Medieval & Renaissance Music Performance by Piffaro, The Renaissance Band

Program Notes

The music heard on this recording traces a long, counterclockwise geographic arc from the towns of the Low Countries through France and Spain, and ending in several major centers of Renaissance Italy. Common to all these regions, however, was the use of wind ensembles in the daily musical life of town and court: the stadtpfeifer of Germany and the Netherlands, the piffari of Venice and Bologna and the shawm bands of the French court and of Spain. Indeed, the sardana dance ensembles of Catalonia have preserved the tradition until the present. Wind bands, using both loud (shawm and sackbut) and soft (transverse flutes, recorders and krumhorns) consorts, performed on major feasts (such as a city's patron saint day), for important political and religious events (treaties, royal entries) and even simply as part of town ritual on Sundays. While wind players often used sets of the same instruments built in different sizes, the remarkably resonant combination of higher-pitched shawms and lower-sounding sackbuts heard on this disc is also well-attested in the documentary evidence. These ensembles functioned as an emblem of urban pride and courtly splendor, and their sounds - whether of complex written-out counterpoint, relatively simpler dance music or even the unwritten and orally transmitted traditions of improvisation - would have been one of the most characteristic aural landmarks of town life.

This recording provides a cross-section of the repertory most likely played by these bands, namely dances, secular song and idiomatically instrumental music. To begin with the Netherlands, the Fuga of the internationally renowned Jacob Obrecht (c. 1450-1505) is simply a three-part canon over a cantus firmus, a "fixed melody" in long notes, in the bass. Obrecht worked and died in the Duchy of Ferrara, an Italian center with a famous wind band. Obrecht's and Barbireau's settings of the popular Flemish melody Ein frolich wesenn reveal the rhythmic complexity and occasional harmonic spikiness of the late 15th century. Barbireau's piece is especially noteworthy for being preserved in a manuscript thought to contain the repertory of the ducal shawm band at Ferrara.

The French contributions on this disc range from simple four-part gaillardes, to the far more polished chansons of Claudin de Sermisy, together with his predecessors Stockem and Bruhier, his contemporary Gombert and his successor Costeley. These composers worked in France and the Holy Roman Empire in the era of Francis I (1515-1547) and Emperor Charles V (1500-1558), the real beginning of the Northern European Renaissance. This music, with its carefully crafted top lines, clear structure, and mood of poetic melancholy, is ideally suited to performance on both kinds of flutes, i.e. transverse and recorders, a fact noted by the Parisian music publisher Pierre Attaignant who mentioned both of these instruments in several of his editions of these chansons. A far more intellectual approach to such chansons is represented by a later figure, Eustache du Caurroy. His three- to five-part fantasias on a chanson tune, Une jeune fillette, feature a melody which first appears in the top voice and then migrates among the inner parts with ever more complex motivic counterpoint.

Our journey takes us next to a rather different land, culturally and musically, the Spain that emerged triumphant from the reconquest and the discovery of the New World. The simple strophic villancicos of the poet-musician Juan del Encina seem ideally suited to wind-band performance; indeed, shawms and dulcians would remain fixtures in Spanish (and Spanish-American) church music well into the seventeenth century. Encina's villancicos generated a number of imitators, among them Lucas Fernández, Encina's successful rival for the post of choirmaster at the Salamanca Cathedral. The Wind Band's arrangement of the two composers' individual settings of Cucú, cucú, cucucú, with its witty and licentious text, unwittingly continues their rivalry, alternating and contrasting strophe for strophe, producing a remarkably unified and convincing whole. These settings along with the fanfare-like Cavallero de aventuras, in praise of St. Ignatius of Loyola, Tan buen ganadico, with its sprightly five/eight meter, all derive from the famous Cancionero de Palacio, the late 15th century manuscript containing 463 pieces representing the domestic repertory of the House of the Duke of Alba. The dance-like and untexted three-part Propiñan de melyor comes from the earlier Cancionero de Colombina, a manuscript preserved in the library of Columbus's son, Ferdinand. Perhaps the most surprising piece in this repertory is Juan Vasquez' motet-like and memorable Ojos morenos, with its long contrapuntal lines and carefully controlled dissonances. Vasquez worked in Badajoz around the middle of the 16th century

Arriving at the southern end of the journey's loop, the Italian pieces provide another wide range of genres and styles. Giorgio Mainerio's simple harmonizations of dance tunes, possibly influenced by Friulian folk music, represent the kind of music likely improvised upon by village bands. Mainerio himself was a musician and priest in Udine, north of Venice. At the other end of cultural sophistication, Andrea Gabrieli's lament on the death of Adrian Willaert, another Netherlands master who worked in Italy, is an affectionate remembrance written in the older master's rich and full-voiced style, full of subtle imitation among the voices. The work sets a classicizing text written in Venetian dialect by the Italian poet Antonio Molino.

Finally, the instrumental canzonas testify to both the skills of Italian wind players and the growth of an idiomatic ensemble repertory by the end of the 16th century. Trabaci's work combines the repeated-note motif of the canzona francese with the chromatic ricercar beloved of Neapolitan composers (like Gesualdo), a trait to be expected since Trabaci worked most of his life in that city. Antegnati's La Borga is in the typical ABB form of the genre, quite popular in the cities of northern Italy. Antegnati himself was an organ-builder and composer in Brescia. The splendid Canzona à 5 by the highly esteemed organist and music publisher Merulo, who worked in Venice and Parma, employs long, downward-sweeping lines which build to a chordal climax. The program ends with a tuneful canzonetta, So ben mi ch'ha bon tempo, from one of the most popular collections of the late Renaissance, the Selva di varia recreatione (1590) by the Modenese Orazio Vecchi. This simple strophic song includes the 'fa-la' refrain known to English-language madrigal singers from Thomas Morley's imitations.

-- Robert L. Kendrick
(Robert Kendrick, a long time friend and supporter of the Wind Band, received his Ph.D. in musicology from New York University in 1992.)

Credits
Producers: Stephen. J. Epstein and The Philadelphia Renaissance Wind Band
Digital Editing: Stephen Epstein, Joan Kimball, Robert Wiemken
Photos by Joseph Chielli, Philadelphia, PA.
Loan of Von Huene Greatbass recorder by David Goldstein.
Cover design by Leland Kimball.

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