Piffaro, The Renaissance Band

This recording presents a selection of north Italian instrumental music of the 16th century as it would have been heard in one of the most characteristic sonorities of the time: the "loud" and "soft" wind bands of cities and courts from Udine to Siena. There is archival evidence for the existence of such ensembles from the late 15th century onwards, and the penetrating timbre of the shawm and sackbut ensemble must have been one of the most familiar features of the urban scene, audible in town squares on holidays, in court for festive entrances, and in cathedral and chapel to accompany sacred polyphony (a 1548 organ contract from the Marian shrine at Saronno, near Milan, recorded the long-standing use of fiati, wind instruments, instead of an organ, in the church's sung liturgy).

The documents suggest, however, that the original players of these ensembles, like most practitioners of polyphony on the peninsula, were imported from northern Europe. Many of the first pifferi were transalpine players from the town waits of central and southern Germany (indeed the Italian term derives from the Middle High German Pfeifer; "piffaro" is an older spelling). Soon, however, native Italian players, including the Bassano family, active over several generations in Venice, came to dominate the ensembles; local makers constructed matched sets of both "loud" instruments (uncapped double-reed shawms, or multiple-bore, and hence compact, dulcians and rackets) and "soft" instruments (capped crumhorns, along with recorders) in standardized sizes. Some of the best-preserved specimens are indeed of Italian origin, and their sound can be heard on this recording in the consort-like blend of instrumental families.

The characteristic sound of bagpipes is most clearly evident in the single works by Dalza and Rossino Mantovano, imitating the drone effects of the piva or bagpipe piece. Dalza's Piva was first published as a transcription for lute, while Rossino Mantovano's Un sonar de piva was originally a vocal work in dialect (Lirum bililirum) that took over the stock phrases and simple progressions of the windband repertory. But other stylized dances, from later in the century, draw upon the standardized harmonic basses with quasi-improvisatory top lines, typical of the early wind ensembles; these include the Pass'e mezo and Bandera of the Sienese dancing-master Francesco Bendusi, as well as the short, direct dance-like settings of the Udinese priest Giorgio Mainerio (published in 1578).

Heinrich Isaac's two Florentine pieces, the carnival song Ne piu bella di queste and the remarkable Palle, palle, convey a strong sense of urban pride. As Allan Atlas noted 20 years ago, Palle, palle is built on a transposing eight-note ostinato in the tenor, whose melody visually symbolized the palle (balls) in the coat-of-arms of the Medici family, Isaac's patrons and the rulers of the city. Isaac's La mi la sol introduces another kind of piece well suited to the clarity of the wind band's sound: the imitative fantasia based on a single or on multiple recurrent melodic motifs. Among the work of a later generation, the Capricci of Vincenzo Ruffo represent some of the best examples: El travagliato ("The Tormented Man"), for instance, begins with relatively slow contrapuntal motion that gradually speeds up, one voice at a time, culminating in kaleidoscopic cascades of scales in all three parts. La gamba in basso et soprano comnbines both kinds of writing: lively contrapuntal lines embellish a stock dance-like phrase in triple time, which is first presented in the bass then in the "soprano" (i.e. the highest) part. The use of short musical motifs also typifies the vocal writing of Costanzo Festa; his Regem archangelorum, a motet for the feast of St. Michael the Archangel, applies the post-Josquin technique of contrasting duet sections with homophonic tutti passages.

Secular vocal repertory, especially simpler forms like the villanella and the canzonetta, also provided material for the soft wind ensembles. The three villotte alla padovana by Filippo Azzaiolo, from collections of his published in the late 1550s, employ the harmonic patterns and duple-triple metric shifts of the early dance repertory, adapting them to entertaining texts: Bona via faccia barca, for instance, is a gentle parody of a Venetian boating-party song. Orazio Vecchi's Amor è foco e ghiaccio, from his Convito musicale (Musical Banquet) of 1597, combines two ensembles, both employing canzonetta motifs, in a seven-voice dialogue setting. The sonatas and canzonas by Cesario Gussago and Aurelio Bonelli mark the ascent of the piffero tradition to the most festive occasions in Venetian civic and religious ritual.The two works by Bonelli use canzonetta-like ideas, while the sonorous Gussago pieces are broadly scored, with a leisurely rate of harmonic change, and are not particularly idiomatic to any one kind of wind instrument. La faccia reworks and varies a simple G-E-A-G motif in the top part, while La fontana uses a plethora of contrasting phrases. If these works underline the ways in which north Italian instrumental music was integrated into the most complex polyphony to be heard by the end of the 16th century, then the final set on the recording takes us back to the galliards and pavans of the early repertory, neatly combining the origins and the destiny of Western Europe's first great school of wind-playing.

-- Robert L. Kendrick

Credits
Executive producer: Dr. Peter Czornyj
Recording producer: Hans Bernhard Bätzing
Tonmeister: Gernot von Schultzendorff
Recording Engineer: Reinhard Lageman
Artist photo: Joseph Chielli, Church Street Studios, Philadelphia, PA

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