2238
Fairmount Avenue | Philadelphia, PA 19130
info@piffaro.com
| phone/fax (215) 235-8469
Artistic Directors:
Joan Kimball & Robert Wiemken
Administrative Director: Matthew
Smith-Soley
CHANSON ET DANCERIES
| |
|
| |
Program Notes Music of Renaissance Germany Across early Renaissance Europe, the best-known wind ensembles consisted largely of players from Germanic lands, who took their craft with them to Italy, Spain, And France. The ways in which they marked the styles of instrumental music around 1500 have been studied extensively by the American scholar Keith Polk, and much of what we know about their organization, repertory, and influence is due to his research. (The interested reader should consult Polk's German Instrumental Music of the Late Middle Ages: Players, Patrons, and Performance Practice [Cambridge, 1992] for more details.) This recording offers a sample of their music from about 1470 to 1550, mixing sacred and secular vocal pieces here played on Renaissance winds with some works clearly conceived for instruments. It culminates with eight pieces by Ludwig Senfl (c.1486-c.1543), the most important German composer of the sixteenth century. |
 |
| |
The
medieval tradition of contrapuntal parts improvised or composed
surrounding an existing melody ('cantus firmus') placed in the tenor
part (creating a so-called Tenorlied) characterized German
secular music up until about 1600. Thus the probably earliest pieces
on this program, the three selections from the Glogauer Liederbuch
of around 1480, feature this style, especially audible in Der
Pfauen Schwantz, with its two virtuoso upper parts dueting over
the untexted tenor. The repeat of Bonum vinum employs the
performer's practice of improvisatory embellishment of an existing
and otherwise unembellished written part, a requirement of the job
for all professional instrumentalists of the wind bands and one
at which the German practitioners in particular were renowned.
The level of sophistication that could be brought to relatively simple material, in the composed pieces that come out of this improvisatory tradition, is evident in the three versions of the satiric song Greiner Zancker. Heinrich Isaac's four-voice Lied mixes brief snatches of counterpoint with chordal declamation, while the two settings by his contemporaries Hofhaimer and Finck take very different approaches. The repeated opening descending fourths of Isaac's piece, clearly some reflection of popular tradition, migrate through the ever more elaborate voiced of Hofhaimer's three-voice piece. In contrast, Finck takes such motives and weaves them into an eighty-two-bar instrumental fantasia, supplanting the original's direct energy with contrapuntal complexity. At the other chronological end of this recording, the three Latin-texted pieces by Caspar Othmayr reflect a similar mix of learned and popular. The dedicatory piece of 1542 to Prince Henry of Brunswick and Princess Anne of Burgh, Non somnos requiem, combined a German tenor song text with four other voices as a secular Latin motet, while the two bass voices of Quisquis requiem quaeris are comic, stuttering repetitions of a single note (or two-note gesture). The mixture of Latinate learning and popular tradition is typical of the court and civic culture in which Othmayr, Senfl, and other German composers worked. In that culture, the boundaries between secular and sacred were fluid, and it is evident that wind ensembles played music from both kinds of repertories. The two settings of the hymn for the feast of Corpus Christi, Pange, lingua, gloriosi (best known today as the source for Josquin des Pres' late Mass), show both characteristically instrumental and vocal approaches, as the version from the 'Apel Codex', a song-book from around 1500, features typical embellished Tenorlied style, while Adam von Fulda's roughly contemporary setting uses the long, balanced phrases of a vocal motet. Again Finck provided the most complex piece, a setting of the Pentecost sequence Veni sancte spiritus, a large-scale, seven-voice piece in which the cantus firmus is hidden in the second tenor, surrounded by short and closely-spaced imitative motives spread throughout the other voices. The remarkable stylistic range of Senfl's compositional production is evident in his pieces recorded here. Patientiam mueß ich han, the complaint of a longing lover, here appears in several guises: a keyboard version from a tablature compiled by Hans Gerle in 1532, a four-voice Tenorlied, and yet another five-voice fantasia based around the tenor melody. In the equality of its parts, and its motivic density, this last is perhaps closer to sixteenth-century writing than it is to improvisatory tradition. The more popular, straightforward side of Senfl's work is evident in Im Maiem and O du armer Judas, a popular religious song. If the Tenorlied tradition is still audible in the five-voice setting of Was wird es doch des Wunders noch, still the seven-voice version of the same tune, with its closely-knit scales, represents a much more motivic and fantasia-like approach. Some of the best echoes of the improvising wind-band tradition are to be heard in the extremely virtuosic Tandernack Quatuor. This begins with a favorite Dutch folk tune set as a cantus firmus, canonic in the two lower voices. The extremely free and rhythmically irregular gestures of the two upper voices, however, come gradually to dominate the writing of all the parts, with marked contrasts towards the end. This piece is certainly one of the high points of Senfl's instrumental writing and one of the most remarkable works among the settings of the tune by various composers. For all the 'high culture' repertory represented by the works of Finck, Isaac, and Senfl, much of the German wind bands' staple diet must have been music for courtly (and not-so-courtly) dances. This recording interlaces dance and popular song settings with the motets and Tenorlieder, starting with the folktunes such as Hildenbrandslied and Es taget vor dem Walde, and ending with Michael Praetorius' somewhat neater dance tunes taken from his Terpsichore. The practice of virtuoso improvisation over a continually repeated framework of musical phrases was something that must also have prepared the shawm and sackbut players for the ornamentation of lines in pre-composed polyphony. -- Robert L. Kendrick Credits Producer: Ronn McFarlane Engineers: Craig D. Dory, Joseph F. Korgie Executive Producer: Brian M. Levine To Top of Page |
