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Ramée 1203
2012
Joanambrosio DALZA, fl. 1508
1. Calata ala spagnola ditto terzetti
[3:34]
harp, gittern, vihuela de arco, fiddle, flute
2. Calata spagnola [2:47]
harp, gittern, vihuela de arco, fiddle, flute
3. La graçia de vos, donsella
[2:09]
voices AS, PUJ, vihuela de arco
Juan PONCE, * c.1476; † after 1520
4. Bien perdí mi coraçón
[3:21]
voice AS, harpsichord
Garci SÁNCHEZ de BADAJOZ, * c1460; † after 1524
5. ¡O, desdichado de mí!
[2:42]
voice PUJ, lute, vihuela de arco
J[uan?] de LEÓN, fl. ?1480-1514
6. Ay, que non sé rremediarme
[2:48]
harpsichord
Vincenet du BRUECQUET, † before 1480
7. La pena sin ser sabida
[2:12]
harp, lute, vihuela de arco, flute
8. Alburquerque, alburquerque
[2:39]
voice PUJ, gittern
? Guglielmo EBREO da PESARO, * c1420; † ?after 1484
9. Falla con misuras [1:36]
vihuela de arco, flute, drum MG
Francisco de LA TORRE, fl. 1483-1504
10. Alta [1:14]
harp, vihuela de arco, drum MG
Johannes GHISELIN, fl. 1491-1507
11. La Spagna [3:44]
vihuela de arco, lute, fiddle, flute, drum AS
12. Qué me queréis, cavallero
[1:22]
voice AS, vihuela de arco, flute
Pedro de ESCOBAR, * c1465; † after 1535
13. Las mis penas, madre [0:50]
voice AS, vihuela de arco, fiddle, flute
14. Dindirín [1:31]
voice AS, gittern
15. Al alva venid [3:46]
voice AS, vihuela de mano
Diego FERNÁNDEZ, † 1551
16. De ser mal casada [2:00]
voice AS, gittern, vihuela de arco, flute, drum PUJ
Juan del ENCINA, * 1468; † late 1529 or early 1530
17. Qu'es de ti, desconsolado
[8:25]
voice PUJ, vihuela de mano
18. Bive leda, si podrás
[3:18]
harp, lute, vihuela de arco
Antonio de RIBERA, fl. early 16th century
19. Por unos puertos arriba
[3:48]
voices AS, PUJ, harp, vihuela de mano, vihuela de arco, fiddle,
flute
20. Es la vida que tenemos aborrida
[3:16]
voice PUJ, vihuela de mano
Juan de ANCHIETA, * 1462; † 1523
21. Donsella, Madre de Dios
[3:57]
vihuela de arco, flute
Juan del ENCINA
22. Más vale trocar
[2:33]
voice PUJ, gittern, vihuela de arco, flute
23. Todos los bienes del mundo
[2:56]
voices AS, PUJ, gittern, vihuela de arco, flute
La Morra
Corina Marti & Michal Gondko
www.lamorra.info
Arianna Savall
www.ariannasavall.com
voice, 3, 4, 12-16, 19, 21-23
harp, 1, 2, 7, 10, 18, 19
drum, 11
Petter Udland Johansen
www.petterudland.org
voice, 3, 5, 8, 17, 19, 20, 22, 23
fiddle, 1, 2, 11, 13, 19
drum, 16
Corina Marti
flutes, 1, 2, 7, 9, 11-13, 16, 19, 21-23
harpsichord, 4, 6
Michal Gondko
vihuela de mano, 15, 17, 19, 20
gittern, 1, 2, 8, 14, 16, 22, 23
lute, 5, 7, 11, 18
drum, 9, 10
Tore Eketorp
vihuela de arco, 1-3, 5, 7, 9-13, 16, 18, 19, 21-23
INSTRUMENTARIUM
flutes, Monika Musch (Freiburg i. B.), Ernst Meyer (Paris),
Yukiko Yaita (Basel)
lute, Stephen Gottlieb (London)
vihuela de mano, Alexander Batov (Lewes)
gittern, George Stevens (Lydd)
vihuela de arco, Richard Earle (Basel)
harp, Franz Reschenhofer (Handenberg)
fiddle, Marco Salerno (Zagardo)
harpsichord, Andreas Hermert (Berlin)
drum, traditional
Recorded in March, 2011 at the Heiligkreuzkirche, Binningen, Switzerland
Artistic direction, recording & mastering: Rainer Arndt
Editing: Michal Gondko, Rainer Arndt
Production: Outhere
Graphic concept: © Laurence Drevard
Cover: Mediterranean portolan chart, Spain, c. 1575
(by courtesy of the Huntington Library, San Marino CA)
Photos: © Huntington Library (cover), © Susanna Drescher (p.
4)
With many thanks to Rev. Christian Schaller, the staff of
Heiligkreuzkirche and Elizabeth Rumsey.
RAM 1203
2012 Outhere
www.ramee.org
· www.outhere-music.com
SPANISH SONG IN THE TIME OF COLUMBUS
Central to this disc, as to any programme of Spanish song from the age
of the Catholic Monarchs, is a book known as the Cancionero Musical
de Palacio in Madrid (we can call it CMP, as its lovers have always
done). This has about the dimensions of a paperback novel but has over
600 pages, nearly all beautifully copied by a single hand, working over
perhaps fifteen years from about 1505 but including music that dates
back to the 1470s. Of its 450 songs, only 35 are known from elsewhere.
Without it, our knowledge of Spanish song from the fifteenth century
would be horrifyingly poorer.
Another manuscript from around 1490, the Cancionero Musical de la
Colombina in Seville (CMC, given that name because it was owned by
the younger son of the great Italian explorer), contains only just over
100 pieces and very little Spanish song that is not also in CMP; but it
does include a fair number of French-texted pieces, giving a hint that
strong roots of the Spanish song style lie in France and Flanders
– that Spain was not quite as independent of the rest of Europe
as some may think. In addition, several Spanish songs circulated in
Italy, particularly in the Aragonese kingdom of Naples and the Rome
ruled in the last decade of the century by the cultured and
culture-loving Spanish pope, Alexander VI – Rodrigo Borgia, a man
whose lavish patronage of the arts is sometimes forgotten amid the
scandal of his personal life.
Among the many songs that would be lost but for CMP is the hauntingly
seductive Al alva venid, which contains in its text the title
of this disc, Luz del alva ("The light of dawn"). It seems
clear that the copyist started the plan for CMP with some large formal
songs in the manner of ¡O desdichado de mí!, only
later squeezing in the slighter or lighter songs like Al alva venid.
But it is also true that there is no other national song tradition in
the years around 1500 that includes the kind of genre represented by Al
alva venid – with its utter simplicity, its repetitive text
(a style called cosante or cosaute), and its evocation
of a dreamy and mystical world. Its theme and manner go back to the
cantigas de amigo (love-songs of a lady) of the thirteenth century
by Martin Codax and others, something else very rare outside the
Iberian peninsula. Equally, its language recalls the pastoral encounter
songs, known as serranillas, by one of the greatest Spanish
poets, the Marqués de Santillana (d. 1458), so the folk-like
style of this and several other songs on this disc need not indicate
folk origins.
Our journey through this music begins not in Spain but in Venice, where
in 1508 Ottaviano Petrucci printed a collection of lute music by the
Milanese lutenist Joanambrosio Dalza. Dalza states the origin of
several pieces in his book. He defines four pavans as alla venetiana,
four more as alla ferrarese. Several pieces have the title Calata
and some are defi ned as either ala spagnola (in the Spanish
manner) or just spagnola (Spanish). Other dances of those years
are similarly entitled calata; but the earliest uses of that
word in Italy appear to be from a hundred years before Dalza, a gentle
reminder that the relationship between Spain and Italy was neither
short-lived nor simple.
We continue in Geneva, where Jean de Montchenu's beautiful heart-shaped
Chansonnier cordiforme was probably copied in about 1474. This
contains La graçia de vos donsella, one of the earliest
surviving Spanish polyphonic songs of the fifteenth century, as we know
because it is mentioned in a poetry manuscript of the early 1460s. The
francophone copyist horribly garbled the text, but it can be
reconstructed from Spanish poetry manuscripts. It is a love-song
– once again with the very simple and expressive textures that
seem characteristic of much Spanish song during these years.
For Bien perdí mi coraçón we join the CMP
where this compact song – again a late addition to the manuscript
– tells of the poet's lost heart. Its composer, Juan Ponce,
served King Ferdinand of Aragon but was additionally involved in an
exchange of Latin letters with his humanist teacher. That is to say
that it may be restrained and even simple in its manner but it is the
work of an intellectual and an aristocrat, not of some humble soul.
Far more formal and extended is ¡O desdichado de mí!,
a full-scale song in courtly mode by a composer who was also famous as
a fairly prolific poet.
Across Europe, some of the most successful and skilled polyphonic songs
of the late fifteenth century were the work of men from whom no other
composition is known: Ay, que non sé rremediarme is one
of these. In addition, it is one of the works that would have survived
without the help of CMP: it is also in CMC as well as another probably
South-Italian songbook now in Bologna; beyond these, it was quoted
several times in the literature of the early sixteenth century and was
obviously widely loved. But it also survives in an early tablature
source, where the first few bars are presented in two different
intabulation methods; and that seems a good reason to transcribe the
entire love-song for performance on a keyboard instrument.
La pena sin ser sabida is known only from the Mellon
Chansonnier, copied in Naples but mainly containing Franco-Flemish
music. It is the only Spanish song by the relatively prolific
Franco-Flemish composer Vincenet du Bruecquet, employed at the royal
court in Naples; its melodic style very much reflects that of the
Spanish composers.
Alburquerque, Alburquerque may be one of the earliest surviving
examples of the Spanish romance, a genre of long strophic
historical or mythological narratives. It tells of the heroic deeds of
the royal princes at the siege of the castle of Alburquerque in 1430.
Although the music survives only among the additions to CMP, some 80
years later, it is in a style that could easily be from the middle of
the fifteenth century.
We then move to three settings of the dance melody called La spagna.
Nobody has a convincing explanation for its name, but it is found all
over Europe, and there are several hundred different settings of the
melody from between about 1480 and 1620. The setting known as Falla
con misuras has just a single line above the La spagna
tenor; it survives in two Neapolitan manuscripts from the 1490s. That
of Francisco de la Torre is in CMP and adds two new voices to the La
spagna tenor. That of the Franco-Flemish composer Johannes Ghiselin
(here preceded by an improvised recercar on the bowed vihuela),
adding three voices, looks very much as though it may have been
extracted from a mass cycle – as was common enough at the time.
The percussion is not notated but has been added by the performers.
In the next group of love-songs, the frst – ¿Qué
me queréis, cavallero? – is again one of those tiny
and astonishingly delicate songs that appear only in the Spanish
repertory; and it is also one of those songs that tantalizingly seem
part of a larger story, for the available words and music give no hint
as to whether the lady is glad or not to be able to tell her knight
that she is married to another. The second – Las mis penas,
and perhaps also needing further text – is one of the group of
seven songs in CMP composed in quintuple time (another feature not
encountered outside Spain during these years), with a marvellously
fragile result in the music. Dindirín sets a poem with a
text that is in fact French but seems to have travelled widely. The
three-voice Al alva venid is performed here with certain
embellishments in the vocal part, such as were surely used at the time
and perhaps reflect the frequent "signs of congruence" in the music,
often considered to be points of embellishment. And finally in this
group of women's love songs, De ser mal casada is on the stock mal
mariée theme of an unhappily married girl; but here with a
very different use of quintuple time that gives her unhappiness a sense
of absurdity. ¿Qu'es de ti, desconsolado? is a classic
Spanish romance, addressed to the defeated king of Granada after its
fall to the Catholic Monarchs in 1492.
The concluding songs on this disc are all on philosophical and
religious texts. The lovely Bive leda si podrás survives
not in CMP but in the earlier and smaller CMC. Its music is modelled on
one of the most successful of Du Fay's songs, Le serviteur hault
guerdonné – a further reminder that the Spanish
repertory, for all its individuality, was neither separate from the
music of the rest of Europe nor without stylistic and melodic roots in
the main Franco-Flemish tradition. Por unos puertos arriba uses
a romance text by Juan del Encina, the most prolific Spanish
composer of this generation, who was also extremely famous as a poet, a
dramatist and a literary critic. Es la vida que tenemos aborrida
may seem simple but is a full-dress cançion with
elaborated coda. Donsella Madre de Dios is a prayer to the
virgin by Juan de Anchieta, who was singer to Queen Isabella the
Catholic from 1489 and from her death in 1504 to Queen Joanna the Mad.
The programme closes with two characteristic and unforgettable pieces
by Juan del Encina: his Más vale trocar extols the
importance of love, despite everything, and Todos los bienes del
mundo reflects on the vanity of human life, with music in the style
of Italy – where Encina spent many of his most important years in
curial employment.
David Fallows
A NOTE ABOUT THE PERFORMANCE
In an enlightening article published in 1992, music historian Tess
Knighton presented the results of her study of literary sources with
regard to the performance of early Renaissance Spanish secular music
from the time of the Catholic Monarchs. Three basic modes of
performance were proposed: all-vocal; all-instrumental; and vocal
soloist accompanied by a plucked instrument such as lute, vihuela or
harp. The performances on this disc acknowledge their debt to this
study. That being said, for the purpose of this recording we have
consciously avoided all-vocal performance focusing instead on
vocal-instrumental and all-instrumental scorings. In particular, we
wished to explore possibilities that emerge from combining solo voices
with certain deliberately chosen instruments, which are known to have
been played in the circles where polyphonic art music was appreciated.
Both in Spain and at the outposts of Spanish culture in Italy (Kingdom
of Naples and Borgia-ruled Rome), those circles were royal and
aristocratic. In 1500, "the king and queen [of Portugal] were alone
together listening to the music of Rodrigo Donayre and his companions"
(Donayre was a player of vihuela and, apparently, a singer). King
Ferdinand, too, enjoyed listening to vihuela music in quiet moments.
His son, Prince Juan, "inclined to music by nature", sang at times with
the chapel singers and "had in his chambers a claviorgan, organs,
harpsichords, clavichord, plucked and bowed vihuelas and flutes; and he
knew how to play all of them" (Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo). An
inventory from the year 1503 of objects kept in the royal
Alcázar de Segovia lists numerous musical instruments, among
them a harp (harpa), flutes (flautas), lutes (laudes),
bowed vihuelas (vigüelas de arco) and harpsichords (clavicímbanos)
. Various documents reveal that the royal family owned a collection of
keyboard instruments, including claviorgan (clabiórgano)
– "the first seen in Spain" – by a Moorish builder, Mahoma
Mofferiz of Zaragoza. Nobility followed their monarchs. In 1513, the
Count of Tendilla sought after anything that had to do with music, "for
it is all the rage now". Lots of music (including polyphonic songs) was
performed during festivities at the court of the Constable of Castile
in 1470...
The vihuela (literally: viol) enjoyed considerable esteem. It was
played before kings and queens. It existed in Spain in bowed and
plucked incarnations – hence the respective extensions de arco
and de mano. Eventually, it spread to Italy via contact points
with Spanish culture and, around 1480, Johannes Tinctoris informs us in
his De inventione et usu musicae that, "while some play every
sort of composition most delightfully on the lute, in Italy and Spain
the viola without a bow is more often used". In Spanish-speaking
territories this situation lasted throughout the sixteenth century.
Contemporary depictions of vihuela de mano reveal two basic shapes.
Until c. 1520, a viol-like variant of the body outline –
featuring C-shaped cuts and pointed corners – is well
represented; but the plucked vihuela was to prevail in common awareness
as a roughly guitar-like, figure-of-eight shaped instrument. Attempts
to reconstruct the early, viol-shaped type have been undertaken only
recently. The vihuela de mano heard on this recording has the early,
viol-like shape and was built specially for this project after an
exceptionally beautiful depiction from an altarpiece painting Madonna
and Child with Saints (c. 1520, now in the Metropolitan Museum in New
York) by the Veronese painter Girolamo dai Libri.
The vihuela de mano is an excellent instrument for accompanying
polyphonic songs, as is the lute (with which the vihuela shares its
tuning) and – for that matter – any contemporary instrument
capable of producing polyphony (including harp and harpsichord). Among
various genres of Spanish song, the romance (ballad) was
perhaps most commonly associated with a plucked instrument. The frst
publication of vihuela music – Luys Milán's El maestro
(1536) – contains several ballads with vihuela accompaniment in
tablature. Milán describes there a manner of romance-performance,
which involves both vocal and instrumental embellishment. Although he
does not notate the vocal ornaments (garganta), he is specific
about the rapid passages (redobles) to be executed by the
vihuela player during the long notes of the vocal part. Throughout the
fifteenth century the ballad was elevated from a popular song to the
"respected" courtly genre. In ballads from El maestro, already
highly stylized settings, we may thus encounter what was simply
Milán's own artistic policy. But it is equally possible that he
has imitated some older, perhaps improvisatory practice. We have
therefore searched in the CMP for a suitable early ballad to apply that
procedure. Encina's ¿Qu'es de ti, desconsolado? suited
the purpose perfectly.
Tinctoris mentions the gittern (ghiterra or ghiterna) as
yet another string instrument on which a song can be accompanied. He
considers it "a Catalan invention", and adds: "due to the thinness of
its sound it is most rare". The gittern's limited range makes it far
less suitable for rendering polyphonic textures. But when employed as
an instrument of simplified rhythmical chordal accompaniment, it is
capable of providing the singer with support that is anything but thin.
This is clearly demonstrated in Alburquerque, Alburquerque
(this may be just the type of a song for which Juan de Sevilla, who
"sang Castilian romances to the lute", was admired by the ruler of
Naples, Alfonso V The Magnanimous; Juan's "lute" may in fact have been
any plucked instrument). Tinctoris writes also about the gittern: "I
have often heard Catalan women (catalanas mulieres) sing certain
love songs to it for some men". Few songs in CMP fit this description
more neatly than the macaronic Dindirín when sung by
Arianna Savall – a true mulier catalana – and
accompanied on a gittern.
In a poem printed in Hernando del Castillo's Cancionero general
(1511), the love-sick poet Costana describes how he was comforted by an
unusual trio of minstrels: Love (with a harp), Desire (with a bowed
vihuela) and Hope (with a lute). They played (tañian) for
him dance music and songs. Among the latter was Bive leda si
podrás, the setting of which survives in CMC. Due care is
advised in applying this kind of evidence literally: combining incipits
of existing songs with performance-practical information for purely
poetical purposes has a long tradition in European poetry. But, at the
same time, polyphonic songs like Bive leda si podrás
(which we here play on the same set of instruments as the allegorical
minstrels) or La pena sin ser sabida make delightful listening
when performed without words, for instance by an ensemble of several
instruments.
By 1500, intabulating a polyphonic composition for solo performance by
one instrument was a widespread practice in Europe. Most unfortunately,
instrumental music of this type has not survived from Spain, though it
must have been played there on various polyphonic instruments mentioned
in historical documents. Corina Marti took an intabulation of the
incipit of Ay, que non sé rremediarme (surviving in a
Neapolitan manuscript from the late fifteenth century) as point of
departure for her own version of the piece.
The vogue for Spanish music and instruments in places like Naples, Rome
or Mantua is the likely reason for the appearance of Spanish songs and
instrumental music in Italian manuscripts and prints from around 1500.
Some of the most intriguing "Spanish" instrumental pieces are found in
Joanambrosio Dalza's Intabulatura di Lauto Libro Quarto
(Venice, 1508). Nowadays, it is hard to pinpoint their "Spanishness".
One – labelled Calata ala spagnola ditto terzetti di zuan
ambroso dalza – seems to be Dalza's implementation of
whatever he considered to be "Spanish". Although not an ostinato-bass,
this piece's persistent triplet-accompaniment (terzetti) very
faintly resembles the much later canario (the name of which
suggests a connection with Canary Islands incorporated into the Kingdom
of Castille after 1495) . The other, labelled simply Calata spagnola,
is essentially a passamezzo antico (also known as romanesca).
Is this piece genuine vihuela music, like Luis de Narváez's Tres
differencias based on the same chord progression? We have chosen to
treat the surviving lute versions of these pieces as a sort of "lute
score", from which they were arranged for an ensemble of several
instruments.
Michal Gondko