Last October, I found myself making a strange pilgrimage through an industrial estate in search of a rock music studio, the venue for a recording of Obrecht’s Missa Scaramella. Many will know Scaramella as set by either Josquin or Compère; it’s a delightful Italian satirical song about a soldier preparing for war, an earworm full of lively nonsense words – the early music foreshadowing of ‘Non più andrai’, if you like. Frustratingly, the Mass that Obrecht based on this song survives incomplete, with two of the four voice parts completely missing from the surviving set of partbooks in the Biblioteka Jagiello´nska, Kraków, and so for this recording they have been reconstructed by my Gramophone colleagueFabrice Fitch. The ensemble is The Binchois Consort, founded and conducted by Andrew Kirkman (pictured above left, with Fitch). The ensemble’s longtime resident scholar and friend Philip Weller was part of this particular project when it began.

Weller was a hugely popular figure in early music research who taught at the University of Nottingham, where he inspired generations of students. He had also been friends with Kirkman since their student days. Before he died in 2018, he had worked many times as scholar-in-residence for The Binchois Consort, with a speciality in reconstruction of lost voices in early Renaissance polyphony. Notably, he had already worked on a missing section from another Mass by Obrecht, Missa Libenter gloriabor, which, despite having been performed several times by Kirkman’s ensemble, remains, as yet, unrecorded.

Inspired by a footnote in Rob C Wegman’s 1996 Obrecht biography, Weller and Fitch began work together on the Missa Scaramella, but Philip sadly passed away before they had completed more than a few short movements. This recording is a tribute to him, and as such, most of the rest of the programme consists of pieces associated with him: Obrecht’s motet Mater patris, from the printed source Motetti a cinque (1508), and a motet by Brumel called Philippe, qui videt me, both reconstructed by Weller, alongside a piece by Fitch composed for The Binchois Consort to sing at Weller’s memorial in 2019, Planctus David (after Pierre de La Rue), which pleasingly is a double retrograde canon – musicological catnip to those who study the Renaissance masters.

A few days before my walk through the damp, autumnal streets of Maidenhead, I schedule a call with Fitch to quiz him on his process of reconstruction. How best to unpick this dazzling act of detective work? As I wrestle with this question, my thoughts turn to former US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who, in a now infamous speech from 2002, described various types of knowing: ‘There are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don’t know we don’t know.’

Taking my cue from Rumsfeldian philosophy, I start by asking Fitch about the known knowns – the state of the extant material, for instance. He tells me that the Mass is basically complete in terms of length, it’s just missing two voices from the texture. Out of the four original partbooks, the two that are missing are those for the discantus and the tenor. To me that sounds like 50 per cent of the information: ‘So that’s helpful, then!’ I quip. He replies, ‘Well, it is helpful, yes, in the sense that a lot of the time you can confidently restore the tenor.’ Fitch explains how tenor parts in this sort of Mass setting often repeat the same material (the cantus firmus) from section to section in slowish note values, and in this particular case we know the music in question is that of Scaramella. ‘Because Obrecht is usually so systematic, he likes to keep the rhythms and the pitches exactly as he finds them and notates them the same way over and over again. You can take this “notational archetype” and work out where it fits in relation to the voices we’ve got, then recycle it. So that is helpful. But the other side of the coin is that Obrecht can also transform the cantus firmus in very arcane ways. If it is as simple as inversion or retrograde, it is easy to recover, but in some cases you get the weirdest stuff going on,’ he chuckles, with obvious delight. So much for known knowns; Fitch has already made it sound like a Boulezian puzzle.

I ask if there were any sections where he couldn’t find what the tenor was doing, even though there is obvious context from the other voices and the fact that it will always be doing something related to the tune. He tells me that at one point in the Credo he got stuck and consulted scholar and singer Paul Kolb: ‘What he doesn’t know about mensural notation isn’t worth knowing, unless you were actually born then.’ Fitch had worked out where all the pitch changes of the tune were but couldn’t detect how it might have been notated originally; Kolb finally deduced that at this point Obrecht had got rid of all the rests, keeping an unbroken chain of notes in more or less the same values as they appeared in the song but notating every alternate note in black, thus changing its value. This is just the sort of stuff that Obrecht does, but Fitch thinks that rather than notating it, he probably would have indicated the transformation by some kind of delightfully obscure written instruction (known as a rubric) to the singer. ‘And if that’s not a known unknown, I don’t know what is,’ I helpfully suggest. But Fitch is on a roll: ‘Well, what’s lovely about these situations is that once you’ve found a solution that fits the notes and then deduced how Obrecht would have notated it, then there’s virtually no doubt that you’ve found the correct solution, because these notational tricks are absolutely typical of the way composers worked, and Obrecht in particular is renowned for devising elegant notational games of this kind.’

Thus, with the tenor part battened down, we turn our attention to the other missing voice, the discantus (the top one), which is almost the diametrical opposite in terms of the problems that it poses, largely because it doesn’t recycle the Scaramella tune; instead, it presents any number of motifs and freely composed phrases. Or does it? Once the missing tenor was constructed and placed beside the two surviving voices, the altus and bassus, Fitch found that from a counterpoint perspective he suddenly had quite limited chess moves available.

The Binchois Consort in the Hyperion recording sessions, Denmark Studios, Maidenhead, October 2023. Clockwise from top left: Andrew Kirkman (conductor); Nicholas Madden and Matthew Vine (tenors); David Allsopp (countertenor), Jimmy Holliday (bass), Dominic Bland and Nicholas Madden (tenors); Philip Hobbs (engineer–producer)

It’s a strange situation: on the one hand, our conversation implies that this music is quite formulaic, that there are passages we can be quite sure about; but the more we talk, I realise we’re also looking at Obrecht’s music in wonderment and finding it amazingly artistic. I love that inherent tension and say as much. ‘In a way, it’s at the heart of what it is to compose,’ Fitch tells me. ‘I found myself in my element, because it’s the sort of tension that I’m constantly working with as a composer, especially since I tend to work on the sort of problem-solving principle. In that sense, working with somebody like Obrecht is a lot easier than if you were trying to reconstruct Ockeghem, say, or Agricola. That’s not to say that he’s more predictable, necessarily, it’s just that he does tend to operate on a more rational level, like a game of consequences: if x, then (probably) y.’

For me, Obrecht is anything but simple. He’s got a lot of flow, Obrechtian flow. Fitch agrees: ‘The key is that amid all these logical deductions, like a sort of contrapuntal Sudoku, you’re also dealing with a composer with a wonderful sense of melodic invention, so as you’re scanning the existing voices to find out what you can do against them, you’re also trying to come up with something that’s got – whatever you call it – elegance, fluency, and that really meshes with the other voices. That’s the tough part. That’s invention in the sense of discovery.’

So now we have a method to reconstruct four voices, do we always need all four? Might one be adding a voice part that never was in certain places? I note that Fitch has assigned a number of duos in the Gloria, so I ask how that came about. He responds with a typical politician’s reply, ‘That’s a very good question,’ but backs it up swiftly: ‘First, trios are comparatively rare in four-voice music of this time, except in reduced sections, of which there are none in this Mass. And as a reconstructor, one’s always got to bear in mind that there may not actually be anything to add. Then, one is helped by knowing what is typical in any given situation. At the beginning of the Credo, there’s a lengthy duo between the missing discantus and the altus before the cantus firmus comes in. Theoretically, it could be a trio with the bass, but so many cantus firmus Mass Credos (including Obrecht’s) begin with a duo that that’s got to be your starting hypothesis. Many of these local decisions work on these lines: knowing the context is essential.’

We discuss how the Mass offers us few new insights into the song itself, apart from noting that Obrecht’s use of the tune has more in common with Compère’s setting than with Josquin’s. Importantly, of course, it reaffirms the fact that popular melodies like this were ‘in the ether’ at the turn of the 16th century. Besides, the likelihood that it was originally notated at all is not very great. But, more interestingly, Fitch uses the song to triangulate a potential date for the Mass: ‘I’m speculating, but it could be very late. Several of Obrecht’s works that are considered late are in Germanic sources, often in only one copy made after his death. The partbooks for the Scaramella Mass satisfy these conditions: it’s a unique source copied in the Tyrol, probably in the orbit of the court of Emperor Maximilian I, around 1520.’ I sense that Fitch is working towards a tentative hypothesis that this Mass may have been composed in Ferrara in the very last months of the composer’s life (he died of plague there in 1505). In fact, he has the impression that it would be considered one of Obrecht’s very greatest Masses if we had it complete, simply on the basis of how beautifully it’s designed and the sheer number of ideas that Obrecht manages to cram into it: ‘It’s almost as though he’s looking at each movement and trying to do something different with it. That speaks to me of the increasingly sophisticated conceptual thinking that you get in the Masses composed towards the end of his life.’

Finally we discuss unknown unknowns, how to embrace the Obrechtian unpredictability apparent in his other works. Fitch talks about another seemingly late work, Missa Adieu mes amours, in which Obrecht sneaks in a complete and unmistakable reference to a particularly filthy Flemish tune, Meskin es u cutken ru – and in the Benedictus, no less (‘the most sacred part of the Mass liturgy: the moment of the elevation of the Host’)! That’s the sort of unknown unknown that might be missing from Missa Scaramella, so I have to ask Fitch if he’s included a similar wildcard, but he won’t be drawn, responding with a twinkle in his eye, he mutters, ‘Yes, it’s true that I could have done …’

All this Agatha Christie-esque musicology ends up in a small studio, behind a paint shop, next to an absolutely superb Italian deli (that mortadella!) in Maidenhead. For three autumnal days, this venue hosts the fusion of musicology and performance, and I visit on the second day to hear both Josquin and Compère’s settings of the Scaramella song as well as the Credo of Obrecht’s Mass. The studio has a particularly dry acoustic and is quite a small space anyway, so my initial reaction is to feel that the song-settings are surprisingly loud; but the sense of fun this brings pleases Kirkman as well as producer and engineer Philip Hobbs. And they’re right: it’s a satirical song about going into battle, so it deserves a bit of verve. Kirkman has many interesting ideas about virtually reconstructed acoustics, which bore fruit in his previous recording, ‘Music for the King of Scots: Inside the Pleasure Palace of James IV (5/21), set in Linlithgow Palace. This new recording also seeks to recreate a similarly intimate, tapestried space of a private chapel. As justification for his aim to avoid spacious, resonant, bathroom-like acoustics, Kirkman says to me at one point, ‘I think that most of the time this music was going on in fairly small spaces with quite a lot of wall hangings and rushes on the floor, and with a lower vaulting than in the main body of the church.’ I love the clarity of the sound world his approach creates as well as the sense of immediacy and physicality.

By the time lunchtime is looming, and that deli is on my mind, they’re in the thick of the Credo, and Kirkman is grinning from ear to ear at a spicy harmonic twinge on ‘lumen de lumine’. The singers are in the middle of a long take and the music is really flowing. Suddenly there’s a glorious but fleeting moment of parallel thirds in the top two voices on ‘de Deo vero’, a little blaze of Obrechtian genius, and everyone’s eyebrows shoot up in delight. This time, from his seat behind the glass in the control booth, it’s Fitch’s turn to grin from ear to ear: his unknown unknown is a triumph.

This article originally appeared in the October 2024 issue of Gramophone magazine. Never miss an issue – subscribe to Gramophone today