Madame d'amours. Music for Renaissance Flute Consort
The Attaignant Consort

medieval.org

Ramée RAM 0706
2007







1. Madame d'amours  [1:32]
consort à 4

2. The Duke of Sommersettes Dompe  [2:03]
lute solo

3. Robert FAYRFAX (1464—1521). Farewell my joy  [2:09]
flute and lute

4. My Lady Careys Dompe  [1:58]
harp solo

5. Henry VIII (1491—1547). Pastyme with good companye  [1:50]
consort à 4, lute and harp

—·—

JOSQUIN (1440—1521)
6. In pace ~ Que vous madame  [4:17]
consort à 3
7. Mille regretz  [1:37]
consort à 4 and harp

8. Luys de NARVÁEZ (?—1549). La Canción del Emperador (Mille regretz)  [2:35]
lute solo

Heinrich ISAAC (c. 1440—1517)
9. Güretzsch ~ Si dormiero  [3:45]
consort à 3
10. La my  [2:21]
consort à 4

—·—

11. Arnolt SCHLICK (c. 1460— after 1521). Mein M. ich hab  [1:49]
flute and lute

12. Paul HOFHAIMER (1459—1537). Ach Lieb mit Leid  [1:35]
consort à 4

13. Ludwig SENFL (1486—1542). Carmen  [0:52]
consort à 4

14. Hans JUDENKÜNIG (c. 1460—1526). Ein seer guter Organistischer Preambel  [3:05]
lute solo

15. Georg FORSTER (1510—1588). Ich habs gewagt  [1:20]
consort à 4

16. Das Jägerhorn  [0:54]
consort à 3

—·—

17. Jacob OBRECHT (1456—1505). Qui cum Patre et Filio  [1:54]
2 bass flutes

18. Orlando di LASSO (1530—1594). Beatus Vir  [1:14]
2 tenor flutes

19. Tomás Luis de VICTORIA (1548—1611). Tenebrae factae sunt  [4:19]
consort à 4 – 2 tenor and 2 bass flutes, harp and lute

—·—

Claudin de SERMISY (1490—1562)
20. Tant que vivray  [1:51]
consort à 4 and harp
21. Au pres de vous  [2:24]
consort à 4

22. Nicolas GOMBERT (1495—1560). Amours,amours  [2:03]
consort à 4

23. Pierre SANDRIN (1538—1560). Doulce memoire  [3:43]
consort à 4, harp and lute — divisions by Diego ORTIZ (1510—1570)

24. Jean-Paul PALADIN (?— 1565). Le content est riche  [2:20]
harp solo

25. Jacobus CLEMENS non Papa (1510—1555). Frais et Gaillard  [3:31]
flute and harp — divisions by Giovanni BASSANO (1560—1617)

26. Claudin de SERMISY. Au joly bois  [3:22]
consort à 4 – 2 tenor and 2 bass flutes, harp and lute

27. Clément JANEQUIN (1485—1558). Le rossignol. En escoutant  [1:45]
consort à 4

—·—

28. Alfonso FERRABOSCO (1543—1588). Fantasia  [3:25]
lute solo

29. Cipriano de RORE (1515—1565). Anchor che col partire  [3:57]
flute and lute — divisions by Riccardo ROGNONI (c. 1550—1620)

30. Ricercada  [1:55]
harp solo

—·—

John DOWLAND (1563—1626)
31. Pavan Lachrimae  [4:37]
flute and lute — divisions by Jacob van EYCK (c. 1589—1657)
32. Praise blindnesse eies  [2:16]
consort à 4 and lute
33. Fine knacks for ladies  [1:42]
consort à 4 and lute







THE ATTAIGNANT CONSORT
KATE CLARK direction, flute
FRÉDÉRIQUE CHAUVET flute
MARION MOONEN flute
MARCELLO GATTI flute

THE ATTAIGNANT CONSORT
gratefully acknowledges the magnificent collaboration, for this recording, of
MATHIEU LANGLOIS flute
MARTA GRAZIOLINO harp
NIGEL NORTH lute

CONSORT À 4:
Kate Clark, descant—Frédérique Chauvet, alto—Marion Moonen, tenor—Marcello Gatti, bass
(except for 19 and 26:
Kate Clark, tenor—Marion Moonen, tenor—Mathieu Langlois, bass—Marcello Gatti, bass)

CONSORT À 3:
Kate Clark, descant—Marion Moonen, tenor—Marcello Gatti, bass

BASS FLUTES IN 17: Marcello Gatti, Mathieu Langlois
TENOR FLUTES IN 18: Kate Clark, Marcello Gatti

All flutes: Giovanni Tardino, Rome 2000, after anonymous 16th-century builder (collection in the Academica
Filarmonica, Verona)
Arpa doppia, Enzo Laurenti, Bologna 1999, after 17th-century Italian instrument
Eight-course renaissance lute, Paul Thomson, Bristol 1999, after Vendelio Venere, c. 1580


Recorded in May 2007 at the church of Notre-Dame de l'Assomption, Basse-Bodeux, Belgium
Recording, artistic direction, editing & production: Rainer Arndt
Graphic concept: Laurence Drevard
Design & layout: Rainer Arndt, Catherine Meeùs
Cover: Flagon ornamented with a winged Cupid and motives »à la Bérain«,
France, 17th century
Photos: © bpk/RMN/Musée du Louvre/Jean-Gilles Berizzi (cover)
© Laura Lombardi (booklet)
Translations: Rainer Arndt (German)
Frédérique Chauvet, Catherine Meeùs (French)

MUSIC FOR RENAISSANCE FLUTE CONSORT

From the early renaissance to the present day, the slender, side-blown flute of the Western art music tradition has undergone a series of transformations. Its interior contour has changed from being cylindrical to being conical and back again, it has gained and lost various keys, and the mechanisms for operating them have been successively refined. While woods of various kinds and colours have for centuries been most favoured for its construction, the flute was also given form in glass, crystal and ivory, surviving in the mid-nineteenth century a truly remarkable transformation into a shimmering pipe of precious metal. Today, an enduring preference for the sound of wooden flutes is reasserting itself, as many players of the »modern« flute redesigned by Theobald Böhm are turning again to wooden-bodied flutes, silver being reserved for the slide and key mechanisms only.

The flute of each period had its own distinctive sound, peculiar to the musical epoch in which it flourished. The elegant, keyless, cylindrical flute of the sixteenth century had a reedy, penetrating sound, closer to the cornetto than to any other wind instrument of the day. It had an impressive range of two and a half octaves and an evenness of tone quality that would not be matched again until the nineteenth century. Its dynamic flexibility and responsiveness to subtleties of articulation endowed it with a vocal quality. And, for all its outward simplicity, it was capable of a startling virtuosity. Together with its bass and descant variants, it played a full part in that distinctive sixteenth-century musical phenomenon: the instrumental consort.

In this recording we focus on repertoire for the renaissance flute consort, almost all of which was originally vocal music. We have included a number of purely instrumental pieces, Heinrich Isaac's La my, Ludwig Senfl's Carmen, and the Anonymous Jägerhorn which show the agility of which the consort was capable. There are several pieces for one flute with lute or harp in which the flute's role is closer to that of the singer-poet or narrator, conveying the words of a song in a polyphonic context in which the other voices are carried by the plucked instrument as in Robert Fayrfax's Farewell my joy and Arnolt Schlick's Mein M. ich hab.

Some of the solo pieces are presented in highly ornamented versions, known as »divisions« in which little melodic flourishes, each with a rhythmic life of its own, have replaced (or »divided« up) the longer notes of the original. Divisions gave new life, perhaps a contemporary flavour, to popular melodies from previous generations. Riccardo Rognoni's divisions on Cipriano de Rore's Anchor che col partire, and Jacob Van Eyck's on John Dowland's Pavan Lachrimae are two famous and beautiful examples.

Other pieces present diminutions in several parts simultaneously within the consort context. This practice, well documented in sixteenth-century sources, called for extra skill, generally requiring that the diminutions be written down for each part rather than improvised in performance, so as to avoid undesirable clashes or dissonances between parts (though surprising dissonances are not entirely absent from some of the most beautiful composed divisions of the period). Diego Ortiz's version of Pierre Sandrin's Doulce memoire provides diminutions for both descant and bass voices simultaneously. For Claudin de Sermisy's Au joly bois I have composed divisions for all four voices. Other incidental divisions in the recording have been improvised in the performance.

Finally we present a number of pieces for lute and harp solo, the two »classic« polyphonic instruments of the renaissance world of bas or soft instruments. The association of flute with plucked instruments may be traced far back in the history of both Western and Eastern musical traditions. The juxtaposition of the melancholy lyricism of the one with the quietly stunning articulacy and eloquence of the others, has captivated musicians and listeners for centuries.


THE AGE OF THE FLUTE CONSORT

By the year 1600, hardly a musician alive could remember when the practice of playing in consorts had begun. The word had come to denote a group of musicians playing upon a family of like instruments – or the family of instruments itself – made in several different sizes so as to reproduce the registers of the ensemble of human voices: bass, tenor, alto and descant. It was no less than the instrumental embodiment of the vocal ensemble. By then a long-established feature of the musical landscape in English, German, French and Italian-speaking lands, it was destined to persist well into the seventeenth century, and to have consequences for musical practice far further into the future.

Yet the very idea of such a consort once swept across Europe like a scented breeze intimating the coming of spring. It brought the promise of new possibilities of expression and participation in music making. The ascendancy of the consort principle went hand in hand with the spread of polyphonic music from the sacred into the secular realm, and the consort was uniquely placed to exploit the rise of imitative counterpoint as the dominant compositional model, in which all voices played an equally important role. Indeed, it is hard not to see in the consort principle, with all its various implications for communal music-making, both a product and an instrument of humanist influence. In the eyes of humanists, human endeavour attained a new, enhanced status. In music, secular forms moved into a new relationship with sacred ones to which they had formally been considered subordinate. A basic education in music and private music making for devotional or recreational purposes were considered to be good for individual morality. At the same time, the growing market of players wishing to play in consort in the early sixteenth century was both beneficiary and patron of a revolutionary new industry: music-printing.

The transverse flute was not among the first instruments to be adapted for consort use. However, within the first three decades of the sixteenth century the practice of playing transverse flutes in consort had taken hold in Western Europe. A comparison of the earliest treatise documenting the existence of the transverse flute (Sebastian Virdung, Musica Getutscht, 1511) with treatises by later sixteenth-century authors helps to locate the emergence of the transverse flute consort, in German-speaking areas at least, somewhere between 1511 and 1529. Virdung's little page illustrating mouth-blown wind instruments presents two sizes of shawm (the longer is called a Bombardt), and three sizes of recorder, but shows only one Zwerchpfeiff or transverse flute. In 1529, by contrast, Martin Agricola's Musica Instrumentalis Deudsch, presented drawings and fingering charts for a whole consort of flutes. His charts clearly refer to three sizes of flute only, and make clear too that the tenor and alto parts were played upon one single size of flute, the lower part of its range being used for the tenor part and the upper part for the alto. This accords with all the other sixteenth-century documents on the use of transverse flutes. Later in our period, the descant flute appears less often: the middle length flute (fundamental d') having the largest range and greatest flexibility, had subsumed the role of the descant, and later consorts comprised one bass and three »tenors«. Indeed it was the tenor flute which survived mutation into the solo flute of the baroque and later periods. During the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it acquired longer foot joints extending its range downward to c' and even b. In its latest incarnation as an instrument made from metal (c. 1847) this aspect of its historical construction was not altered.

In England the flute consort was identified for the first time in a document dated 10th December 1543, though the names of two of the flautists mentioned in that document first appear in court records in 1537. In his sleuthful sifting through sixteenth-century English court records on the trail of the history of the violin, Peter Holman exposed a picturesque metamorphosis: »It seems that the court rebec consort was replaced (or was changed into) a flute consort in the 1540s«. Players of soft or indoor instruments were generally skilled on several different ones. As the rebec became outmoded, those players assigned to perform on it were given other functions more in keeping with current musical taste. Certainly, by the death of Henry VIII in 1547, a vast inventory of flutes had been acquired.

In France we have a delightful moment of illumination in 1533 with Pierre Attaignant's publication of Vingt et sept chansons musicales a quatre parties desquelles les plus convenables a la fleuste dallemant sont signees en la table cy dessoubz escripte par a. et la fleuste a neuf trous par b. et pour les deux par a b. [...] (Twenty-seven chansons for four parts, of which those most suitable for playing on the german flute are marked in the index by the letter 'a', those for the recorder with the letter 'b' and those suitable for both with the letters 'ab' [...] – The transverse flute had come to be known across Europe variously as the »german flute«, »fleuste d'allemand« or »flauto tedesco« because of its association with military practice particularly by the Swiss, but also among other German speaking soldiery). Obviously, Attaignant's publication was aimed at players participating in an already existing practice.


THE REPERTOIRE

There are two other developments in mid-renaissance Europe that fuelled the veritable explosion of interest in playing upon consorts of instruments: the craze for the French (language) chanson which spread far beyond the borders of French-speaking Europe, and the invention of music printing, which made polyphonic repertoire, from Josquin's generation to the sixteenth-century present, available on a scale never seen before.

Among the most-favoured secular genres in the sixteenth century, the chanson occupies a distinguished place by virtue of its enormous and international popularity, and its profuse representation in manuscript and early printed collections of instrumental music. Chanson here refers specifically to polyphonic settings of French verse. These were set by composers from within and without the French kingdom, notably by many composers from the Low Countries (and consequently known as »Franco-Flemish chansons«). It is not surprising then, that when Ottaviano Petrucci came to produce the first book of printed polyphonic music, his Harmonice Musices Odhecaton A (Venice, 1501), he devoted it almost entirely to the French chanson. Evidently he considered this the safest basis from which to proceed on what was plainly an entrepreneurial adventure: he had invented a technique for printing music from moveable type, and his work was to change the music industry for ever. Two further books of chansons followed promptly: Canti B (1501/2) and Canti C (1503/4), confirming his business acumen as to the popularity of this particular repertoire.

While Attaignant, aiming at a French-speaking market, printed his part books with texts, albeit often poorly underlayed, Petrucci printed his chansons, with very few exceptions, with text incipits only. The most plausible explanation (though it has not been an uncontested one) for the wide-spread transmission of secular polyphony in textless versions, from the second half of the fifteenth century onwards, is that it was increasingly often played and enjoyed in instrumental versions.

For The Attaignant Consort, the chanson repertoire has been an immensely fruitful and delightful point of departure, and source of inspiration, since its inception in 1998. We have constantly returned to it, after each sortie into other genres and national styles. That fleeting moment of illumination provided by Attaignant's introduction to his Vingt et sept chansons, is no more than a momentary flicker of candle-light in the dimness that still shrouds our present knowledge of renaissance instrumental performance practice. Yet I am quite unable to believe that the connection he pointed to between French chansonnerie and performance by transverse flute consort reflected only a haphazard circumstance of his immediate surroundings. For in this repertoire, the renaissance flute seems to encounter no obstacles whatever in expressing everything the music calls for: the ranges of the parts, the tonalities in which chansons were most commonly written, the sentiments expressed in their poetry, and even the French language itself, seem perfectly suited to this instrument's natural capacities.

Certainly, for this sixteenth-century chronicler, there was a marriage – so to speak – between the transverse flute and the French which simply spoke for itself: »[...] il y avoit une fleute-traverse, que l'on appelle à grand tort fleuste d'allemand; car les Français s'en aydent mieulx et plus musicalement que tout aultre nation; et jamais en Allemaigne n'en fust joué à quatre parties, comme il se faict ordinairement en France.« (»there was [playing on] a transverse flute, which is called, quite erroneously, the German flute; because the French play it better and more musically than any other nation; and never in Germany was it played in four parts as it commonly is in France.«)

There is evidence to suggest that professional musicians aimed to conjure up in their playing not only the sentiments of the text, but the inflections of the voice and even the pronunciation of the words as it would be present in a vocal performance; this was the ideal for which they strove. Sixteenth-century writers on flute playing give only scanty indications as to how such an ideal might be attained in playing, but their comments on how to »lead« each note with the tongue, or how to nuance expression through a variety of »double« tonguing techniques are telling enough to the experienced player. With regard to the ultimate aesthetic goal of such mastery, it has been illuminated for us by a most articulate contemporary witness: Silvestro Ganassi, who concludes the introduction to his famous treatise La Fontegara (1535) as follows: »You may ask me: How is that possible, [the voice] being something that can utter every [kind of] speech such that I do not believe that the flute can ever equal it? And I answer you, that just as a worthy and masterly painter imitates all things created in nature by [means of] the variation of colours, so can a wind or string instrument imitate the utterances made by the human voice; [...] And if the painter imitates the impressions of nature by means of varied colours, so the [wind] instrument imitates the expressions of the human voice by modulation of the force of the breath, and by inflection of the tongue [offuscation della lingua], with the help of the teeth [deti*]. And in this respect I have had the experience of hearing other players render understandable with their sound, the words of that piece [they are playing], such that one can truly say that this instrument lacks nothing but the form of the human body itself, just as one says of a beautiful painting that all it lacks is breath.« (*There is disagreement among scholars as to whether the teeth or the fingers are intended by the word deti.)

The poetry of all vocal pieces recorded here is included in the back of the book so as to put the listener in the position of a sixteenth-century connaisseur who may glean the spirit, the gesture, and even the intimate details of the text from the instrumental performance.

This recording is dedicated with gratitude to Norma Scott and Anne Smith for their guidance at the two most hazardous moments in my own formal education as a flautist – the beginning and the end.

Kate Clark