Piffaro, The Renaissance Band

Program Notes

French Renaissance Wind Music

Compared to the amount of documentary evidence for German and Italian loud wind bands and players (the so-called alta capella) in the Renaissance, there is relatively less information about similar French ensembles in the 16th century. However, the shawm band, composed of a consort of loud double-reed, oboe-like instruments, continued to function at the French court into the 17th century. In addition, contemporary paintings, along with literary descriptions and instrument inventories, testify to the use of the softer (bas) instruments, largely recorders and flutes. This recording samples both kinds of instrumentation, offering repertory characteristic of each.

Some of the earliest wind repertory is represented by the French songs (chansons) of Josquin Desprez, acknowledged by his contemporaries as the leading composer of his time. Josquin may well have written these pieces during his various periods of employment in France, most notably at the court of Louis XII. Of those heard on this recording, the melancholy of Adieu mes amours, a farewell to the pleasures of love, features the paired imitation between voices typical of his mature style. The more complex counterpoint of Se j'ay perdu mon amy (transmitted in the sources without a text) is balanced by the extroverted and chordal Baisez-moy, ma doulce amye, marking the two sides of Josquin's chanson output. His death in 1521 was commemorated by laments composed by a number of musician, including the Latin elegy Musae Jovis of Nicolas Gombert. This piece is written around the chant cantus firmus Circumdederunt me gemitus mortis ("The sighs of death surround me") in Gombert's richly imitative style.

The spread of the chanson and instrumental repertory in France was in large part due to a number of enterprising music printers, many of whom seem to have played an active musical role by arranging or collecting the pieces which they published. Foremost among them was the Parisian Pierre Attaingnant, who was also responsible for the diffusion of single-impression music printing (i.e. printing the music from type at one impression - staves, notes and text together rather than separately, as was previously the case). This process cut time and costs considerably, and enabled Attaingnant to produce a remarkable output ranging over all the musical genres of the day. Most popular was a series of chanson anthologies, at least one of which indicates on its title-page that its contents are suitable for playing by soft winds. The style of these so-called "Parisian" chansons, composed by such figures as Claudin de Sermisy, reveals a subtle sense of melodic line, and controlled use of dissonance to highlight textual or poetic points.

One such piece, which was so popular that its melody line served as a point of departure for other composers' settings, was Sermisy's Content desit, qui cause ma douleur, a melancholic love lyric typical of the genre. It is also heard here in other versions which span a wide range of styles: the three-voice setting by Thomas Crecquillon features smoothly flowing lines, with surprisingly complex counterpoint, given its light scoring. Crecquillon worked both in Paris and at the royal chapel of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V in the 1530s and 1540s, and his version was published by another musical printer, Tylman Susato, in the printing centre of Antwerp. The more elaborate six-voice setting of Content desir by the Fleming Jacques Buus states the tune successively in a highly ornamented and virtuosic version.

In a later generation, composers such as Philip Van Wilder, also from Flanders, extended the chanson to five parts. Van Wilder, a renowned lutenist, spent most of his career in England at the courts of Henry VIII and Edward VI. His version of Amour partes simply adds another voice to Sermisy's four-part original, underlining the typically melancholy text with simple but expressive dissonances. Une nonnain refaite shows the other side of the chanson's personality with its rapid note values and racier text.

Illustrating genres other than the chanson, the Regina coeli of the Parisian Jean Maillard is a setting of a Marian antiphon text in simple counterpoint. More thoroughly imitative is the Ricercare (published by Jacques Moderne in an important anthology) of Adrian Willaert, one of the leading composers in the generation after Josquin. After an early career in the Low Countries, Willaert was chapel-master at St. Mark's in Venice for some 35 years from 1527 to his death in 1562. The ricercar, one of the first purely instrumental forms, develops a series of contrasting motifs in succession.

Another facet of the wind repertory is represented by far simpler instrumental dances, apparently printed for a market of domestic middle-class music making. Of them, the best-known come from the books of dance music produced by Attaingnant and his successors in Paris or Lyons: Claude Gervaise, Estienne Du Tertre, Jacques Moderne and the Le Roy & Ballard printing dynasty. The basses danses and allemandes represent the other side of their output, simple but rhythmically lively pieces, in triple and duple time, respectively. Attaingnant even published a basse danse based on the melody of Sermisy's Content desir, thus providing some idea of the interplay among musician genres in 16th France.

The branle (bransle), the most popular in character of these dances, usually opened the proceedings at court and other festivities. Of its various forms, distinguished by their manner of dancing and their phrase structure, the Bransles d'Escosse, published in one of Du Tertre's series, was a version which arrived in France in the 1550s via the court of Mary, Queen of Scots. The Bransle de chevaux was classified by the dancing-master Thoinot Arbeau as one of the "mimed" (morgué) kinds, found particularly in court masquerades. Arbeau published this melody in the second edition of his classic treatise on court dancing, Orchésographie (1589).

The restricted instrumental compass of many of these works makes them especially suitable to such ensembles as the crumhorn consort heard here, each of whose individual instruments is limited to the range of a ninth. The typical sounds of the bagpipe and hurdy-gurdy are still to be heard today in Brittany and elsewhere in rural France, and the occasionally rough harmonies and repetitive phrases of these works again link them to the musical world of the countryside.

-- Robert L. Kendrick

Credits
Executive producer: Dr. Peter Czornyj
Recording producer: Hans Bernhard Bätzing
Tonmeister: Gernot von Schultzendorff
Recording Engineer: Reinhard Lageman

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