another superb album with Musica Secreta... As so often with Musica Secreta, the meeting of inspired musicology with passionate and committed performance generates something way beyond the sum of its parts.”
Gramophone Magazine

”The music is unpredictable and vitalised, episodic and striving. ... At times there is such energy and power in the singing that one feels one’s feet lift from the floor. ... This is a recording that will delight scholars and laymen, theorists and practitioners, alike.”
Opera Today

“If just for the importance of the premiere of Brumel’s complete Lamentations, this recording would be practically an imperative. But it is so much more than that — a window into a world of musical practice, not just by nuns but also by the myriad members of a society in which convents played such a pivotal role, and it is performed beautifully.”
Early Music America

“The sound-world is quite distinctive, with its use of four high voices (the total span of the music is around two octaves), and the results have an almost aetherial quality, at first delicate and intricate but you come to realise that there is a strength to it to. … The sound-world from Musica Secreta is beautifully crafted and balanced, with a fine feel for the shape of the polyphony and a lovely transparency of sound.”
Planet Hugill

Nominated, Recordings of the Year 2019, Presto Classical
David Smith also interviewed Laurie Stras for Presto Classical here

“… the interpretations of these works are appealing, projecting an almost Italianate lightness that can seem dance-like at times, yet rejecting an "angelic" sort of vocal presentation.”
Medieval.org

“This is an extraordinary work. Brumel varies his treatment of the initial Hebrew letters, sometimes setting them in short and concise phrases, sometimes stretching out to quasi-instrumental preludes or even short fantasias, often exploiting different scorings. This in microcosm is true of the entire work. Given Brumel’s dates, c. 1460-1515, there seem to be so many pre-echoes of later music. … Musica Secreta perform this music radiantly. Brumel’s vision is projected sensitively, whether ruminative or ecstatic. Every part is clearly audible, and the balance between them is ideal. The continuo is discreet but effective. … Performance and musicology come together on this disc with results that are exciting, rewarding, stimulating and reassuring.”
Early Music Review

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About the artist

Musica Secreta has been at the forefront of the discovery and interpretation of music for and by early modern women for over 30 years.  The ensemble brings together a blend of internationally-acclaimed highly experienced and new generation musicians with ground-breaking research to perform the fascinating and continually emerging repertoire. Its programmes illustrate the many faces of female musicians in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: courtiers, courtesans, actresses and cloistered nuns.

Liner notes

“I had a day in a Florentine library, a smartphone, and a well-preserved (and very large) manuscript in front of me, so I asked permission and started taking pictures of aspects that interested me: small bits of decoration, unusual passages of music – including alternating sections in duple and triple time. Knowing that someone had felt this anonymous music to be of value enough to commission such an extensive manuscript, I scanned quickly through it to see if there were pieces I might like to recover. I paid little attention to musical detail, however, because four hundred pages of sixteenth-century notation are impossible to parse in such a short time. 

When I returned home and started to look at the photographs again, I realised there was something very unusual happening some thirty-five pages after the familiar Brumel verses. I thought perhaps the copyist had become confused, and had copied the work twice in the same manuscript, because I was looking again at the ‘Ierusalem convertere’ of Brumel’s Lamentations. It slowly dawned on me that the refrain was a repeat, and the music on the intervening pages was all part of the same work, a much larger work than we had previously recognised. The researcher who identified the known verses back in the 1960s had not spotted the superstructure. Three days and nights of frantic transcribing later, the whole cycle emerged; over one thousand breves of music held together by a pair of refrains and a small number – perhaps a dozen – of motifs that are combined, inverted, layered, transposed, sequenced, restated in a seemingly infinite number of ways.”

Read the full liner notes on the Musica Secreta website

Find a supplementary essay by Laurie Stras about the complexities of the musical setting here