Medieval & Renaissance Music Performance by Piffaro, The Renaissance Band

Beyond his family origins in Fossombrone, little is known of Petrucci's early life. As part of a rising class that owed its fortunes to talent rather than the accident of noble birth, he probably studied in Urbino at the court of the hapless Duke Guidobaldo de Montefeltre, whose reign is immortalized in Castiglione's The Book of the Courtier. Petrucci's own genius lay in his ability to achieve the method needed for printing complex polyphony. By a combination of precision equipment and a process in which three passes of a page were made through the press - one each for staves, text and notes - Petrucci was able to replace the painstaking copying of individual songbooks with the technology of mass publication. On May 15, 1501, after three years of designing and making type, the publication of Harmonice Musices Odhacaton A ("One Hundred Songs of Harmonic Music") began a virtual flood of accessible music, including several reprints, two famous sequels, and numerous titles within the next decade. Although Petrucci's work was anticipated by the publication of plainchant and a few woodblock prints in treatises, his role in the birth of the music publishing industry has aptly earned him the epithet "the Gutenberg of Music".

Were it not for the high quality of its contents, Petrucci's landmark print might have become an historical footnote. He was therefore fortunate in his choice of collaborator, the Dominican friar Petrus Castellanus, maestro di capella of St. Giovanni e Paolo (Zanipolo) in Venice, who compiled and painstakingly edited the ninety-six works in Odhecaton. In addition to the resources of a church renowned for its music, he probably received compositions from collectors like the Venetian diplomat and music lover Girolamo Donato, to whom Odhecaton was dedicated. Castellanus chose for the "first-fruits of his Muses garden" almost exclusively from the works of Northern singer-composers, such as the recently deceased Johannes Ockeghem, Firmin Caron, and Antoine Busnois, whose Acordes moy dates from the final years of a brilliant career. The works of a younger generation active in Italy, including Josquin Desprez, Heinrich Isaac, and Alexander Agricola, explore a range of techniques and an evolution - from the three-voice chanson to the new four-voice style/texture based on pervasive imitation - that is reflected in the organization of Odhecaton. Loyset Compère is especially well represented. His Garisses moy and Me doubt typify the subtle devices of the three-voice chanson, in which endlessly lilting counterpoint searches for satisfaction that is constantly foiled by cadences as deceptive as a faithless lover. By the time Odhecaton was published, however, these works were already out of date for Compère. In the newer style, Alons ferons barbe sets a Tenor melody to shorter phrases of imitation and paired duos. Although the theme is still love, its text about a barber's wife, who will wet two beards at once, proves that Compère was no stranger to carnal discourse. The technique of alternating duos, heard also in Isaac's E qui le dira and Jacob Obrechts' Tsat een meskin, is even more pronounced in Bruhier's Latura tu.

The role of musical citation in this repertory can hardly be overemphasized. In his Helas, Heinrich Isaac recomposes Firmin Caron's chanson of the same name, by extending Caron's own favorite technique of fugal sequence. In a more subtle exegesis, Agricola's intensely motivic Je nay dueul finds inspiration in the first few bass notes of an Ockeghem chanson. A single voice from a song or a dance tenor could also inspire settings like Agricola's Ales regrets and Jacob Obrecht's Tander naken, both of which add two voices of a highly florid character. In Isaac's La morra, a long tenor "motto" is surrounded by florid outer voices in parallel tenths, a "famous progression" praised by Franchino Gaffurius in 1496. The presence of this technique has suggested instrumental origin, but this same trait appears frequently in his Masses.

Another form of musical commentary is the addition of si placet ("if you please") voices to enrich the sonority of older three-voice compositions. Some of these voices appear uniquely in Odhecaton, as in the case of Je ne fay plus. Such work provided an opportunity for virtuosic display, and may reflect a contemporary improvisational practice. The si placet performed on harp over Agricola's Cest mal charche, compliments the existing counterpoint with a new melodic layer. A more drastic overhaul can be heard in the anonymous Le serviteur, in which added Bass and Alto voices create an entirely new set of sonorities to Dufay's original chanson.

In his dedication, Petrucci announces the intent of engaging youth in the study of music as a renouncement of what he calls "other more sordid pursuits." Beyond this humanistic reference to keeping youth off the streets, the intended use of Odhecaton has presented something of a paradox. Whether the works were meant for vocal or instrumental performance is difficult to discern. On the one hand, its title implicitly refers to vocal performance, and it contains many songs that were conceived with text. However, Odhecaton only preserves their brief text incipits, and contains other works with apparently instrumental stylistic traits. To further complicate matters, these traits are often found in the same sacred works that probably graced Zanipolo, where Castellanus was maestro di cappella. Perhaps the answer lies in Petrucci's own words, which attest to the multiplicity of uses for polyphonic music, "without which we neither pray to Almighty God, nor celebrate wedding rites or banquets, nor let anything pleasant in life go by."

In this spirit, Piffaro explores the range of instrumental combination favored by professional suonatori and avid courtly amateurs. Northern (oltremontani) shawm and sackbut players of the alta cappella were prized both for their ability to improvise counterpoint and for their skill in performing polyphony, which they adapted to the ranges of their instruments. The cylindrical bore of the douçaine, heard in Gentil Prince, both sweetened this version of the shawm and limited its ambitus. A new instrument on the scene with a flexible dynamic and vocal timbre, the cornetto, was destined to supercede the shawm as the king of the winds in the sixteenth century. Although the virtuosity of its Venetian players would reach legendary proportions a hundred years later, it may have already been heard as part of the brass ensemble of Venetian churches. Soft instruments like the recorder and lute were more suitable for indoor entertainment, as well as for women who were admonished to avoid undignified appearances. Although the unbroken recorder consort was the phenomenon of a later generation, it matches closely the sound of chamber organs like those favored by Isabella d'Este. A fascination for ancient string instruments led humanists like Marsilio Ficino and Lorenzo de Medici to pick up the lute and harp for the accompaniment of their own verse. Their interest in declamation of text did not stop them from performing intabulations of popular polyphonic chansons.

The polyphonic setting in Odhecaton preserve a wealth of monophonic melodies and common vocabulary of melodic patterns - not unlike riffs of the Jazz age - for exploration of the "unwritten tradition" on instruments. The ostinato that pervades Hor oires une chanson, for example, serves as a kind of signature appearing in numerous works. Tant que notre argent dure, with its modal character echoed in modern French carols, and Il est de bonheure né are both adapted from a single chanson for performance on shawm and bagpipe, a time-honoured folk duo with a vibrant tradition spanning from the middle ages until today. The second tune is liberally enhanced with melodic patterns found throughout Odhecaton, as well as a closing fuga ad minim that was a favorite technique of Josquin's generation. Mouton's "high-art" polyphonic setting of James james james also provides an excellent opportunity for imagining an early French bransle. Although no written arrangements of polyphony survive for bagpipes, the primitive "fauxbourdon" of James james james plus is based on existing improvisational practice.

One of the few five-voice works in Odhecaton, Johannes Stokem's lovely Brunette may be an early example of an entire genre of works based on the same name: a Renaissance version of the "little brown-eyed girl." Piffaro's version of the related melody Loseraie dire departs from polyphonic style by adopting the homophonic chords of an Italian falsobordone. Dit le burguygnon, which may have been a dance "called the Burgundian," anticipates sixteenth-century passamezzo harmonic patterns. Rompeltier, whose title was once believed to refer to the wild boar, survives in several versions with Flemish text, in which a Miller's wife warns her lover not to knock on the door tonight because her husband is home. Their rhythmic drive suits both works to arrangement as a dance pair for bagpipes, and it is hard not to imagine them as the rumbling accompaniment to sordid pursuits.

-- Adam Knight Gilbert

Credits
Producers: Edwin I. Lawrence, Craig D. Dory
Engineers: Craig D. Dory, Joseph F. Korgie
Editor: Brad Michel
Booklet Preparation & Editing: Katherine A. Dory
Graphic design: Kimberly Smith Company
Executive Producer: Brian M. Levine

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