Taking a little break from talking about composition and musicology: here's some thoughts about a new album I was listening to this past week!
Before we begin: I love that the title rhymes. Now on to the blog post proper.
I only found out Pullois existed when Passacaille Records announced this album release. Honestly, half the reason I bought it in the first place was that I was curious to see what this unfamiliar composer was all about (what was his life like? What's his corpus of works, and are his chansons fun?). As it turns out, this album has a lot of first-time recordings of Pullois's work, so I don't think I was alone in being unfamiliar with most of them. But at the very least, his La bonté du Saint Esprit and Flos spina have been recorded before, so fans of these works have a bit more variety to choose from now.
The liner notes described a bit about his life: Pullois was probably a well-connected individual, with the notes making a point of his seventeen benefices (and two additional ones he procured for Ockeghem) and his 20+ years in the papal chapel. The latter point isn't unheard of, especially considering that being in the papal chapel gets more eyes on composers' works (and thus makes them more visible to us 500+ years later), but I found the first bit very amusing.
As with most other 15th century composers, I found his chansons to be most enjoyable: So lanc so meer/So lang si mire's1 attribution to Pullois may be contested, but I enjoyed Solazzo Ensemble's rendition of it very much. The only question in my head was- why connect it to the previous track (Quelque lange), when the two songs have no textual similarity (at least as far as I've looked)? I didn't mind it much while listening, but I found it kind of strange after the fact. Meanwhile, on the sacred side of things, I liked Flos de spina, though I wish the ensemble had also done Missa sine nomine, especially from from how it was mentioned to be one of the earlier cyclic masses on the continent2. But this comes only after about a week or so of listening to figure out how I felt about the album, and for the most part I still don't know how to feel about it. Whether this is down to Pullois's style of composition (I would hate that to be the case, but there's a non-zero chance...) or the performing decisions made by Solazzo (more likely, though I do admire them lots) I don't know, but regardless I'm definitely going to hold onto this album for a while. It's an important endeavour, especially since composers who are not Dufay and Binchois tend to get less recordings and publications for them and their works- so I hope more projects like these get made in the future.