Sicut Cervus, the likely most well-known piece by Palestrina, and perhaps even the most well-known polyphony piece from the Renaissance period, continues to move listeners centuries down from its original composition.
In many circles, the piece is almost a cliché—the not uncommon fate of any great work. And yet, many more have not yet had an encounter with the heavenly sounds that have earned their way into countless hearts and minds. There is clear reason why this piece persists in influence.
At The Beauty Rebuild, my focus is not on hyper-technical analysis of art pieces, but rather a desire to communicate bits of my own encounter with meaningful art over to as many people as possible.
There are, therefore, many things that could be said about the technical prowess of the piece that I will not touch. I will simply say that one should enter into the spirit of the piece as it was intended: as a contemplative, ecstatic experience of beauty, set to the timeless words of Psalm 42—Like the deer longs for running streams, so my soul longs for you, Oh God.
I had the honor of co-directing a polyphony choir while I lived overseas and attended graduate school in Austria. To be exploring these great pieces with the backdrop of the summer castle in which I attended classes—as well as beautiful Viennese not so far off—was remarkable.
One of the pieces we took on with our mostly formally untrained choir was this piece, and I remember my mother saying, after I played it for her, that making it come into being once again in our small corner of the world was perhaps the most important thing I had done all year.
It was hard to disagree.
This is the power of beauty—to cut through the noise of all of the rest of our lives and assert itself as queen over it all. It rightly gives us pause and draws our attention fully into it, pouring into the exhausted, dusty corners of the heart and mind with light and a definitive healing, transformative power.
In this piece in particular, the voices interweave in the characteristic polyphonic manner, layering harmony, movement, and dynamics naturally. The effect is that one feels “washed over” by the piece and relaxes into it, allowing a kind of cleansing, intuitive and invisible but real.
The purity of voices matters tremendously for a piece like this. Although strongly trained voices with heavy vibrato fit beautifully in many opera or opera-adjacent solo work, the smoothness of a choral voices aids in this experience as articulated above, without the distraction of any one line or voice.
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