Matin Responsory, and more lies

It's Advent, and for many of us that means Palestrina. Not just any Palestrina; the "Matin Responsory," sung from some distant church recess, à la King's College. Like this, perhaps: 

It's a fairly common practice in Anglican/Episcopal church, and there are any number of lesser newer compositions on the same text, for choirs who want to vary up their yearly practice. The whole thing gives the impression of having been done since time immemorial. But "time immemorial," in this instance, is only a couple of generations, and there's quite a few points of confusion in the interim. First, the piece is not, despite what the video above may indicate, anything to do with a piece "Aspiciens a longe" by Palestrina. Carols for Choirs 2 published it as being based on a Magnificat, but that's not quite right either; in fact the basic harmonization comes from a Nunc dimittis. Normally an alternatim Nunc (in the third mode, if you want to be precise) would have three distinct harmonized verses trading off with chant verses; in this case, the responsory text circles back, and so does the music. That is, chant responsories always have a text that goes something like "Blah blah blah...yadda yadda" and then a little verse section that says something else, and then it circles back to "yadda yadda, " and then there might be another verse, or a Gloria, and then "yadda yadda" will happen another time. So usually we get something like AB (chant) B (chant). n this case the structure isn't quite as neat as all that. We get:
(I look) (Go ye out) (Tell us) (to reign) (chanty bit) (Go ye out) (chanty bit) (Tell us) (chanty bit) (to reign) (chanty bit) (I look) (Go ye out) (Tell us)(to reign)
We might diagram this as ABCDxBxCxDxABCD.
Meanwhile, the music has a slightly different repeated structure. Basically there are three harmonized sections: there's the bit that goes "Tell us..." the first time (let's call it A); then "Go ye out," which is something new (B); then another "Tell us," that is a little bit different (C). At "to reign" we get the A music, again, and then after "Glory be" we get the entire "I look" text, with the C music followed by the A music, and a reprise of A after the last chant.
So the music is:
(chant) A (chant) B (chant) C (chant) CA (chant) A
The music for A,B, and C, it would seem, is taken from a single verse of a Nunc dimittis, and then chopped up and rearranged to fit the text.

But even that isn't quite right, because the Nunc music is somewhat elusive. On cpdl, somebody has traced it to a specific edition of Palestrina's five-part Nunc--which actually has verse two in four parts, because it's really an editorial variant of Palestrina's four>part Nunc, of which the editor forgot to set this verse. (Confused?) That verse, with a little part-switching, supplies what we've just called C and A, in that order. B is taken from the next verse, only with the fifth voice excised (which gives the altos a very slightly more interesting line, at the expense of the tenors losing some motion in the notes.)
In other words, we can figure out not only how David Willcocks set about turning a bit of Palestrina into a new composition, we also know he probably used a specific nineteenth-century edition to do it (since it had to have those two bits of different Palestrina Nuncs next to each other). So, it perhaps should say "rather loosely adapted from one and a half verses of a two Magnificat Nunc Dimittis by Palestrina by way of a few centuries of editors.

Whew! What about the words? Carols for Choirs tells us they are "translated from the First Responsory of Advent Sunday in the Office of Matins (early medieval Roman rite). This is sort of true. The text "Aspiciens a longe" is indeed that usually used for the first responsory of Matins on Advent 1. "Early medieval Roman rite" is an odd phrase, though, unless they meant, in a sloppy nineteen-fifties-British way, to use "Roman" to mean anything Catholic, and "early medieval" to mean "anything before the Reformation. There was in fact an early medieval Roman set of chants that differed from what came to be the mainstream Gregorian tradition, but this has nothing to do with that; the text here is actually quite a wide-spread tradition, and high medieval rather than early. There *is* one variant even in the later tradition, though: some (a majority of the manuscripts on CANTUS) texts have "Tollite portas" as the third verse, while others (like this one) have "Excita domine" ("stir up thy strength"). I can't tell if there is a pattern, and unfortunately a number of the Sarum manuscripts catalogued on Cantus don't have the Advent sections (the beginning of the book often got pilfered for parchment), so I don't know what English usage might have been. Certainly it's not an "early Roman" text, though.
Which brings us to another question--it's not as if DVW was a chant scholar with catalogs at his fingertips; moreover nobody notes who did the translating of the words. I rather suspect they came from some extant source, like a translated Sarum breviary, or maybe something analogous to the little G.H. Palmer chant-books one finds in Anglo-Catholic parishes of a certain stripe. Googling this translation yields nothing much; probably it was some resource for translated chants that was totally obvious to church musicians in 1960, and has since fallen into obscurity. So our poor translator must--at least for now--remain anonymous.

As for the Vesper Responsory that concludes the piece--well! This is only sometimes (by my count, 48/163 times) a responsory at all--usually the text is an antiphon. (And 7 of those 48 times it isn't at Vespers, either.). The music seems to be from yet another piece, one I haven't tracked down yet. And it's for Christmas Eve (hence the "tomorrow") so how it got stuck into Advent I don't quite know.

Still. For a sizable number of churches and people in the sphere of the Anglican tradition, *this* is the authoritative version of this particular piece of "Palestrina," and it's the way Advent services need to open--always, unchanging, the same! Tradition seems static, and yet, somehow, it evolves.