"Scrutatur"

[Eric Van Tassel 101233.342@xxxxxxxx]

On 25-5-97, Teresa Muir invited speculation on the "grinding, very
expressive dissonance" on "scrutatur" in Josquin's "Praeter rerum".
In matters of pictorialism I can resist anything but temptation, so
I jumped in.

Hitting the wrong button, however, I sent my response to the wrong
mailing list -- one for users of XyWrite the Miracle Word Processor.

One of the accidental recipients, after offering disclaimers about
both her musical knowledge and her latinity, ventured a comment which
I thought interesting enough to pass on (with the writer's permission)
to this list:


>I think it makes perfect sense, in context, that Josquin would have
>introduced a dissonance for the word "scrutatur," to highlight the
>impossibility of humans trying to fathom the work of the Holy Spirit.
>We can SCRutinize and SCRutinize and SCRutinize, and never come close
>to fathoming the divine purpose. Even the sound of the word itself,
>"SCRutatur," seems to convey grinding difficulty, a wracking of
>brains. Josquin may even be twitting those who attempt the task of
>analyzing the Holy Spirit, pointing out that attempting to comprehend
>the divine will, rather than simply submitting to the Holy Spirit,
>result in dissonance in life.

>Now I'm off into fantasyland, but I can easily imagine Josquin
>pondering how to set "scrutatur" and noting the "dissonance" of the
>spoken SCR consonants, then making the happy connection with the
>theological point, the futility of exercising the human will in an
>attempt to wrest from the Holy Spirit's work a comprehensive meaning
>that would make sense to the limited human intellect.

>Josquin's audience would almost certainly have recognized the point:
>whatever humans attempt to do on their own hook is bound to fail
>miserably. All the other words but "scrutatur" have to do with the
>actions of the Holy Spirit and are therefore set with flowing musical
>consonance; setting the one term referring to human striving
>dissonantly highlights the difference between human and divine
>activity.