Musicians In Ordinary

2011-12-31T10:30:00.000-05:00

Here's the revised program for the New Year's Day concerts.

Sonata a Tre, Op 1, No. 9 in G Major Arcangelo Corelli (1653-1713)

Sonata in C maj. for violin & continuo Antonio Vivaldi (1678-1741)

Passacaglia in g minor Georg Muffat (1653-1704)

Fantasia No. 10 in D Maj. Georg Philipp Telemann (1681-1767)

Sonata Prima a Doi Violini Biagio Marini (c1597-1665)

Intermission

Ceccona Giovanni Zamboni (fl. early 18th c.)

Sonata Pisendel

Gulliver Suite Telemann
Intrada-Lilliputsche Chacconne- Brobdingnagische Gigue-Reverie der Laputier, nebst ihren Aufweckern-Loure der gesitten Houyhnhnms & Furie der unartigen Yahoos

Sonata a Tre, Op 1, No. 10 in G minor Corelli

We begin and end our concert with some of the most influential music of the period. It is impossible for us to overstate the popularity of Corelli’s trio sonatas, so we should leave it to Roger North, writing in the early 18th century, to tell us what the sonatas did, at least, to English musical culture. They ‘cleared the ground of all other sorts of musick whatsoever’ and ‘are to the musitians like the bread of life’ and contributed, with opera, to the ‘circumstances which concurred to convert the English Musick intirely over from the French to the Italian taste’. Corelli’s Opus 1 and 3 sonatas are scored for two violins, organ continuo with ‘violone or arciliuto’ as the melodic bass instrument.

As well as this suite on Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels Telemann wrote other ‘programmatic’ including orchestral suites depicting life on the river that runs through Hamburg, the battles of the Frankfurt stock exchange and the tales from Cervantes’ Don Quixote. We print the scores of two of the movements which show the tiny note values he uses for the Lilliputians (they are 256th notes, or, we think, demisemihemidemisemiquavers) and the huge time signature and note values he uses for the giant Brobdingnagians (their jig is in 24-1). Telemann’s unaccompanied violin Fantasias are far less famous than Bach’s solo violin works.

Vivaldi needs little introduction to concert goers. The sonata we present here comes from a manuscript which was owned by Charles Jennens, who wrote the libretto for Handel’s Messiah. Thus it also demonstrates how Italian music dominated England in the 18th century. Vivaldi wrote many sonatas for the violin virtuoso Johann Pisendel who worked at court in Dresden. It seems very possible these pieces have already been played on the same program.

Muffat was a much travelled musician who on his travels had met the masters of the Italian and French styles – Lully and Corelli. He wrote a manual for a German readership which discusses the difference between the styles, contemporary violin techniques (which you hear put into practice on this concert) instrumentation and many other topics of interest to we who are aiming for historically informed performance.

Printed in Lucca in 1718, the Sonate d’intavolatura di leuto Zamboni, a Roman who was lutenist at Pisa Cathedral, represents the swansong of Italian solo lute music, though the instrument continued to be used as a continuo instrument and as an obbligato instrument in operas and oratorios till the end of the baroque.

2011-12-28T12:30:00.000-05:00

Out of the mists of the annual pre-Xmas concert and church service glut, the seasonal sniffles and family time absences the program for New Year's Day has emerged.

2PM Jan. 1st, 8PM Jan. 2nd
Heliconian Hall, 35 Hazelton Ave. (near Bay Subway)
Tickets at the door, $25/$20 students & seniors, Doors open a 1/2 hour before concert time.

Hallie Fishel – Soprano
John Edwards – Archlute
Christopher Verrette and Edwin Huizinga – Baroque Violins
Lysiane Boulva - Organ

We'll be doing a cantata, or 'Serenata' as it's labeled in the original manuscript, by Alessandro Scarlatti which starts with the words Correa Nel Seno Amato. It's for soprano, two violins and continuo. After comparing the modern edition we have to the original manuscript available on the excellent IMSLP site we found an number of changes made by the editor to rhythms so once again that site is a life saver.

We'll also be doing a Motet for the Blessed Virgin by Francesco Antonio Bonporti, which Chris Verrette, who's playing violin on this show, recorded a few years ago. It's the Feast of the Circumcision after all when Mary dropped of Jesus at the temple.

Chris will be playing a Vivaldi violin sonata and Edwin will be playing a Telemann Fantasia for unaccompanied violin. Also by Telemann is a suite on Gulliver's Travels for two violins without continuo. Pictured above is the Chaconne for the Lilliputians, which as you can see is in tiny note values to match the diminutive people who it is named for. There's also a jig for the Brobdingnagians in giant note values and a time signature of 24-1.

I will play another Ciaconna for archlute solo by Giovanni Zamboni. You can read about the archlute at wikipedia in the entry I created for it a number of years ago. It has been heavily edited since then, though, so please ignore the stupid bits (which I am not saying are not me). You will read there about Corelli's trio sonatas Op. 1 and 3 which has partbooks labelled violin 1&2, organ and 'violone o arciliuto'. The melodic bass part has the fugal entries and just as many continuo figures (which tell the player what chords to play above the bass) as the organ book, which would not be harmonized by a bowed bass instrument.

And Lysiane will also play a ground bass, a Passacaglia for organ by Muffat. Because as Frank Zappa said 'for people who don't understand what's going on in the rest of the song there's always the bass line.'

2011-11-04T14:23:00.008-04:00

Hallie shows the correct 17th cent. etiquette as she curtsies to York U's Laura Pietropaolo

Yesterday had Hallie and me doing a lecture demonstration at York University for Laura Pietropaolo in the Italian Department on the early opera libretto. I played the chitarrone (or chittarone, it’s spelt both ways) or theorbo as it came increasingly to be called in the beginning of the 17th century.

We started with Dovrò dunque morire from Giulio Caccini’s Nuove Musiche of 1601. The poem, by Ottavio Rinuccini, has the poor/lucky protagonist protesting about his imminent death several times in the 2 ½ minute long song. This showed the dramatic force of the ‘new music’ at the beginnings of the Baroque.

We continued on with the Prologue to Dafne, which is sometimes called the first opera. Well a good chunk of it is recycled from one of the intermedi from a play for a Medici wedding and is very masque-like (that is to say, more about the spectacle and dancing rather than being a music-drama). The words for this were also by Rinuccini. Jacopo Peri sets the prologue, where the poet Ovid addresses the audience to the accompaniment of his lyre, in a much less dramatic style than the Caccini we had done. Indeed, the prologues to early operas are very often like that. The immortals and goddesses and personifications who populate the prologues are one dimensional (though I’m sure they had fabulous costumes and scenery): Ovid here, explaining that the opera will be in the ‘ancient style’, and the explanations of what is to follow that Tragedy and Music give at the beginning of Peri and Caccini’s Euridice and Monteverdi’s Orfeo.

From this we moved to Monteverdi’s Lamento d’Arianna from his opera for the Gonzaga court. All the music that has survived from L’Arianna is this lament, and even that is missing the punctuations of a chorus of fishermen who comment on Ariadne’s fate and a string ritornello. Monteverdi explains why he is able to provide such dramatic music for Arianna (now she’s angry for being dumped by Teseo, now she’s sad about being away from her parents, now she’s scared of the wild animals) in a letter to another librettist. She was a woman, not a disembodied personification or force of nature. Monteverdi writes –

‘I have noticed that the interlocutors are winds…And that the winds have to sing!... How, dear sir, can I imitate the speech of winds, if they do not speak? And how can I, by such means, move the passions? Arianna was moving because she was a woman, and similarly Orfeo because he was a man, not a wind.’

After performing this (with me playing a short passacaglia bass as a little ritornello to replace the fishermen) we sang the beginning of a contrafactum of the same piece this time with words making it a Lament of the Blessed Virgin, from a collection of Monteverdi’s sacred music. So the opera libretto and its depictions of the passions of a jilted woman, influences a Counter-Reformation motet text. To prove this ‘operafying’ was not a one off, we sang a setting of Song of Solomon snippets set by Monteverdi’s vice-maestro at St. Mark's, Alessandro Grandi. Grandi’s dramatic love song wouldn’t be out of place in an early opera, except its being in Latin.

We then sang an aria by Stefano Landi, sung by Thetis, announcing the birth of the wine god Bacchus. Landi has got around the dramatic problem of the one-dimensional personalities of gods and goddesses by adopting a characteristic that was creeping into opera as it became a commercial entertainment, rather than a courtly one. Thetis’s air is just a beautiful tune, rather than cleaving close to the intellectual ideal of imitating speech as Ovid had done a few numbers earlier. Though Landi’s song was not for a commercial performance, it’s such a good tune it would certainly have sold tickets and put bums on seats.

And we finished the operatic portion with another lovely tune from Sartorio’s Giulio Cesare the libretto of which was recycled into Handel’s opera of the same name. The Sartorio aria Pietà del mio languir is in the form of a tiny high Baroque aria (ABA or Da capo) except without a big orchestral ritornello and accompaniment.

For fun we finished off with a couple of non-operatic airs on ground basses (the standard chord patterns of grounds were increasingly used in mid century operas by Monteverdi and Cavalli). S l’aura spira by Frescobaldi was a special request for Laura (the breeze-l’aura/Laura pun goes back to Petrarch’s girlfriend of that name) and is built on the Italian Folia. The funky Cantata sopra la Ciacona by Sances is always just plain fun. It’s been a long time since we’ve done that with the theorbo rather than the guitar.

2011-10-26T15:50:00.000-04:00

This morning we did a guest lecture and sang some songs in a class studying Taming of the Shrew for Prof. Deanne Williams at York University.

We talked about how, for the Renaissance, the lute took the place of the Ancient lyre, using these pictures. Compare how the listeners to Orpheus the lyre player and Francesco da Milano (who died in 1547) are in nearly the same poses. (This is from an article by Roger Harmon in the Lute Society Journal in 1996.)

So what aristocrat, or socially climbing wannabe aristocrat merchant, wouldn’t want to get lute lessons to make his daughter more marriageable? All of the great and the good were imitating the Ancient Greeks and Romans - that’s what the Renaissance were re-birthing after all. The suitors in Shrew pose as Latin teacher and lute teacher to get close to the ladies, but they’re both peddling the same thing – a classical humanist education.

We sang Coy Daphne and Chaste Daphne from John Danyel’s songbook, which is dedicated to his student Miss Anne Greene. This has the tale of Daphne being chased Phoebus Apollo from Ovid (so she gets her classical myth lesson with her music lesson). In one set of words the listener is left wondering why she would not just acquiesce to his pursuit, but in the second, no doubt preferred by Anne’s dad, who was paying for the lessons and the dedication, she is praised for preferring to be turned into a tree rather than be ravished by the god. We then sang Like as the lute, the text by John’s brother Samuel, which is set like a needlepoint sampler of musical terms as Sam’s poem compares musical effects to his love. Then we sang Eyes look no more which seems like it may have been made to order when Anne or dad Sir William said ‘that Dowland song Flow my tears is very popular. Can you do us one like that?’

We then went on with some manuscript collections from a bit later, collected by Anne Twice and Elizabeth Davenant. These have lots of play songs which you might imagine a young woman being excited to sing, having just heard them in the theatre. Elizabeth’s songbook particularly has lots of written out ornaments as you might hear a pop diva now embellishing the Star Spangled Banner. Maybe Elizabeth’s book has a didactic bent too, to teach her how to ornament.

We finished with songs from the youth of the Egerton sisters, daughters of the Earl of Bridgewater, a major aristocrat, composed by their teacher Henry Lawes. We sang the saucy Sweet stay a while (do you really want your teenage daughter thinking about what the protagonists of that have been up too?) and then a song ‘To a Lady singing the Former Song’. Here Lawes pats himself on the back mostly, while praising his student. He throws in more comparisons of himself to myths from Ovid, so the girls get another Latin literature lesson. But it also makes you think about how at the same time, the music teacher is master and servant in a society that is very concerned with hierarchy. He's the 'maestro' but is still thanking you for his pay at the end of the day.

We finished off with Lawes’s setting of the table of contents from an Italian songbook (complete gibberish of course, set in the dramatic Italianate style) no doubt to make fun of those less educated who didn’t have a clue what they sang, but wanted repertoire in the fashionable Italian style.

2011-10-17T07:47:00.000-04:00

Here's what we think we'll be doing at the Classical Revolution event at Dave's Restaurant, 730 St. Clair Ave. West. Our set will be about a half hour and will start at 8PM.

Hallie will be singing, I'll be playing the Baroque guitar. (We don't have the little Renaissance guitar as pictured for Hallie, but her birthday's coming up. I can't find one on the ebay, though.) Chris Verrette and Edwin Huizinga will be 'adapting in real time' (ie. improvising around) certain stock ground basses of the early 17th century after various examples for ritornellos between the verses of the songs. Every instrumental collection has a few of these grounds in.

Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643) - Eri gia tutta mia - Ritornellos on Bergamasca (famous from Ancient Airs and Dances by Respighi)

Alessandro Grandi (1586-1630) - Gioite, danzate, ridete - Ritornellos on Folia (an older 'alla Italiana version, not the Folies d'Espagna that Corelli, Marais and Rachmaninov set.)

Stefano Landi (1587-1639) Odi glorie - Ritornellos on Romanesca (the changes from the second half of
Greensleeves. This song's on the birth of Bacchus, who was born in Phrygia and Hallie notes it's in the Phrygian mode.)

Giulio Caccini (1551-1618) - Dalla porta d'Oriente - Ritornellos on the ground Ruggiero (Probably most famous from Byrd's keyboard version)

Giovanni Felice Sances (c. 1600-1679) - Cantata A Voce Sopra La Passacaglia - Ritornellos on the passacaglia (the four descending notes of Hit the Road Jack, the last bit of Stairway to Heaven and many others)

Sances - Cantata a voce sola sopra la Ciaccona - Ritornellos on the ciaccona (which Monteverdi's Zefiro Torna is possibly the most famous version of)

2011-10-07T18:40:00.000-04:00

This still life with rotten fruit and musical instruments was taken at today's rehearsal for the Apt for Voices and Violins. 8PM, Sat. Oct. 8th at Heliconian Hall, 35 Hazelton Ave. near Bay Subway in Toronto. Tickets $25 and 20. Doors open at 7:30. Here's the program:

Welcome black Night John Dowland (1563-16 26)
Though Amarillis William Byrd (1540-1623)
Paduan – Aria Dowland, arr. Thomas Simpson (1582-c. 1630)
La Sirena Thomas Morley (1558-1602)
Die not before thy day Dowland
Ambroses Pavin Ambrose Lupo (d.1591)
Galliard to the pavin before
What if I never speede Dowland
Lachrimae Pavaen Dowland, arr. Johann Schop (c. 1590-1667)
Ne reminiscaris Domine John Wilbye (1574-1638)
When to her lute Corinna sings Thomas Campion (1567-1620)
Weepe you no more Dowland
Ronda – Represa Anon. from the Lumley Partbooks
Brandenberges – Represa

Intermission

Lady if you so spight me Dowland
Sorrow come Dowland, arr. William Wigthorpe (c.1570-1610)
La Rondinella Morley
Pavana Bray, Volta Byrd, arr. Francis Cutting (c1550-1596)/Anon.
Sweet stay a while Dowland
Pavana – Gallyard –Dance Anon. from the Lumley Partbooks
Fuga Dowland
If fluds of teares Dowland
Come to mee grief forever Byrd
Delacourt Pavan Anon.
Markantonyes Gallyard Mark Anthony Galliardello (d. 1585)
Cease these false sports Dowland

Hallie Fishel - Soprano

Christopher Verrette - Violin and viola

Edwin Huizinga - Violin

Eleanor Verrette - Viola

Laura Jones - Bass violin

John Edwards - Lute

A string band arrived in England in the reign of Henry VIII. Wind instruments had been played in ‘choirs’, corresponding to soprano, alto, tenor and bass voices for some time, but the application of this concept to stringed instruments had first occurred to Isabella d’Este and her sister-in-law Lucrezia Borgia in Mantua and Ferrara respectively. The string playing families, such as the Lupos and the Galliardellos, who turned up at Henry’s court appear to have been Jews who were escaping resurgent persecution in Italy.

The word ‘viol’ seems to have been used in Elizabethan and Jacobean times for both the drop-shouldered, 6-string ‘da gamba’ family and that family of stringed instruments we now see in symphony orchestras. The print of Morley’s ‘Consorts Lessons’ for example has ‘treble viol’ on one of the partbooks, but pictures of that kind of ‘broken’ consort always show a treble violin played ‘da braccia’, on the arm. Though the repertoires of viol and violin were largely interchangeable there was a social difference between players of the two instruments. Though the viol increasingly took over the position of the lute as the instrument of the amateur, the violin was always played by professionals, and was the main ensemble for courtly dance music.

The Epistle to the Reader of Byrd’s Psalmes, Sonets, & songs of sadnes and pietie tells us that several of the songs in that collection were ‘originally made for Instruments to expresse the harmony’ and, though all the parts are texted for maximum performance options (and sales to partsong singers), he helpfully labels the melody ‘the first singing part’ in those songs where instruments are expected. As well as some of these pieces from Byrd’s publication we present some from manuscript sources. We present a consort song arrangement of Dowland’s lute song Sorrow stay with its secular words, though the manuscript of the string version gives a sacred contrafactum where the singer rises to heaven, rather than falls into the pit of despair with Dowland. Ne reminiscaris is a setting of the antiphon of a penitential psalm. It appears that string consorts were often used in chapels, perhaps where organs were too expensive or mice had chewed the leather bellows.

What we think of as ‘lute ayres’ were commonly printed with optional four-part versions for voices, or, as the title page of Dowland’s Third Book of Songs says ‘to sing to the lute, orpharion or viols.’ Again, maximum flexibility for performance is offered.

In the early 17th century England began exporting string players back to the European continent. Dowland, Thomas Simpson and William Brade all worked at the Danish court where Johann Schop was also a violinist. (The ceiling painting on the cover of our brochure is from a Danish palace of this period. Could that be Dowland peeking over the balcony?) Simpson’s arrangements of Dowland with continuo and the string quartet scoring with two violins rather than plural violas represent the beginnings of the baroque, though Dowland did offer one galliard ‘with two trebles’ in his own collection of string music.

Ne reminiscaris Domine

Remember not, Lord, our offences, neither those of our fathers:

and do not wreak vengeance for our transgressions.

Spare, Lord, spare your people, whom you redeemed with your precious blood:

lest you be angry with us for ever.

2011-10-03T21:32:00.000-04:00

This is John Dowland's 'own hande' in a friend's autograph book. The music is a puzzle canon and the second part comes in where the sort of backwards 3 is over the first line. Is it music or just a puzzle? We can't decide (see the picture below of Chris Verrette and Edwin Huizinga trying to play in 6 flats and 5 sharps at the same time). You can hear it at our season opener, Apt for Voices and Violins, 8PM, Heliconian Hall, 35 Hazelton Ave. Tickets $25 and $20. Hallie will be singing Byrd consort songs and Dowland ayres with strings (the two pictured, plus Eleanor Verrette and Laura Jones). And there'll be some lute songs too.

2011-09-15T09:23:00.003-04:00

Download the MIO 2011-2012 brochure by clicking below.

MiO Brochure

2011-09-11T15:12:00.003-04:00

Here is our 2011-12 season. Robert Cecil here says you better come. He looks serious about it.

“Into a most delicate and pleasant garden they came, led by the king, who there, with true curiosities, had crowned himself in making that place the crown of all pleasure, yet, was not sufficient, but yet must be inly adorned with other sorts, as music. Music there was of all sorts, yet the king thought that the best was not yet, wherefore he told the emperor that voices, he thought, did excel all these kinds of music.”

– from Mary Wroth’s The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania

We agree with the king that music, and vocal music in particular, is the crowning pleasure. Join us at the Heliconian Hall for this most intimate repertoire of song.

All concerts at Heliconian Hall

35 Hazelton Avenue (near Bay Subway)

Single tickets available at the door $25, $20 for students and seniors.

Apt for Voices and Violins

8pm, October 8th, 2011

Consort songs, dances, lute songs and solos from the Elizabethan and Jacobean courts. Christopher Verrette leads a Renaissance violin band. Music by Byrd, Dowland, Campion and others.

A New Year’s Day Concert

2pm, January 1st, 2012 8pm, January 2nd, 2012

Don’t like polkas and waltzes but looking for a concert on New Year’s Day? This is the concert for you. With guests Christopher Verrette and Edwin Huizinga, and others. All new repertoire from the late Baroque including Vivaldi and his contemporaries.

When Tircis Met Chloris

8pm February 18th, 2012

The amours of shepherds Tircis, Corydon etc. and nymphs Chloris, Phyllis and others are laid bare in Baroque duets and dialogues from the time of Monteverdi with guest Bud Roach, tenor and Baroque guitarist.

Sero sed Serio

8pm, March 17th, 2012

Our last concert has as its title the motto (Late but in Earnest) of Robert Cecil, Earl of Salisbury, who died 400 years ago this spring. As Elizabeth and then James’ “prime minister” Cecil had his finger in every pie, including the musical one. Songs and lute pieces by Dowland, Lanier, Thomas Robinson and others.

2011-05-27T08:03:00.010-04:00

Monday was the Victoria Day holiday, and we played a house concert the with an Oxford theme as the audience had as its nucleus a group going to a choir workshop/historical holiday there next month. We narrowed it down to circa 1600 so I didn't have to bring too many lutes or a choir.

John Dowland obtained his Bachelor of Music from the college of Christ Church in 1588, so there was plenty to choose from. Since Robert Burton wrote his Anatomy of Melancholy while he was student at Christ Church (that's equivalent to fellows at most colleges there) we sang Flow my teares of course. After quoting Burton's opinion that 'the poets did well to feign all shepherds lovers', and melancholy ones at that, since they are idle and solitary while grazing their flock all day, we sang A shepheard in a shade. The pastoral theme was augmented by an anonymous setting of Goe my flock the Ninth Song from Sidney's Astrophel and Stella. Sidney was also a Christ Church grad, and Astrophel is the original English manifestation of the melancholy shepherd-lover.

But we started our set with an arrangement for lute and voice of Benedicam Domino, a devotional song for four voices by Robert Johnson. This Robert Johnson was a Scot who appears to have come to England because he was an 'early adopter' of protestantism. The version we performed is from the back of a manuscript which is a Catalogue of the Bishops of England by Francis Godwin who was a student at Christ Church as well. The last section of the

song exhorts us to pray for our queen, but which queen is not clear, since Johnson was dead before Elizabeth came to the throne. It seems unlikely that Johnson would be setting a text that was pro-Mary, Mary Queen of Scots or Mary Queen of Heaven. So maybe the text was adjusted by the scribe who wrote our version in Elizabeth's reign as was not unheard of. A motet at Christ Church dedicated to Cardinal Wolsey, the college's founder, was later adjusted to ask God to 'preserve our Queen Elizabeth'. Below is the singing part of the song from a microfilm of the manuscript in the British Library. The singing part is at 90 degrees from the lute tablature part, so the singer would be unlikely to self-accompany; the lute player sat on one side of the table and the singer on another.

2011-04-14T17:52:00.004-04:00

Here are the program and notes for the A Sa Lyre concert, Sat. 16th of Apr. at Heliconian Hall in Toronto. Hallie will be singing and I'll be playing two lutes (one with the top string at A at 465, so very little and high, one in G at 465) and a little Renaissance guitar. The artist who painted Mary Magdelene playing a Jouissance vous donneray (you can see the music if you turn it upside down) is the famous Master of the Female Half-lengths. Then there is a picture of Hallie looking at some words, and me playing the little guitar, details in the notes.

Venes mes serfs et Bacchus adorons Clemens non Papa (c 1513-c 1556)

Ah Dieu que c’est estrange martire Adrien Le Roy

Jouissance vous donneray Claudin de Sermisy (c 1490-1562)

Psalm Tunes for Lute Le Roy

Pseaume CXXXIV – Les Commandemans de Dieu – Pseaume XLII

Tant que vivray Claudin

Je suis amour Le Roy

La Magdelena - Bass dance Pierre Blondeau?

D’out vient cela Claudin

Anchor che col partire Jean Paul Paladin

Tant que jestoys Le Roy

J'ay le rebours de ce que je souhaite Pierre Certon (c. 1510-72)

L'ennuy qui me tourmente Le Roy

Oyez tous amoureux Jacques Champion dit Mithou (1530-80)

Intermission

O ma dame Le Roy

Pour m’eslonger Certon?

Puis que nouvelle Le Roy

Secourez moy Claudin

Prelude-Secoures moy-Tant que viray Pierre Blondeau?

Si j'ay pour vous Claudin

Pavane la Milanoise-Galliarde Guillaume Morlaye

Puis que malheur me tient Thomas Crequillon (c 1500-57)

Lute dances Le Roy

Pavan Est il conclud/Galliard Est il conclud/Branles des Bourgoignes

C’est a grand tort Crequillon

Le Petite enfant amour Charles Tessier

The publisher Pierre Attaingnant had already had success with books of dance music and chansons in four parts when in 1529 he printed a book of arrangements called Tres breve et familiere introduction pour entendre & apprendre par soy mesmes a jouer toutes chansons reduictes en la tabulature du Lutz. The lute’s popularity rose quickly in France in the early 1500’s thanks to its identification with the Classical lyre and, as the title page states, there is a didactic angle to the book - there are instructions for how to tune the lute and read the tablature. Claudin’s chansons are heavily represented in the print and we offer a selection of his settings of poems mostly by Clément Marot. In setting the anonymous poem Si j’ay pour vous Claudin quotes himself at the words ‘Secourez moy’. Overleaf from the voice and lute version of each song, Attaingnant gives a lute solo arrangement and he prints anonymous preludes at the beginning of the volume.

As well as those to his lute and his lyre (which turns out to be a lute in the last couple of verses) the great poet Pierre Ronsard addresses an ode A sa Guiterre. The guitar was a very diminutive instrument in this period, having four courses and, since it is not much bigger than a violin, being tuned a fourth higher than later guitars. There was a sudden flurry of printing for this instrument in France beginning around 1550. After a first book of solos Adrian Le Roy printed his Second livre de guittere, contenant plusieurs chansons en forme de voix de ville. The very courtly poetry (Pour m’eslonger and Puisque nouvelle and others in the book are by the Poet Laureate Saint-Gelais) is set to attractive, folksy melodies or based on popular stock chord progressions (L’ennuy is on the Spagnoletta bass). Many are dances; L’ennuy and Puisque nouvelle are Gaillardes, J’ay le rebours is a Pavanne, O ma dame is a Branle de Poitou). In all of the accompaniments the guitar plays a decorated version of the tune while the singer sings a simple version, suggesting that the player might chose to perform the piece as a guitar solo if he pleased.

Also in the voix de ville form are the airs from Le Roy’s book Livre d’Airs de Cour Miz sur le Luth of 1571. Though these, too, have the charming melodies and naïve doubling of the singing part, the courtly poets Ronsard (Je suis amour and Tant que j’estoys, Ronsard’s adaptation of an ode by the Roman Horace) and Desportes (Ah Dieu que c’est) are represented in the settings. We can safely say that such poetry is unlikely to have been sung by a plebian on a street corner in the Ville de Paris.

Pierre Phalèse printed several extraordinarily popular editions of his Hortus Musarum in the 1560s and 70s. We can see the repertoire, aimed at the burgeoning bourgeoisie of the Low Countries, develop over the course of the editions as the anthologist keeps up with the latest pan-European prints; The chansons of Crequillon and Clemens dominate in the early books.

Charles Tessier set Ronsard’s poem about Love being stung by a bee for four voices in his book of 1582. The tune became the model for one of Philip Sidney’s songs from his Astrophel and Stella, and Tessier’s music was published in lute song version of Sidney’s In a grove most rich of shade. We sing Ronsard’s words to Robert Dowland’s arrangement of Tessier’s version.

2011-04-10T08:12:00.003-04:00

On the upcoming concert (8PM Sat. Apr. 16th at Heliconian Hall, 35 Hazelton Ave. Single tickets $25/$15 students & seniors.) I am going to play some solo lute versions of some famous Psalm tunes that are still used today. One of the tunes I'll play is called Old Hundredth in English hymnals. I looked up the version by Vaughan-Williams above to see how it most decidedly would not sound played on a little lute alone. Turns out that the verse starting at 2:27 with the tune in the tenor is straight out of Ravenscroft's psalter and is harmonised by John Dowland. I think that may have been the first Dowland I ever performed then, with the Winnipeg Philharmonic Choir more years ago than I care to remember.

We have the other repertoire all worked out for next Saturday's show. Hallie will be singing a set from Attaingnant's Tres Breve et familiere introduction of 1529 which you can look at a facsimile of here. It has chansons mainly by Claudin de Sermisy set for lute and voice and then for lute solo on the next page. There are several poems by Clément Marot in that set. There will be some chansons by Crequillon and Clemens non Papa from a collection published by Pierre Phalése called Hortus Musarum in 1553. There will be a set each from Adrien Le Roy's Livre de Airs de Cour and his Second Livre de Guitarre. These are in the form of voix-de-ville, as they may have been sung on the street in the city. The lute and guitar often has the melody decorated in its part turning around the singing part. We may try one of the Genevan Psalter psalms like that too.

2011-04-03T08:58:00.006-04:00

Last Wednesday afternoon had us doing a lecture-demonstration in a common room with comfy chairs for the last class of a graduate seminar led by Prof. Deanne Williams. Her seminar on Early Modern Girlhood and David Goldstein's class, some of which were also there, had been looking at Milton's Comus.

Comus was written to celebrate the appointment of John Egerton, the Earl of Bridgewater's appointment as Lord President of Wales and was Milton's first big gig. He was recommended for the job of writing the book by Egerton's household musician, Henry Lawes.

Milton's dad (also John) was a part-time composer though his day jobs were scrivener, a kind of notary, and investor. His music was published in two fairly prestigious prints. There's one piece in The Triumphs of Oriana, a set of madrigals about how great Elizabeth I is and there are a few in a book called Teares and Lamentacions of a Sorrowful Soule which is for broken consort and voices. These books have music in by Byrd, Morley, Dowland, Ferrabosco and lots of other famous composers, so he was in good company. There are manuscript pieces by Milton the Elder on sacred subjects as well. There's no good editions of any of his music really, and the only recording of some of the manuscript pieces and a couple of the consort songs use a boys choir when they are certainly 'domestic sacred music' for singing at home one on a part.

The younger Milton wrote a big Latin poem to his dad when the old man was letting the boy sit around the house reading for five years after getting an MA. (How many bourgeois dads would stand for that?) In the poem he says Ipse volens Phœbus se dispertire duobus,/Altera dona mihi, dedit altera dona parenti,/Dividuumque Deum genitorque puerque tenemus. (Phoebus wished to divide himself, and gave one half of himself to me and the other half to you. Father and son, we share between us the god.)

We discussed this and looked at the disposition of some the scores comparing the old fashioned Teares and Lamentacions print to the up-to-date scoring of Sweet Echo from Comus. We used Milton's poem commending Lawes to think about what criteria the new style that was emerging was to be judged by then we got as quickly as we could onto saucy love songs.

Comus, celebrates chastity, but a number of the songs that Henry Lawes says he wrote for Lady Alice Egerton (who sang Sweet Echo in the masque) and her sisters are pretty racy. For example Psuedo-Donne's Sweet stay awhile (which would fit into the Romeo and Juliet consummation scene), Waller's Go Lovely Rose and others. We also sang songs by Lawes brother William on poems by Herrick (including How Lillies Came White; quite saucy), a Lanier setting of Carew's obscene poem on the Marigold and finished with downright vulgar songs with words by Thomas Durfey. Durfey was good pals with Chas. II and the song above song is a Health to His Majesty. When you read during this Canadian election campaign that political discourse has gone downhill think about this song that has 'Tories guard the king/let Whigs in halters swing'. Whiggish peers are accused of rape and the prime minister is mocked for being crippled. Rabid anti-Catholic perjurer Titus Oates is accused of buggery, but this is probably true since he was kicked out of the navy for gross indecency. Read this to get a sense of how binge drinking becomes a political statement in the 1660s. We also sang a ballad song from a collection by Durfey with Benny Hill style humour about a young lady rejecting various tradesmens' advances.

No wonder Milton closeted himself up to write Paradise Lost after the Restoration.

2011-04-01T16:56:00.005-04:00

A busy week or two. We gave our paper at the Renaissance Society of America conference in Montreal and it seemed to be well received. (see previous entry for the subject matter) Then it was lunch with Prof. Alejandro Planchart, an old friend of Hallie's and off to play the music for papers given by Katie Larson from University of Toronto, and Gavin Alexander from Cambridge. Their papers were in a session on the Sidney family. It was great to meet Gavin Alexander since we poached much of his research to put together our Philip Sidney/Earl of Essex concert When Silly Bees Could Speak of a few years ago.

After getting takeout (see picture above) from Schwartz's Deli (now the topic of a musical) it was off to see McGill's opera department and baroque orchestra perform Handel's Imeneo conducted by Hank Knox and starring Hallie's daughter Eleanor Verrette on the viola.

Tuesday was a rehearsal for our continuing Wednesday Vespers services at St. John's Dixie Chapel in Mississauga. As well as hymns we played a movement from an Alessandro Scarlatti motet for soprano (Ms. Fishel), 2 violins (Chris Verrette and Edwin Huizinga) and continuo (Laura Jones, baroque cello and John Edwards, theorbo).

Wednesday was particularly full. We gave a lecture demonstration on music in the life of John Milton for Prof. Deanne Williams at York University. I'll post more on that event tomorrow.

Meantime here's a picture of us posing in the chapel at St. John's Dixie. You can get a sense of the lovely ambience of these contemplative services from that. The Scarlatti is great music and we hope we can play a whole motet soon.

2011-03-21T15:41:00.004-04:00

We are going to the Renaissance Society of America conference in Montreal to give a paper on Friday in a session about this young man.

He's Henry, Prince of Wales, first son of James I. He would have been Henry IX, and Charles would not have been king and not got his head chopped off and no Commonwealth and no Restoration with more constrained constitutional monarchy and there might have been a British absolute monarchy like Louis XIV and then there might have been a more emphatic revolution than the Glorious Revolution and Britain would be a republic. But none of that happened because Henry died of typhoid at age 18. Thomas Campion wrote the words and John Coprario the music for a cycle of seven songs about this loss. The songs are addressed to James, his queen Anne, Charles, his sister Elizabeth, her husband Frederick, the most disconsolate Great Britain and the world.

The paper will be about how the song to Anne has her displaying many more symptoms and symbols of what we might call 'clinical' melancholy that James's song. Remember how Elizabeth II was criticized for not being emotional enough when Diana died? Well, she couldn't really; it would be undignified and in fact James himself wrote that the monarch's actions had to be well tempered. Luckily James had Mannerism at his (or at least his court composer's) command. Coprario quotes the musical melancholy emblem of the Lachrimae incipit in James's song, so the in-the-know would hear, if not see, that James was just as melancholy as Anne.

If only Elizabeth had had Campion and Coprario at the funeral instead of Elton John.

2011-03-11T15:44:00.002-05:00

Here are the notes and translations for Saturday's concert. You'll never get the chance to hear most of it again.

Rococo

At the beginning of the 18th century the public concert or public opera finally eclipsed the court chamber as the engine for music making; The German Handel made and lost fortunes selling tickets to Italian opera in London, virtuosi with publicity machines toured the great music centres playing concerti with orchestra, even the Concert Spirituel was a ticketed concert. But chamber music still flourished, especially in the Parisian intellectual salon. Here men like the encyclopaedist Diderot, liberal thinkers like Rousseau and even a pre-imperial Napoleon would gather, literally, at the foot of the bed of great ladies. These patronesses were the first ‘bluestockings’, this hosiery being the fashion for the literary ladies who attended these events. And after a hard afternoon’s reporting to one’s patron how the encyclopaedia or the thinking or the revolution plotting was coming along, one would need to unwind with some chamber music.

Putting patrons on seats at public concerts had required the Italians develop a melodic style with clear chords progressions which, when introduced to Paris, was termed Style Galant. Rousseau was an apostle of this style where beautiful cantabile melodies are carried to the ear by simple harmonies with no turgid polyphony. The Genevan wrote of the music of French composers like Rameau ‘There is neither a clear beat nor a melody in French music because the French language is not susceptible to either. French song is only a continual squealing, intolerable to every unbiased ear; French harmony is brutish, without expression and suggests nothing other than the filler material of a rank beginner; the French “air” is not an air at all; and the French recitative is not at all a recitative. From all this I conclude that the French do not have music, and that if they ever do have it, it will be all the worse for them.’

Giacomo Merchi was an Italian who settled in Paris in 1753 and played in the salons. Porro (née Pierre-Jean Porre) was from Provence but thought it well to affect an Italian name when he moved to the capital in the 1780s. The popularity of the guitar as accompanying instrument is attested to by the many prints of song published by these and other composers, as well as its ubiquity in parlour scenes painted in the period.

The violin sonatas presented this evening are from a collection called L’Art du Violon published in Paris in 1800. This anthology featured works by Italian virtuosi like Nardini and his teacher Tartini as well as works by Germans and the Spaniard who affected a French name who worked in England, Chabran. Chabran taught guitar as well as violin in London.

In reading the texts of tonight’s music you will notice that shepherds and shepherdesses once again populate our poems. While those who inhabit the literature of earlier centuries gave their listeners an ideal of perfect love to emulate, tonight’s pastorals reflect a desire, even a nostalgia for a more natural way of living far removed from the complexity and artificiality of 18th century society. Unfortunately the deluge of revolution swept away not only the artificiality of faux-pastoral aristocrats but also the grace and artifice of Rococo art.

Un jour sur la coudrette

One day in the courtyard,

Love came to say hello to Lisette.

The simple shepherdess saw him,

and right away the poor dear blushed.

The child Love, seeing her sudden trouble,

redoubled his attentions,

and said "you know well how to charm,

shepherdess; you must love once more."

With a sweet smile, at a loss for words,

with a very silly heart that sighed,

the gentle bachelorette was quiet, but her youthful soul was moved.

Seeing that she quaked with fear,

the god quickly seized her heart;

now he was master of it, he laughed,

and then the little traitor left.

While the victim sobbed, the ingrate, proud of his crime, fled;

pity young girl Lizon

and profit by this lesson.

Voyez dans ces vergers

See in these orchards the spring that snakes around;

it waters the young saplings a hundred times.

One with the elm, this abundant vine

rises and clings to its branches.

This other, without support, lies languishing;

these amorous palm trees unite in lullabies.

It is of the pleasure of loving that the nightingale sings;

these waves and these woods, these fruits and these birds,

all are a living lesson in love, for you.

Au fond d’un bois Solitaire

Deep in a solitary wood,

One day, the shepherd Tircis,

Finding the shepherdess alone,

Spoke to her of his love.

"You know," he said, "cruel one,

How strong my fidelity is:

An eternal hardship

Has never repulsed me.

If my soul was light,

My fate would be more sweet;

More than one friendly shepherdess

Has wanted revenge on you for me.

Ah! how easily with others

I could have found happiness,

If other eyes than yours

Could have charmed my heart."

Sighs interrupted

This lover's complaints;

The tears that followed them

Spoke more strongly.

The shepherdess became tender,

And finding herself without witnesses,

Was forced to yield;

I have seen some yield to less.

En vain j’adresse

In vain I address an unwelcome plea to the Heavens; the Heavens no longer listen to my pained voice. Redoubtable Love, flighty Fortune, even friendship - sole blessing of the unhappy - seem to reunite to intensify my misery. I fulfill my destiny; I was born to suffer. My heart has nothing left on earth; I can no longer love and I cannot die.

Pure and Holy friendship, sweet charm of life, I sacrificed love to you; but what it cost at least grants peace to my faded heart. They say that you are enough for happiness; far from soothing me, you compound my misery...

Pour Jeanette

For Jeanette, my bagpipe

Plays a song each day.

The sprite on the tender grass

accompanies my sounds with her voice.

I am the happiest shepherd

of Paphos and of Cithere;

she is not severe with me at all.

I have found the art of pleasing her,

and the love of my shepherdess

I vow forever.

Every day, to my crook

she ties a thousand flowers,

and decorates my bagpipe

with all colours of ribbons.

All over the village

she has carved my name into the elm,

and if there are some pastures

in her heritage,

in returning to the village

she leads my flock there.

Be happy, dear lover,

remember that I've received your trust;

without sharing I commit myself,

to live for always under your law,

and your flame, through which my soul

feels the liveliest ardor for you,

is an Eternal flame,

so that in a cruel absence

it will make its only sweetness

to console my faithful heart.

Astre des nuits

Star of the night and your pleasant hours,

Delay the return of the light.

Stop, you leave sensitive hearts

To sob in the shadow and sigh of love.

Ah! Who can defend themselves from loving you?

I adore you and say it to none but you,

This simple avowal that I dare to make heard,

Is already a sweet enough joy.

Accompanied by shadow and mystery

I will return; each night in this place

You will hear its solitary echo

Repeat to you my sighs and my vows.

Me promenant

Walking near home, without thinking, my heart was taken, my poor heart, without thinking about it my heart was taken; a certain pretty face almost rendered me mute today [with surprise] that destiny did such a favor for me, my poor heart etc.

An appetizing mouth, an elegant waist, little cute feet, little mischievous eyes, nothing like her here or there, my poor heart suddenly was taken, etc.

Quel tourment

What torment, ah, what martyrdom,

That is so hideous to suffer;

To sob in one's soul and not dare speak.

Alas, alas, I feel myself dying.

Happy in their bitter pain

Are those who can at least shed tears.

But always to suffer in silence,

Ah, that is the worst kind of pain.

Charmant Iris

Charming Iris, if, on a scale,

One were to weigh your unfairness;

Yes, I would be sure that your inconstancy

Would be equal to my lightness.

Let us, then, give each other release

From our debt of infidelity.

At each instant, by a new offering,

Let us court, Iris, the god of hearts;

Let us never attach our flighty natures;

Let us fly from turn to turn in love;

Perhaps, Iris, in this lovely voyage,

Our hearts will meet one day.

Charmant valon

Charming dale, the sweetest wilderness where often alone I have sought nature,

I hear already your brook that murmurs, I see at last your willows always green.

Sing the willow and its gentle greenery.

Yes, there they are, these amorous wood-pigeons,

These hills, these woods, these meadows, this pure stream,

Ah! Rich and simple nature, must you offer yourself,

so beautiful, to the eyes of the unhappy!

Sing the willow &c

It may be that soon - these are my final vows -

Some shepherd ,seeing my tomb,

Will say in passing, "his righteousness was wronged;

he was sensitive, and died unhappy."

Sing the willow &c

2011-03-10T07:27:00.005-05:00

Here's a couple of pictures of us rehearsing Saturday's Rococo concert. 8PM, Heliconian Hall, 35 Hazelton Ave. Details here. Rococo is sometimes a dirty word in classical music and the music is pooh-poohed, but I am really enjoying this concert. The composers' names are not very well known. Porro has his own Wikipedia page. Merchi is talked about in James Tyler's book on the early guitar which is here on Google Books. That book also says that Chabran was a guitar teacher as well as a violinist, so he probably wouldn't have minded the guitar accompanying his sonata. That's why the cat can hang out inside the unused harpsichord.

Canzonetta – Un jour sur la coudrette Pierre Porro (1750-1831)

Ariette – Voyez dans les vergers Francesco Alberti

Romance - Au fond d’un bois Solitaire Giacomo Merchi (1730-aft.1789)

Sonate in D Maj Pietro Nardini (1722-1793)

La Plainte de Fabian – En vain j’adresse Porro

Pour Jeanette Merchi

La Serenade – Astre des nuits Porro

Intermission

Me promeant du Logis Merchi

Quel tourment Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778)

Sonate in G Major Charles Chabran (fl 1752–1785)

Le Quittance Mutuelle – Charmante Iris Merchi

Le Saule du Malheureux – Charmant valon Porro

2011-02-17T09:03:00.004-05:00

We were running through some of the songs we've chosen for the Rococo concert yesterday. One of the books has guitar tablature right under the octave treble clef (which they use nowadays for guitar music) so you have the choice of what you like to read. Today we will be looking through a book of songs by the philosopher Rousseau. Those songs mostly have a continuo part that I will make up chords for on the guitar.

Chris and I also read through a couple of violin sonatas and chose a couple. Those are also continuo parts.

At the top is the guitar I'll be playing. It has five courses tuned like the top five of a 12-string guitar. During the late 18th century players were increasingly taking the second string of each pair off, but I will keep them on as some did. (I also like reading the tablature better than the octave treble clef.) At the very end of the century some guitars had a sixth pair, and one or two of the songs we're doing have the option of taking some notes down an octave.

Below is the Comtesse d'Egmont, who was a Spanish noblewoman who kept a salon in Paris. I think the above guitar is more like hers than the one that Madame de Pompadour is playing in the one at the bottom of this post.

2011-02-03T21:32:00.005-05:00

The programme notes for Saturday's concert. There'll be some blabbing too between the pieces if you want to know more. The picture is from a ceiling in Rosenborg Castle, where Danish King Christian IV lived. So, depending on when the picture was executed, maybe that lute player there is John Dowland.

See the previous post for the pieces I'll be playing, see the previous one to that to listen to an mp3 of the Ferrabosco Pavan I'll be playing.

Blame Not My Lute

The first music specifically for the lute, the most important solo and accompanying instrument in the Renaissance, appeared around the beginning of the 1500’s in Italy. That country is the centre of lute playing for the first four decades of the century and the lute style is consolidated in the works of Francesco da Milano. His oeuvre is almost entirely comprosed of Fantasias or Ricercars, that is to say, free instrumental pieces, but other Italian contemporaries based works on motets, Mass movements, madrigals and chansons, often decorating the hit vocal music of the day. By the middle of the century, though, France had become the centre of lute playing and, unsurprisingly, the country that gave us ballet increasingly chose more or less stylized dances as their favoured mode of expression. As France descended into sectarian chaos, and as England emerged from the same towards the end of the century, the latter became not just the centre of lute playing, but a net exporter of string players of all kinds. Several North European courts had an English lute player or violin band leader.

The first lute methods printed in England were translations from the French. John Dowland’s first job, at age 19, was as lutenist to the English ambassador to France. It’s natural, then, that his complete solo lute works contains about 60 dance pieces (pavans, galliards and almains, or allemandes), 7 Fancies (English for fantasia), and a few settings of popular ballad tunes. French dances dominate manuscripts and the few printed sources of lute solos as well.

Besides picking up experience with dances and lute playing while in France, Dowland also picked up Catholicism. He claimed this prevented him from ever being engaged by Elizabeth as a court lutenist, despite being the most famous instrumentalist in Europe (his works are in manuscripts from Scotland to the Ukraine). More likely he was the victim of government cutbacks at the increasingly frugal court. After a visit to Italy where he added to his compositional quiver the chromaticism and dissonance of the madrigalists Gesualdo and Marenzio, Dowland was employed by the Landgrave of Hesse and the King of Denmark, who fired him for being undependable. Back in England, a place was found for him at James I’s court, replacing a lutenist who had been dead 40 years.

Holborne appears to have been a gentleman, and it is not clear that his employment with Elizabeth was primarily as a lutenist. Apart from one song and a pavan in a collection of lute music, his printed works are for cittern solo and a collection of dances for 5-part string or wind band. It is hard to know if his lute solos in manuscripts, which are mainly versions of these 5-part pieces, are arrangements by him or someone else.

Ferrabosco was a Bolognese who was one of Elizabeth’s lutenists. He left England in a hurry when he was embroiled in the murder of one of Philip Sidney’s servants. Pilkington is known to us as a madrigal composer, though he dabbled in lute playing. Robinson published the first completely English lute method. And then there is Anon. and the nearly Anons. Whitfield and E.E. We are lucky that at least one of their works have made it through to us.

2011-02-01T13:17:00.005-05:00

Here's what I'll be playing on Saturday I think. 8PM Heliconian Hall. More details at the website.

Philipes Pavan Peter Phillips (c.1560-1628)

Passion Anthony Holborne (c.1545-1602)

Sir John Smith his Almaine John Dowland (1563-1626)

Semper Dowland Semper Dolens Dowland

The Fairy Round Holborne

The Night Watch Holborne

The Most Sacred Queen Elizabeth, her Galliard Dowland

Robin is to the Greenwood gone Anon.

The Right Honourable Robert Earle of Essex his Galliard Dowland

Pavin Alfonso Ferrabosco I (1543-1588)

Mellancoly Galliard Dowland

Merry Melancholie Thomas Robinson (c. 1560-1609)

Hearts Ease Anon.

Kemps Jig Anon.

Dump Philli Anon.

------------Intermission-------------

A Doompe E.E.

Lachrimae Dowland

Bara Faustus Dream Anon.

Countesse of Pembrookes Paradice Holborne

The Right Honourable the Lady Rich, Her Galliard Dowland

O deare lyfe Anon.

Go from my Window Francis Pilkington (c1565-1638)

Willsons Wylde Anon.

The English Huntsuppe John Whitfield (fl.1588-1620)

A Dream Dowland?

Packingtounes Galliard Anon.

Packingtounes Pound Anon.

Forlorne Hope Fancye Dowland

2011-01-17T19:48:00.003-05:00

Happy Birthday (or at least, happy baptism day) Alfonso Ferrabosco the Elder, lutenist to Elizabeth I, composer, spy, accessory to murder, father of that other Alfonso and integral plot device in Rose Tremain's bestselling Music and Silence. You can download the mp3 of his pavan above for free of course by clicking here.

2010-12-31T14:20:00.003-05:00

Here's the program for the New Year's Day concert. Above are some pictures of the rehearsal. Concerts are 8PM Jan. 1, 2PM Jan. 2nd at the Heliconian Hall, 35 Hazelton Ave. Get there early as it will possibly sell out. Doors open a 1/2 hour before concert time.

A New Year’s Day Concert

Cantata - Risoluto son gia Antonio Caldara (1671-1736)

Recitativo-Aria-Recitativo-Risoluto

Sonata "Victori Der Christen" Heinrich Biber (1644-1704)

Der Türken Anmarsch-Der Türken Belägerung Der Stadt Wien-Der Türken Stürmen-Anmarsch Der Christen-Treffen Der Christen-Durchgang Der Türken Victori Der Christen

Per commando del mio bene Antonio Caldara

Aria-Recitativo-Aria

Aria in Modi Variata Wolfgang Ebner (1612-65)

Intermission

Piéces in F^# minor Jacques St. Luc (1616 – c. 1710)

Tombeau De Mr. François Ginter, Allemand-Courante-Sarabande -Menuet

Toccatina-Capriccio Ferdinand Richter (1651- 1711)

Cantata- All’ombra di sospetto Antonio Vivaldi (1678-1741)

Recitativo-Aria,-Larghetto-Recitativo-Aria, Allegro

The Musicians in Ordinary

Named after the singers and lutenists who performed in the most intimate quarters of the Stuart monarchs’ palace, The Musicians In Ordinary for the Lutes and Voices dedicate themselves to the performance of early solo song and vocal chamber music. Soprano Hallie Fishel and lutenist John Edwards have been described as ‘winning performers of winning music’. Now in their 10^th anniversary season of concerts in Toronto, they have concertized and lectured across North America at institutions ranging from the scholarly to those for a more general public: the Universities of Alberta and Toronto, Trent, Syracuse, York Universities, the Bata Shoe Museum and Artists in Residence at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania. Their CD Sleep Wayward Thoughts, Elizabethan and Jacobean music on the various facets of slumber, is available at intermission.

Guests

Christopher Verrette is in his 18^th season as a member of Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra, with which he is a frequent soloist and concert master both in Canada and abroad. He is a graduate of Indiana University, where he was awarded the first-ever Performer's Certificate for accomplishment on the Baroque violin and was a student of Stanley Ritchie. Since that time he has been committed to the growth of Early Music in the American Midwest as a founding member of Ensemble Voltaire (Indianapolis) and the Chicago Baroque Ensemble and has collaborated with numerous period-instrument ensembles around North America. In recent seasons he has played music from six centuries on violins, vielle, rebec, viola and viola d'amore. His recordings range from old favourites like Beethoven and Mozart symphonies and Pachelbel's Canon, to hitherto unrecorded sonatas by Bertali and other seventeenth century composers, new arrangements of Playford tunes on Throw the House out of the Windowe for Marquis records, John Welsman's score for the independent Canadian film The Limb Salesman, the soundtracks of Touchstone Pictures’ Casanova and CBC Television’s series The Tudors.

Recipient of the 2007 Montreal Baroque Prize for Audaciousness and Musicality, harpsichordist Sara-Anne Churchill is in demand as an orchestral player, chamber musician and soloist. She has recently appeared with I Furiosi Baroque Ensemble, Aradia Ensemble, Orchestra London, Niagara Symphony, Mississauga Symphony, The Musicians in Ordinary and Capella Intima. One of the first graduates of the new Advanced Certificate in Performance-Baroque Option, jointly offered by the University of Toronto and Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra, Sara has also received instruction from Olivier Fortin, Skip Sempé, Richard Egarr, Carole Cerasi and Luc Beauséjour. While completing a Bachelor of Arts in Music at the University of Western Ontario she developed an intense interest in early music and historical keyboards and studied harpsichord with Sandra Mangsen. Sara completed a Masters of Arts in Musicology at UWO in 2006. Her thesis, a translation and commentary of a French baroque harpsichord continuo treatise, was later published in Performance Practice Review. She currently studies with Charlotte Nediger and is a candidate for the Doctorate of Musical Arts in Harpsichord Performance at the University of Toronto.

A New Year’s Day Concert

After a glut of Messiahs and other pre-Christmas concerts, the Toronto concert calendar listings, and particularly those on the Early Music calendar, get rather thin in the first weeks of the New Year. We offer again this year a selection of Viennese music as an alternative to the Blue Danubes and Tristch-Trastch Polkas of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra’s New Year’s Day Concert and those of their imitators.

Antonio Caldara was born in Venice and was employed at St. Mark’s Church as a cellist. In 1708 he moved to Rome where he worked with Handel, Corelli and the Scarlattis. After Handel’s departure for England, Caldara followed him as Cardinal Ruspoli’s maestro di capella and in 1717 gained employment at the Imperial court in Vienna, where he was responsible for operas on the birthdays and name days of the Emperor and his consort, as well as other operas and sacred music. This enormous workload meant his salary peaked at a whopping 3900 florins, but he felt the need to supplement it by writing operas for the courts of other Austrian nobles. He is said to have died of a stroke brought on by exhaustion.

Curiously, the sonata celebrating the victory of the Imperial forces at the Siege of Vienna began life as a sonata depicting the Crucifixion composed by Biber. This rather astonishing re-application of a ‘program’ might have been made by the ‘Schmelzer’, to whom the piece is attributed in the manuscript, and who probably composed the last movement, not found in Biber’s sonata. Johann Schmelzer was a violinist at Vienna, but died before the siege, so perhaps his son Andreas was the adapter. The piece is written for scordatura violin. The three lower strings are tuned up a whole tone, but the music notates, not the pitches, but where the violinist is to put his fingers. For example, on a normally tuned violin placing the first finger on the second string gives B^♭, but because it is tuned up, even though a B^♭ is notated, it sounds as C. The violin part, then, looks like musical gibberish.

Ebner was the organist at Stephansdom, Vienna, and was associated with the Imperial court from 1637 until his death in 1665. He was obviously highly favoured since his salary was double that of the now more famous Froberger. Ebner began as the organist for the Kapelle and later became the Kapellmeister at the Cathedral and the official composer for the ballet. Most of his music was destroyed in World War II -- the best-known pieces that survive are the variations for harpsichord based on a theme by Emperor Ferdinand III himself. Hailing from Würzburg, Richter was recognized by Pachelbel as the greatest representative of south German keyboard music. Upon his appointment as court and chamber musician to Leopold, Richter taught two future emperors, as well as Leopold’s other children.

Italian plucked string players at the court included Orazio Clementi (theorbo and guitar) and Francesco Conti (theorbo and mandolin). These men played obbligato parts in operas. The theorbo, though we might think of it as the chordal part of the basso continuo group, was still much used as the melodic bass instrument, interchangeable with the cello or viol, well into the 18^th century. It is in this role we use it in the cantatas. Lutenist Jacques Saint-Luc played the French baroque lute, which then had 11 pairs of strings and was tuned to an open d-minor chord, with basses tuned to whatever scale the piece required. His pieces show that multiculturalism flourished in the Holy Roman Empire, at least as far as matters concerning instrumental music. St. Luc was born in what is now Belgium, but was then the Hapsburg Netherlands. He came to Vienna, where he was employed by Prince Eugene of Savoy. His Tombeau on the death of François Ginter (Adam Franz Günter) is in the key favoured by French lutenists for tombeaux. The lack of open strings in F^# minor gives the lute a covered quality.

Antonio Vivaldi visited Vienna on the many tours he undertook towards the end of his life, some with the singer Anna Girò. The presence of her sister as chaperone on these tours did nothing to stop gossip that Anna was his mistress, and in fact suggestions were made that the arrangement was even more scandalous than just that of an old priest sleeping with a young singer. Emperor Charles VI invited Vivaldi to come to Vienna and as Vivaldi’s music went out of fashion in Venice in his last years he picked up and moved to the Austrian capital. Before he could get established the Emperor died and a period of mourning meant a moratorium of public performances. Vivaldi himself died penniless the same year and was buried in Vienna in a pauper’s grave. His house was on the site of the hotel where Vienna’s famous Sachertorte is said to have been invented.

Translations

Risoluto son gia, tiranno amore

Recitative

I am now determined, tyrant Love, to dissolve those bonds which held me a base prisoner for so long. My rational soul teaches me that you falsely betray every faithful heart. Now I am learning to scorn the proud disdain, which brought so much torment to this unfortunate soul Now your true worth awaits you, imminently. The heart will put bitter war before treasonous peace.

Aria

Arms, deceptions, arrows, chariot, you have wielded these, blind ingrate, against this injured heart. Standing firm always affects one so that fleeing with your passion, with triumph and away from fear.

Recitative

That fearful panic that spurs the soul to flight in the face of danger is mostly submission, since it recognizes the greater of that which is the danger itself, and when the unexpected calamity arrives, it enters and tears apart the ill-defended breast, which it found already weakened, which the weapons of Love at last conquer. Better is burning courage than vile fear.

Aria

War, war, to arms, to arms! Thus shall I dare to advance into the palace of glory. My heart shall hold fast to that duty until either death or victory makes my valour worthy.

Sonata "Victori Der Christen"

Der Türken Anmarsch - Advance of the Turks

Der Türken Belägerung Der Stadt Wien-The Turks Besiege the city of Vienna

Der Türken Stürmen-The Turkish Assault

Anmarsch Der Christen-The Advance of the Christians

Treffen Der Christen-The Christian Engagement

Durchgang Der Türken-Withdrawl of the Turks

Victori Der Christen-Victory of the Christians

Per commando del mio bene

Aria

By order of my beloved, my heart languishes in a thousand sufferings, but my heart cannot endure so many injuries of guilt; It is immersed in a sea of troubles, every hope of salvation from such hardship, between help and constancy, is already lost.

Recitative

Wretched! How did I sin? What did I do? If I deserved the suffering which pierces my heart, you stars, my enemies, say it, or say it yourself tyrannous Phyllis! Say it! But before you condemn me, cruel one, to such harsh martyrdom, to such heavy scorn, I protest to you and I swear to you that I am not, nor ever was, guilty. If before punishing me you had listened to me, you would know that my faithful heart could never offend you, cruel one, neither in thought, alas, nor in desire. Wretched! How did I sin? What did I do?

Aria

Innocence is worthless, faithfulness is useless, neither do I hope for pity from a thankless beauty. Cruel disdain and false pity fear constant and faithful love with cruel indifference and proud severity.

All’ombra di sospetto

Recitative

From the shadow of suspicion, my constancy, suffering, loses somewhat its confidence, and to such beautiful allurement, some trust departs.

Aria

The heart is not accustomed to the bittersweetness of love, which soothes suffering with its fegned charm. Scorn will come to those who love passionately on impulse.

Recitative

O, how many lovers, true and faithful, are deluded by shrewd flattery amid the chains of love. Many languish, and frequently blood is shed to prove true love. Formed from the ardor of charming beauty, the soul struggles each hour, and the derided lover is deceived again and again.

Aria

False happiness is the real torture of the loving follower. Merciless beauty has darts, those glances that waver with distress.

2010-12-20T16:12:00.006-05:00

The program for the New Year's Day concert is coming together. There'll be some late 17th century music as well as some 18th century.

Hallie will be singing two cantatas with violin by Antonio Caldara who was at Vienna from 1717 till his death from a stroke, perhaps brought on by overwork, in 1736. His court duties were to provide an opera for birthday and the name day of the Emperor and his consort as well as a large scale oratorio every Lent. The 3,900 Florins he was getting a year he was getting a year for that was not enough apparently, so he took on work composing operas for other Austrian nobles on the side.

There'll be a Vivaldi cantata. Vivaldi died and was buried in a pauper's grave in Vienna. He moved there to start afresh as an opera composer just before the Emperor died. Operas were cancelled during the period of mourning, so he never caught on.

Sara Anne Churchill will play some variations by Wolfgang Ebner on a theme by Emperor Ferdinand III and Chris Verrette will be playing a sonata attributed to 'Schmelzer' (probably Andreas, since his more famous dad, Johann was dead by the event) in the manuscript which is a programatic piece on the defeat of the Turks in the Seige of Vienna. Except it's probably really a piece by Biber and the subject is the Crucifixion. There's a picture of the score above. You'll see the violin is tuned to a scordatura with the lower three strings up a tone from where they are usually. The notes on the staff tell you where to put your fingers as if the strings were tuned normally, rather than representing the pitches that come out, so the violin part looks like musical gibberish.

There might be some pieces by Jacques St. Luc for the French lute in F# minor, which apparently the French baroque lute players thought was the saddest of all keys. (Later plucked string players have attributed that quality to the key of D minor. See this video.) Many memorial pieces called Tombeaux were composed in that key by French lutenists perhaps because it has a muted, covered quality on the French lute, since there are no open strings. The viol player Marais made his Tombeau de Lully in that key too, but says if you are going to accompany it with a keyboard, you should tune up a half step and have the keyboardist play in G minor, because the temperament in F# minor would sound awful.

2010-12-04T17:45:00.003-05:00

Tomorrow we are singing a set on the Christmas concert of St. Martin's Chorale. We'll be doing Alessandro Grandi's O quam tu pulchra es, which is a mash up of phrases from the Song of Solomon which is commonly applied to the adoration of the Virgin Mary. Then we'll do a motet that is specifically about her by Barbara Strozzi, O Maria. It uses phrases and images from the Song of Solomon more freely. Both of these sound like good old Italian love songs of the 1620s (Grandi) and 1650s (Strozzi). The groaning suspensions that Grandi uses to set the phrase, 'hurry up and come because I am languishing with love' is especially unrestrained in its graphic depictiveness.

The Counter-Reformation really worked hard to dazzle the church goers with beautiful things that would draw them into devotion, and the beautiful BVM and love songs to her were very popular for churches, and the chambers of princes. You'd think that people would have had enough of silly love songs, but they hadn't in church in 1630, if they were in Latin.

We'll finish off with a Cantata by Maurizio Cazzati, in Italian, so not church music if indeed the others were, and not for private devotions. It starts off 'Che fo, che tardo?' What am I doing? Why am I hanging around?' when the baby Jesus has been born. It's a great piece.

2010-11-29T09:06:00.002-05:00

We are getting ready for a series of Advent Vespers services at the lovely chapel at St. John's Dixie Cemetery. We'll be joined by Alexa Wing, soprano, Graham Robinson, bass, and Justin Haynes on bass viol.

This week we'll be doing a Motet Psalm by William Lawes and some music from the Division Viol by Christopher Simpson.

William Lawes was killed in the Seige of Chester in the English Civil war. His Psalm settings for two trebles or tenors, a bass singer and thorough bass were published in 1648 and are dedicated to Charles I, by then deposed, but not executed, so there is a political sense to the book. As well as William's Psalms there are some by his brother Henry (who edited the book) and several elegies to William by John Wilson, Simon Ives and other composers. You can download pdfs of the part books here. There are a few of the Psalms that have been recorded, but they don't get the attention that reflects their popularity in the mid-17th century.

2010-10-26T09:44:00.002-04:00

Here is the program and notes for Saturday's concert at Heliconian Hall. Click on the link for location etc. The picture above is by Gerard ter Borch. It's possible there may be one or two changes.

Songs for Anne Greene by John Danyel (1564-c1626)

Coy Daphne fled/Chast Daphne fled

Eyes looke no more

Let not Cloris thinke

Lute Lessons from Margaret Board’s Lute Book

Delyght Pavin John Johnson (d. 1594)

Delght Gallyard John Johnson

The Lady Phillyes Mask Anon.

I cannot keepe my wyfe at howme Anon.

Songs for Anne Greene by John Danyel

Time cruell Time

Thou prety Bird

Like as the Lute

Ann Twice Her Book

O let us howle some heavy note Robert Johnson (c1583-c1634)

Have you seen the bright lily grow Robert Johnson

Intermission

Eliz. Davenant Her book

Have you seen but a bright lily grow Robert Johnson

Woods rocks and mountains Robert Johnson

Songs for the Egerton Sisters by Henry Lawes (1595-1622)

Sweet stay awhile

Sweet Echo

To a Lady, singing the former Song

Lute Lessons from Margaret Board’s Lute Book

Midnight John Dowland (1563-1626)

Solus cum sola Dowland

Lady Banning her Almand John Stuart (d. 1625?)

Songs for the Egerton Sisters by Henry Lawes

The Rose

To a Lady, more affable since the War began

Tavola - In quel gelato core

The Musicians in Ordinary

Named after the singers and lutenists who performed in the most intimate quarters of the Stuart monarchs’ palace, The Musicians In Ordinary for the Lutes and Voices dedicate themselves to the performance of early solo song and vocal chamber music. Soprano Hallie Fishel and lutenist John Edwards have been described as ‘winning performers of winning music’. This is their 10th anniversary season of concerts in Toronto, and they concertize and lecture regularly at universities and museums across North America.

Before the Restoration, the English stage, was not a place where the educated woman was permitted to exercise the skills she had acquired in the sister arts of rhetoric and music. The more intimate and controlable domestic performance space, however was her’s to command.

John Danyel was the brother of the poet and playwright Samuel, who is the author of the lyrics ‘Lyke as the Lute’ and ‘Time cruell Time.’ John Danyel’s Songs for the Lute, Viol and Voice of 1606 is dedicated to Mistress Anne Greene, the daughter of a wealthy if not particualrly well-pedigreed knight, Sir William Greene. Danyel worked as a household musician for the Greene family. A few lines from his verse dedication will make clear the function of the songs in the collection.

To Mrs. Anne Grene…

That which was onely privately composed,

For your delight, Faire Ornament of Worth,

Is here, come to bee publikely disclosed:

And to an universall view put forth.

These songs, then, were written for Anne to enjoy, and probably sing in her lessons with Danyel.

Before he was engaged at court, Henry Lawes also worked as a household musician, for the more illustrious Egerton family. His duties included teaching the daughters of John Egerton, the Earl of Bridgewater, to sing. Lawes’ dedicated his Ayres and Dialogues of 1658 is to Alice and Mary Egerton, by then Countess of Carbery and Lady Herbert of Cherbury. The dedication says of the songs ‘most of them were composed when I was employed to attend to your Ladishipp’s education in musick’, that is, some 30 years earlier. Lady Alice performed and sang in Milton’s Comus, for which Lawes wrote the music. Since ‘Sweet stay awhile’ preceeds the songs Lawes wrote for that masque in Lawes’ autograph songbook, we can presume it was written when he was still teaching the girls.

While young women were not allowed to perform on the public stage in this period, we can be sure that they wanted to sing the latest stage hits at home if the contents of the songbooks written out by Ann Twice and Elizabeth Davenant are anything to go by. From Ben Jonson’s The Devil is an Ass we hear the song ‘Have you seen the bright lily grow’, and from John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi we present the dramatic ‘O let us howle.’

Margaret Board appears to have taken some lessons from John Dowland about 1620. By this time Dowland was complaining about the new musicians at court. Perhaps he assigned Margaret the pieces in here book by long dead composers like John Johnson, while she filled in the gaps with the latest masque and ballad tunes.

2010-10-20T12:21:00.006-04:00

It was all TV and radio for us for the last few days. We chatted with the excellent Donna G on her program The More the Merrier on CIUT radio on Saturday about the upcoming Her Leaves be Green concert. There is a podcast of the show available at the link to her program.

On Monday were were on Daytime Toronto, where Hallie was identified as having 'the voice of an angel' by the presenter. The other presenter, Chris, was blown away, literally and figuratively, when the diminutive Hallie opened up the hood an revved it up a bity for the higher stuff in Henry Lawes and John Donne's Sweet stay awhile, he sitting on the couch next to her. He then reached over and moved the mic on the coffee table back a foot or so.

This coming Saturday we'll be doing part of the Leaves be Green show at an academic conference at University of Toronto. Prof. Deanne Williams will doing a paper called The Paratextual Girl.

At the top is Mary Wroth with a theorbo. She is pretty proud of it I think.

2010-10-07T09:13:00.002-04:00

The pieces for the Musicians In Ordinary season opener at the Heliconian at the end of the month (download the brochure below for more details) are pretty much set. It's hard to time things when you are actually playing them; you are concentrating on the words or getting your fingers in the right place so you forget what the minute hand was on when you started or you are so pleased you got through it you forget you were timing it or, most likely, you crash and burn and don't get through it at all.

So if a piece has been recorded you can see how long it took someone else to play it and unless they play it twice as slow or fast, that's a good enough estimate.

Thus it was that I was looking on itunes to find how long it would take to play John Dowland's pavan Solus cum Sola. The title means 'alone (masculine) with alone (feminine)' or maybe 'He and She Alone Together', and since you leave your daughter alone in a room with her lute teacher it seemed a good thing to play. You may have read in the news that Apple Inc. boss Ian Apple has been censoring slightly risque apps for the iphone and it seems that his crusade has expanded to cleanse the works of lute composers of the Jacobean era. The word 'cum' in Solus cum Sola has had the 'u' replaced with an asterisk. This also seems to be the case with all the Baroque and Classical mass movements that start with the words C*m sancto spiritu. I will never be able to listen to Bach's Mass in B Minor in the same way again.

2010-10-03T17:54:00.005-04:00

I have been thinking for the last couple of days about the intersection of lutes and the emergency services. I have not been thinking about it very hard, because, as you can imagine, there's not many places they meet.

One is the diary entry that records that Inigo Jones, architect and designer of Stuart masques was sent to see the constable because the theorbo he was importing might be 'some engine brought from Popish countries to destroy the king.' (But it's abbreviated, so it might not even be constable.)

The other is this amazing picture from the Lute Society Journal. You can see this fireman rescuing a lute and an end table from a fire at the library in Linkoping, Sweden in 1996. According to the article inside the lute is by a maker called Raphael Mest, (c1590-after1658). The two headed arrangement which you can just about see would not be common in southern Germany, so I wonder if it was added later for a collector because the 2 peg-box arrangement looks kind of cool. Anyway, thanks to this fireman we'll never know the answer to the question 'What's the difference between a 10 or 11 course lute they'd be making in Fussen in the early 1600's and a 12-course two headed Dutch lute? (The answer, adapted from the viola joke repertoire, would be the one burns longer, but there is also 'holds more beer' etc.)

2010-09-28T20:46:00.003-04:00

Here is the 2010-11 brochure. Download and subscribe and donate (but where is says you get a tax receipt it is only in Canada).

2010-09-21T10:34:00.004-04:00

Here are the set lists for the Toronto Early Music Centre fair, Sat. Sep. 25 at Montgomery's Inn, 4709 Dundas St. West, at Islington. The sets are about a half hour long each.

The words here are from Danyel's book. You can see that you can use either a pro- or anti-acquiesence text depending on your audience.

3PM Set - A Musicall Banquet

Lady if you so spight me John Dowland

O eyes leave off your weeping Robert Hales

Si le parler et le silence Pierre Guédron

Dovro dunque morire Giulio Caccini

Pavan Alfonso Ferrabosco the Elder

Sir John Smith his Almaine John Dowland

In darknesse let me dwell John Dowland

4PM Set - Her Leaves be Green

Coy Daphne fled John Danyel

Lyke as the Lute Danyel

Philips Pavan Peter Philips

I cannot keepe my wyfe at howme Anon.

The Rose Henry Lawes

Tavola - In quel gelato core Lawes

2 Songs from Comus Lawes

To a Lady, more affable since the Lawes

War began

2010-09-15T11:00:00.003-04:00

Here are the concerts for 10-11 season. Click the blue CanadaHelps button to the right if you want to help us hire a small orchstra for New Year's Day. I'll be posting more on these in the next few days between working on getting the season brochure ready. Email us at musinord@sympatico.ca if you'd like a copy mailed to you or a pdf emailed to you.

Her Leaves be Green – Oct 30, 2010 – 8PM
The above rhyme is from the dedication of John Danyel’s Book of Ayres of 1606. We present a concert of music written for Miss Anne Greene and the Egerton sisters, students, and later patronesses of songwriters Danyel, Henry Lawes and John Bartlet. Lute pieces from the manuscript collection of Margaret Board will round out the program, and John will have prepared by practising the exercises in that book in the hand of her teacher, John Dowland.

New Year’s Day – January 1 – 8PM and 2 – 2PM, 2011
Our immensely popular celebration of the New Year with music of 17th and 18th century Vienna, with cantatas and sonatas by Conti, Vivaldi and Caldara. An instrumental ensemble will be led by Christopher Verrette.

Blame Not My Lute – February 5, 2011 – 8PM
John plays lute solos from Elizabethan and Jacobean England. Pavans, galliards, jigs, fancies and dumps.

Rococo! – March 12, 2011 – 8PM
In the Parisian intellectual salon, men like the encyclopaedist Diderot, liberal thinkers like Rousseau and even a pre-imperial Napoleon would gather, literally, at the foot of the bed of great ladies. And after a hard afternoon’s reporting to one’s patron how the encyclopaedia or the thinking or the revolution plotting was coming along, one would need to unwind with some chamber music. Hallie sings, John plays Baroque guitar and Christopher Verrette joins us on violin.

A Sa Lyre – Apr. 16, 2011 – 8PM
The Renaissance saw the lute and guitar as their substitute for the Classical lyre. Indeed, Ronsard (who the French call the Prince of Poets) wrote odes to all three instruments, using ‘lute’ and ‘lyre’ interchangeably in one poem, depending on what rhymed. This concert will see us singing settings of the great poets of 16th century France, Saint-Gelais, and Clement Marot set by Sermisy, Goudimel and others, with dances from the country that invented ballet.

The picture above is by Gerard van Honhorst. It's painted on a ceiling so it looks like the musicians are playing down to you from the balcony. There is a theorbo and another lute and a parrot outside the crop. You can see that the blonde singer supports the Boston Red Sox as does Hallie.

2010-08-29T08:37:00.012-04:00

This year is also the 400th anniversary of the Varietie of Lute Lessons which was compiled by Robert Dowland too. The book is a collection of, though you wouldn't think it from the word 'lessons', sometimes very difficult solo pieces by English, French, German and Italian composers. It starts off with a translation of Besard's lute method Necessarie Observations Belonging to the Lute and Lute Playing. Besard tells you to use what was to become the 'Baroque' lute technique with the thumb outside the fingers. Make a fist with your right hand as if you were hitch-hiking, then put your pinky on the soundboard of the lute and that is the new technique. The old one is to hold your pinky and thumb as if you were holding a pen so that when you alternate plucking thumb and forefinger the thumb goes into the palm of your hand. Here's the old Renaissance hand position, painted by Jan van Scorel in the early 16th century:

And here's the new hand position, with the lute player Charles Mouton painted by François de Troy in 1690:

Besard, as I say, recommends the new hand position, 'execpt thy thombe be short.' Well, mine is very short, and I think the old technique works better for the older pieces in the book. The piece you can listen to above or download here, for instance, is by Alfonso Ferrabosco the Elder, who died in 1588. I think that the older technique favours the polyphonic nature of most of the works in the book, but that the corantos (actually new French style courantes) in the end of the book are better with the thumb outside. The older technique makes it easier to bring out the polyphony and the new technique brings out the treble and bass, which is more polarised and uses 'style brisé' decoration, rather than 'divisions'.

So what technique do you use for the music of John Dowland, who contributes to the book tips for how to buy strings and how to tie your frets on in the right place? (The placements come out as just about equal temperament.) There are more pieces by John Dowland than any other composer in the book. I usually play them with my thumb inside in the old manner, but he lived in a period of transition. Saying 'this is a recording of John Dowland's complete lute works with original instruments and authentic playing techniques' is impossible. In addition to the changing technique and his lute going from having six to nine or ten pairs of strings in his lifetime, there are usually several versions of his pieces.

The type of dance you hear above, the pavan, is a slow dance which is almost like a processional onto the dance floor. There are usually three sections, or 'strains' they would say, each of which are repeated. You can hear Ferrabosco's written out decorations, they would say 'divisions' in the repeats of the strains. Alfonso Ferrabosco the Elder is the composer of the piece that the crazy lord can't get out of his head in Rose Tremain's book Music and Silence which was very popular a few years ago.

2010-08-19T09:48:00.017-04:00

Here is another piece from A Musicall Banquet of 1610. As I say in the last post, the book has a couple of solo 'madrigals' as he termed them by Giulio Caccini. Caccini worked for the Grand Duke of Tuscany, Ferdinand I de' Medici.

Though his publication of 1602, Le Nuove Musiche, is taken as a watershed between Renaissance and Baroque music, the ideas that shaped its contents were very much of the Renaissance. Caccini, with his colleagues at the Florentine court, Jacopo Peri, Vincenzo Galilei and others, were creating the 'new music' in imitation of the Ancient Greeks, who they knew declaimed poetry in the rhythm and pitches in imitation of spoken text; sort of a heightened poetry reading. Since they Greeks used the lyre and kithara to accompany themselves, they developed the new instrument the 'chitarrone' (big kithara?) which Caccini specifies as the best accompaniment for the voice in his long preface to Nuove Musiche. (The name chitarrone dropped away after a few of decades and theorbo became the most widely used term for the instrument.) Other instruments could be and were used though, because Caccini has the music printed with the singing line, and a bass line, with figures from which the lute player, or the chitarrone player would make up chordal accompaniment.

Robert Dowland (or Diana Poulton thinks it may have been his dad) makes up the accompaniment for the purchaser of Musicall Banquet; I guess the skill of figured bass playing wasn't widespread in England yet. His accompaniment, which I am using in this mp3 recording (which you can download for free here), is in lute tablature which tells you exactly what notes to play and where to put your fingers. It's busier than you would make up from a bass line, especially if you were playing the cumbersome and loud and sustaining chitarrone/theorbo. Caccini might have criticised it for getting in the way of his freedom to declaim the text, because for him, it's all about the singer and the text and, indeed there are a few other manuscript sources of tablature accompaniments from Italy that are less busy.

Here's a translation. You can hear that Caccini has carefully considered how an over-emotional man might berate his lover and represented it in pitch and rhythm. The words are by Giovanni Battista Guarini.

Amarilli, my love,

Don’t you believe you are my love, heart's desire.

Believe it and if doubt assails you,

Take my arrow open my breast,

and you will find written on my heart:

Amarilli is my love.

2010-08-12T09:28:00.000-04:00

This year is the 400th anniversary of the printing of A Musicall Banquet. It's a collection of songs compiled by Robert Dowland, son of John. Inside the collection are 3 songs by John (Farre from triumphing court, with words by the formentioned Sir Henry Lee, Lady if you so Spight me, and In darknesse let me dwell), a bunch of songs by guys who were otherwise not known to be songwriters (Anthony Holborne, Daniel Batchelar and Robert Hales, who was Elizabeth's favorite singer and sang the formentioned His golden locks at its premier). It's also got a number of French airs de cour, some Spanish songs and some Italian, including Caccini's Amarilli and Dovro dunque with written out lute accompaniments instead of just figured bass.

The poets are given credit as well in a lot of cases. There are some by Elizabeth's lover, the Earl of Essex, and some of the 'Songs' (as opposed to sonnets) from Philip Sidney's Astrophel and Stella. One of these Sidney songs, In a Grove, was written to a pre-existing tune by Guillaume Tessier. Tessier's air originally set a poem by Ronsard, so Sidney is imitating French poetic meter just by using the tune as a model. (I've linked the poems so you can compare if you are skilled in the French tongue.) Sidney did this in other places in his Certain Sonnets collection.

If the embedding above doesn't work, you can download a (free) mp3 of a live performance of MIO singing Change thy mind, words by Robert Devereaux, Earl of Essex, music by Richard Martin, (not the same guy as Livin' la Vida Loca singer Ricky Martin) here. As I say, it's live, so please excuse any performance bobbles, the subway noise and the truck that goes past. The text of the poem is here.

2010-08-02T17:03:00.001-04:00

Here's what Chris Verrette and I played on Sunday at St. James Cathedral.

Chris played with the violin in the short ribs (well, maybe not quite that low, but Matteis was said to play with it down there quite late in the 17th century).

Thomas Baltzar, Prelude
Biagio Marini, Sonata variata

Anon., Prelude
Marini, Romanesca

Anon., Prelude
Orlando di Lasso/Verrette, Divisions on Suzanne ung jour

Anon., Passacaglia from Sonate "Wie schon leuchtet der Morgenstern"

2010-07-27T16:12:00.002-04:00

Today we did an emergency concert at St. James Cathedral's Music at Midday series, since one of the performers who were booked had to go and look after a sick mom. The concert went pretty well, especially considering we only knew we were doing it 15 hours earlier. The music we performed is below.

I explained how 'His golden locks' was for the retirement celebration for Sir Henry Lee, Queen Elizabeth I's champion at the Accession Day tilt games.

There is not a picture of us playing so here is a picture of me putting a new fret on my 7-course lute this morning. You tie the fret gut on a little down the neck, then burn the ends of the knot so they bunch up and get tighter, then slip the fret up to where it needs to go. As the neck widens towards the body the fret gets tighter, so that, theoretically, it doesn't slip around and go out of tune. I can do the upper frets OK, but have still not got the hang of tying the first fret (which doesn't have as far to slip up the neck) very tight. I think that luthier Michael Schreiner uses pliers, and though I am, as you see, willing to put an open flame next to my lute, I am strangely uneasy about wielding metal tools around it. Curious.

The matches, by the way, are from the house owned by American industrialist J.P. Morgan, which is where the memorial service in the last entry was held.

Here's what we sang at the cathedral:

Unquiet thoghts - John Dowland (1563-1626)

I saw my Lady weepe - Dowland

Come again - Dowland

So, so, leave off - Alfonso Ferrabosco the Younger (c.1575-1628)

Ancor che col partire (Lute solo) - Jean-Paul Paladin (d. 1566)

His golden locks - Dowland

In darknesse let me dwell - Dowland

2010-07-26T10:12:00.000-04:00

On Sunday afternoon we sang a short set at the pre-Evensong concert at St. James Cathedral. The songs were from Harmonia Sacra, published by Henry Playford from 1688 and later expanded editions. It has all the Purcell sacred hits including the above and the Blessed Virgin's Expostulation etc. It would have been for domestic use; to sing at home on Sunday when you are feeling pious and penitent, after singing his booze and fart joke catches on Saturday night. We did some John Blow on the concert too. I played it on the theorbo. Here's a pic of that taken by Darryl Edwards (no relation).

2010-07-24T09:22:00.000-04:00

Chris, Hallie and I played this week at the funeral of our good friend Leah Robinson, who lived in Connecticut. We played 19th century American hymns accompanied on the Ashborn guitar. Amazing Grace, Ps. 23 to the tune Resignation, Jerusalem my happy home (because she always had a happy home when we were gigging in the New York area and stayed at her place) to Land of Rest and Shall we gather at the river. Here is a picture of Leah and her obit.

Leah D. Robinson, 87, wife of the late David E. Robinson of Norwalk, died Sunday, July 4, 2010, in the Norwalk Hospital.

Born October 31, 1922 in Vancouver, British Columbia, she was the daughter of the late William and Mary Ruth Eaton. Mrs. Robinson attended art college in Vancouver and served in the Women’s Royal Canadian Naval Service in London during World War II. She married David Robinson on September 16, 1946. They moved to Norwalk in 1956. In the mid 1960s, she was librarian at Kendall Elementary School. She later worked with her husband in the family business in Danbury, CT. In 2004, she took responsibility for the business, Process Measurement and Controls Inc., when her husband died. Known for her generosity, she opened her home to young people from around the world who wanted to learn English and have the experience of living in America. Some of her most cherished memories were of frequent trips to Mexico and Britain and summers at the family cabin in the Canadian woods.

She is survived by her daughters Joan Robinson of Toronto, Ontario and Mary Susan Bosch, her husband Steven Bosch, and their three children, Leah, Carter, and William, of Redding, CT. She is also survived by her sister, Grace Amanda Cooper, of Surrey, BC.

2010-07-16T10:18:00.000-04:00

Off tonight to play at the Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies' appreciation party for Prof. Jane Couchman, who has been acting director this past year. Since she does Renaissance French literature we are singing some Clément Marot poems set by Claudin de Sermisy published by Pierre Attaingnant, a Basse Dance set from an Attaingnant book, a poem by Philippe Desportes set by Adrian Le Roy and a Ronsard poem about Love being stung by a bee set to music by Guillaume Tessier. Later, Sir Philip Sidney wrote his 'In a grove most rich of shade', a song from Astrophel and Stella to the Tessier's tune. That poem was published in Robert Dowland's A Musicall Banquet in 1610. We'll start off though, with an anonymous poem that tells us to Venes mes serfs et Bachus adorons... set by Clemens non Papa published in a lute version by Pierre Phalèse. The picture above is in Konrad Eisenbichler's garden from another RefRen event.

Program

Venes mes serfs et Bachus adorons by Clemens non Papa, from Hortus Musarum 2da Pars, Pub. 1553

Tant que vivray & Secoures moy by Claudin Sermisy, from Très Brève et familière introduction Pub. 1529

Ah Dieu! que c‘est un estrange martire by Adrian Le Roy, from Livre d'Airs de Cour miz sur le luth, Pub. 1571

La Magdalena-Recoupe-Tourdion by Pierre Blondeau from Dix-huit Basses Dances, Pub. 1530

Le petit enfant Amour by Guillaume Tessier, from Primo Libro d'Arie, Pub. 1582

2010-04-23T09:24:00.000-04:00

Here are the program notes and translations for Saturday's show. And a picture of the guitar I'll be playing.

For us the guitar is a marker of direct, honest communication and non-elitist, even working class usage. 'I'll get out my guitar and play/just like yesterday/and get down on my knees and pray/we don't get fooled again.' wrote Pete Townshend. Even if the prosody worked, if he had written 'I'll sit down at my piano and play…' the meaning would have been different. For the aspiring and wealthy American of the mid-19th century however, the guitar had not yet acquired the meaning we attach to it. For them the guitar was associated with the classical guitarists of the European capitals of culture: Giuliani, Sor and Carulli. The guitar for them was a marker of civility and gentility and they demonstrated to themselves that they were just as cultured as those in the European capitals by consuming arrangements of art music and opera composed in those cities. But the burgeoning bourgeois culture of the antebellum United States was the one that left us the ballads of Stephen Foster, and unsurprisingly, some of the opera arias we present are adapted to that taste: compare the arrangement of the Barcarolle from Hérold's opera Marie (Batelier dit Lisette) to the sentimental Irish ballad Sweet Jessie was Young and Simple. There must have been a market for more bravura performances, though; who would have thought the aria Ah, non giunge from Bellini's La Sonnambula (in its English translation Ah, Don't Mingle) would have been suitable for performance in the parlor with the diminutive parlor guitar replacing the orchestra? The aria was arranged for every medium, including piano, violin and slightly later, classical banjo (sic).

P.T. Barnum (his famous circus has web presence now) brought one of Europe's most famous singers to North America in 1850. With the soprano Jenny Lind and the violinist Ole Bull, Barnum became a cultural tycoon as well as all the other kinds. Lind's success (she even performed at Toronto's St. Lawrence Hall) meant that the tag 'from the repertoire of Jenny Lind' ensured additional sales. Repertoire celebrating her was often arranged for and with guitar for those with aspirations to high culture, but without yet the means to acquire that most bourgeois of instruments, the piano.

The guitar's presence in Latin American music will be less surprising to us. Afro Latin rhythms first moved into the high art repertoire via the theatre. Many Spanish and Portuguese plays featured a stock black character, often a guitar player and often a figure of fun. One such character is told to give up his seat for a white man, but minutes later, after a performance of guitar music, gets his seat back so as to honour to the 'black orpheus.' Native Americans, too had an influence on this repertoire, participating in music making in church and vice-royal courts.

Latin American music was soon being exported back to Europe, as we hear in the songs printed in the Colleccion General and to North America with guitarists such as Delores Nevares de Goni, who taught in New York, toured both North and South America and was famous enough to have had a model of guitar named after her by C.F. Martin and Co. by the 1840s.

And where was Canada in all this? Unfortunately, we have not been able to discover what was being sung to the guitars which Martin shipped into Canada in the mid-1800s. Accomplished players left the country for the US in the last years of that century one becoming instructor of guitar at the illustrious Boston Conservatory. The National Library of Canada lists one single guitar song sheet published in Toronto and that lies in the British Library. More research needs to be done to find out whether our own parlours were as guitar friendly as those of our American cousins.

Batelier dit Lisette

Boatman, said Lisette, I wish to cross the water,

But I am too poor to pay for the boat.

Colin said to the beauty, come, come always.

And sail the vessel that bears my love.

I am going to my father, said Lisette to Colin

Well, do you think, my dear, he will grant me your hand?

Ah! replied the beauty, never stop trying.

And sail the vessel that bears my love.

After his marriage, always in his boat,

Colin was the wisest of the husbands in the hamlet;

He always repeated his faithful song,

"And sail the vessel that bears my love."

Ganinha, minha Ganinha

Ganinha my Ganinha

Ganinha my Lady

Ay la la, my heart,

To love is not worth it.

Se fores ao fim do mundo

If you go to the end of the world

I will have to go there to fetch you

Where ever you are

I cannot be without you

Por desabafar saudedes

To relieve the longing

That my heart suffers

When night falls to the mortals

I begin to sigh.

Os me deixas que tu das

The cold shoulders you give

When people touch you are so cute

I've never seen such in other girls

How I like, little lady, to tease you

When I see that you are angry with me

You get so agitated -

That satisfies me no end

And if I tell you to go

I once again imprison you

It is only to see

the cold shoulder that you give.

Homens errados e loucos

Wrong and crazy men

In what love you wrap yourself.

Of the enjoyable freedom

You remember very little.

Freedom, nothing more.

El Consejo

The Advice

Mistaken is she who brags of defeating her affection,

Because blind and cowardly Love never listens to reason.

And thus, pretty girls, flee the occasion because the little Cupid is always a traitor,

Showing his inhumane, hidden tyranny and if we search for him he distances himself quickly.

Don't trust who tells you I want your heart, since sometimes the tales are weapons that win with treason.

And thus...

Being cautious is what matters in early passion,

Since the whole world is lies, tricks and seductions.

And thus...

Pan de Jarabe

The Syrup Bread

I was your first love and now you don't let yourself be seen.

That this happens in the world to her who knows how to love.

Within your sight, my lord, I was joyful, I was happy,

But absent from your side, I didn't want to live any more.

The memory your image of calms, in part, my pain,

And the tender vows make me thankful for the illusion.

El Vejuquito

This new little tune of Veracruz has come

And it is brought by a little black girl,

Who sings it beautifully, Tai rai etc.

Behold it yourself, how nice it is. Tai rai rai etc.

They call it the Vejuquito,

And with this softness, numbs the senses.

A little Indian girl in her garden was picking flowers

And a little Indian boy was watching her and sings his love.

Tai rai rai etc.

A little Indian boy was telling her tenderly of his discomfort

“For your life, Soapile, dance for me the totaconiche.”

Tai rai etc.

2010-04-20T19:36:00.000-04:00

Here are the Tunes we're planning to play on Saturday. The program notes are half written.

Mid 19th Century US Songs

Columbia Gem of the ocean Thomas á Becket (fl. mid 19th c.) arr. Fr. Blancjour

Batelier dit Lisette Ferdinand Herold (1791-1833) arr. Le Meignen

Anonymous Late 18th Century Modinhas from Brazil

Ganinha, minha ganinha

Por desabafar saudedes

Guitar pieces from 18th Century Brazil

Chacaras 1o Tom de Arbeau – Paracumbe 7o Tom – Minuete

Anonymous Late 18th Century Modinhas from Brazil

Se fores ao fim do mundo

Os me deixas que tu das

Homens errados e loucos

Guitar pieces from 18th by Santiago de Murcia

Allegro – Grabe – Allegro

Minuet

Triste di Jorge

Intermission

Songs from Coleccion General de Canciones Españolas y Americanas (1810-30)

El consejo – Modiña Brasileña

El pan jarabe – Cancion y Baile de Nueva España

El Vejuquito – Cancion de Nueva España

Mid 19th Century US Songs

Sweet Jessie was young and SimpleSamuel Lover (1797-1868) arr. M. Blancjour

Scotch tune arranged from Czerny E.H. Frey

Ah, Don’t Mingle One Human Feeling Vincenzo Bellini (1801-1835) arr. Meignen

From the Repertoire of Jenny Lind

Child of the Regiment Gaetano Donizetti (1797-1848) arr. Saverio Farina

Jenny Lind Polka arr. F.T. Strawinski

Prima Donna Waltz Louis Antoine Jullien (1812-1860) arr. Justin Holland

Jenny Lind’s Celebrated Bird Song M. Taubert arr. M. Zorer

2010-03-25T11:55:00.000-04:00

This Sunday (Mar. 28th) we will be singing 2 pieces as part of the pre-Evensong recital at St. James Cathedral (King and Church Streets). Show starts at 4PM and runs about a half hour. Hallie will sing and I'll play theorbo.

The first piece is Canzonetta Spirituale sopra alla nanna by Tarquinio Merula. It has a two note bass line for most of its six or seven minutes, with spiky dissonances in the chords and with the voice part. It's a lullaby (the Italian 'ninna nana' is like the English 'lulla lullaby') I think maybe the rocking bass represents the motion of a cradle or mom's arms. Schütz uses the same effect in some movements of his Christmas Story. As you can see from the translation below, it's sort of a creepy text and just before the baby nods off you can hear that the Virgin Mary is like any hysterical mom whose baby won't nod off.

The other piece is a 'contrafactum' that puts words of the Virgin Mary to Monteverdi's Lamento d'Arianna. This excerpt from his opera became very famous in his lifetime and was the basis for imitations by all kinds of Italian composers (d'India, Marini and many, many more) as well as Englishmen Nicholas Lanier and Henry Lawes. We've sung the Monteverdi itself as well as the Marini (Lagrime d'Ermina, the heroine from Tasso's Gerusalemme Liberata) and Lanier (The lamenter in his imitation is Hero, who was left on the beach when her Leander was sexually assaulted and drowned by Neptune). In Monteverdi's Selva Morale e Spirituale of 1640, in among the Vespers Psalms are some motets including the Pianto della Madonna sopra il Lamento dell'Arianna. Latin words have been written to the arioso to make a little dramatic scena 'suitable for the chapels or chambers of princes' as Monteverdi describes the motets in his Mass and Vespers of 1610. We usually break up the partite of the Lamento with little improvised passacaglias for a kind of ritornello.

Andrew Ager, the organist at the cathedral, will be playing an arrangement of a Vivaldi concerto for the organ as well.

Here are the translations of the texts:

Plaint of the Madonna

Now I will die my son,

For what mother could find consolation

In such terrible pain, in such cruel suffering?

Now I will die my son.

My son, my Jesus, O Jesus, my spouse,

My spouse, my beloved,

My hope, my life,

Alas, you strike deep into my heart.

Look, Jesus, I beg you,

Look upon a mother,

Look at your mother,

Who, moaning before you, pale, anguished,

In fatal death demands to be joined with you

On that cross so cruel and so monstrous.

My Jesus, O my Jesus,

O powerful man, O God,

Whose breast, alas, endures such suffering

Which tortures Mary herself,

Take pity on the one whose tears are joined to yours:

May she who has lived through you, die with you!

But soon you leave this life, O my son,

And I stay here to weep!

You will confound the infernal enemy with a great victory

And I, abandoned here, a prey to pain, alone and afflicted.

You, nurturing Father, you fount of love, support of the joyful,

I will see you no more.

O, my Father, O my spouse

Here are the promises of the Archangel Gabriel,

Here the high throne of David, our ancient father,

Here the royal crown, the symbol of your majesty

Here the golden sceptre and finally the kingdom,

To be crucified so cruelly on a wooden cross,

To be lacerated by nails and by a crown!

Ah, Jesus, ah, my Jesus!

Sweet death, come to me.

This is what with tears and cries your Mary asks:

For her to die with you is glory and life.

Alas, son, you reply not.

Alas, you are deaf to my moaning and lamentation.

O death, O sin, O hell, behold,

My spouse is quickly drowned in the waves.

O earth, open up your depths, and with my beloved,

Hide me as well.

What can I say?

Alas, what can I hope for in my wretchedness?

Alas, what can I seek?

O, Jesus, O, my Jesus, it is not what I want,

But let it be done according to your wishes.

Let my sad heart, full of suffering, live.

Graze, my son, on the love of your mother.

Canzonetta Spirituale sopra alla nanna.

The time is now come to sleep,

Sleep, sleep my son and do not cry,

For the time will yet come

When you will have to cry.

So my dear, so my heart

Go to sleep.

Shut those divine eyes

As other children do,

For soon a thick veil

Will deprive the sky of light.

Go to sleep,

Or take this milk

From my unsullied breasts,

For a cruel minister

Prepares for you vinegar and gall.

So my dear, so my heart

Go to sleep.

My love, let this soft breast

Be a soft bed for you

Before, on the cross

In a loud voice, you give your soul to your father.

So my dear, so my heart

Go to sleep.

Stretch out, then those sweet little limbs.

So sweet and so tender,

For later irons and chains

Will inflict cruel pains on them.

So my dear, so my heart

Go to sleep.

Those hands and those feet

Which you now look on with pleasure and joy,

Alas, in what a way will sharp nails

pass through them.

That gracious face,

Today redder than a rose,

Will be fouled with spit and blows

In torment and pain.

O what pain, only hope of my heart,

Will be caused by sharp thorns,

Which will wound your head and hair.

Ah, in this divine breast,

my love sweet and tender,

An ungodly and treacherous lance

Will inflict a mortal wound.

Sleep then my son,

Sleep you who is also my redeemer.

Because with happy faces

We shall see each other in Paradise.

Now that my life is sleeping,

He who is all the joy of my heart,

Let each, through pure zeal, be silent.

And I, during this time, what will I do?

I will contemplate my dear,

And I will stay with my head bowed

While my child sleeps.

The photo above is by Alexandra Guerson.

2010-03-02T16:34:00.000-05:00

Some pics from the O Dolce Nocte concert warm up:

Lonely lutes:

All the singers:

Hallie sings:

Bud sings: (Go to his website)

2010-02-26T08:31:00.000-05:00

Here's the program for Saturday's concert. Neil our bass has been very ill and Kevin has been delayed by the flight gods, so things may change after today's rehearsal and run-through. Bios and location of the hall are on the website

Phillipe Verdelot (1480 to 1485-c.1530 to 1532?)

Quanto sia liet’il giorno

Madonna, il tuo bel viso

Vita de la vita mia vita

Fuggi, fuggi, cor mio

Pietro Paolo Borrono (c.1490-after 1563)

Fantasia, Pavana Nova, Saltarello

Jacques Arcadelt (?1507-1568)

Il Bianco e dolce cigno

Che più foco

Che più foco (intabulated by Valentin Bakfark c.1526-1576)

Quando col dolce sono

Cipriano de Rore (1515/16-1565)

Ancor che col partire

Toccata (Francesco da Milano 1497-1543)

Ancor che col partire (intabulated by Giovanni Paolo Paladino d. before 1565)

Non gemme, non fin’oro

Non gemme, non fin’oro (Ornaments by Bassano)

Signor mio caro/Charità di signore

Intermission

Verdelot

O dolce nocte

Adriano Willaert (c.1490-1562)

Vecchie letrose

Signora dolce

Francesco da Milano

Fantasias

Willaert

Qual anima ignorante

Giovanni Maria da Crema (fl 1540-50)

Ricercare Sesto, Quanto sia liet’il giolrno, Passamezzo and Saltarello Lovetta

Orlando di Lasso (1532-94)

Tutto lo dì mi dici

Madonna mia pietà

It seems strange to us that as it emerged at in the first half of the 16th century, most of the leading composers of the ‘Italian’ madrigal were French and Burgundian. Composers of that land moved to Italy largely as composers of church music. While Italians appear to have been occupied with Arie di cantare improvised to the lute the immigrants got to work producing the polyphonic partsongs you hear tonight.

Phillipe Verdelot ‘franzese musico eccellentissimo’ as one contemporary called him, settled in Florence in 1521, and would have known Niccolò Machiavelli, who wrote the texts of O dolce nocte. He also set poems by Michelangelo. When his patron, Giulio de’ Medici became Pope Clement VII Verdelot travelled with him to Rome, but was soon back in Florence. There is no music from him after 1530, so he may have died in an imperial siege of that city in that year.

Cosimo Bartoli, a Florentine diplomat said that Arcadelt ‘followed in the footsteps of Verdelot’. Whether he meant musically or literally is not clear, since his place of birth is not known; he may have been French despite his Burgundian name, but certainly spent time in Florence and Rome. As well as sacred music he published several books of madrigals and composed commissioned music to texts of the Florentine literati. His most famous madrigal today, Il dolce e bianco cigno, seems not to have been as popular in his own day. Orlando Gibbons’ The Silver Swan, on a translation of Il dolce e bianco cigno, seems to have boosted the madrigal’s popularity in the English speaking world.

There are few pieces of music that were as popular as de Rore’s Ancor che col partir, though. Arrangements for nearly every medium possible in the 16th century, from lute to viola bastarda and beyond, are extant. As well as a lightly ornamented lute version of that madrigal, we present a heavily decorated version of another of his madrigals. Most often these versions are instrumental but occasionally are texted. De Rore, from the Southern Netherlands, initiated many of the chromaticisms and crunchy harmonies exploited by the later generations of Italian madrigalists like Luca Marenzio. De Rore worked at the Este court in Ferrara, which later employed Claudio Monteverdi.

De Rore may have been a student of Adriano Willaert. Willaert also worked for the Este family and preceded Monteverdi as maestro di capella at St. Mark’s in Venice. This city was the music publishing capital of Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries and Willaert arranged the lower voices of the Verdelot madrigals for lute, as heard this evening. His student Caimo extolled the perfection of his composition in a letter: ‘your music, my dearest friend, has been distilled in seven alembics, purified in nine waters and refined in four flames, as is proper to the aurum potabile’.

Orlando di Lasso, or Roland Lassus was born in Mons in what is today Belgium. During his lifetime the typical madrigal gained a voice, being composed for five voices rather than our four, and the genre split into lighter canzonettes and more serious works. We present a couple of his Neapolitan style madrigals.

Lutenists provide the Italian names on our program. We present some dances as well as arrangements of some of the madrigals and fantasias or ricercars. Francesco da Milano, like Verdelot, a servant of Giulio de’ Medici, was recognised as the leading lutenist of the 16th centuries by his contemporaries, who called him ‘il divino’. Paladino’s lutebook was published in Italian lute tablature in Lyons. Crema may have been in a musical embassy to the English court of Henry VIII. Borrono appears not to have been a professional musician, but to have been a real ambassador, and possibly involved, for his home town of Milan, in a plot to assassinate Cardinal Alessandro Farnese; at least the Cardinal thought so. By comparison, the career of the peripatetic Valentin Bakfark, who travelled from what is now Romania, to be lutenist to the Kings of Poland and Hungary, who published in Lyons and who travelled through Italy enough to leave much music in manuscripts there, seems positively dull.

Quanto sia liet’il giorno

How happy is the day

In which ancient things

Are shown forth and celebrated by you!

We see all around

Troops of friends are assembled here:

We who in our lifetime

In woods and thickets live out, Are also come,

I, a nymph, and these shepherds,

And we go singing together with our loves.

Madonna, il tuo bel viso

My lady, your fair face

Which is my leader and guide on the great sea of Love,

Now revives my hope, and now slays it,

And whenever it sees therein fair weather,

It spreads its sails to the wind

Without fear of reefs or storms:

But if the light fails on its path,

Filled with terror,

It lowers the sails of its bark,

In the light of your flickering star

It drifts hither and thither on the treacherous waves,

And fears and hopes and never sees the port.

Vita, de la mia vita

Life of my life,

What great wrong you do in thinking that I

Have ever forgotten for anyone’s sake

That fire which Love kindled in my bosom!

Alas! For so many years it has been of such violence and of such strength,

That my greater misfortune,

Neither for absence, nor for suffering,

Did it issue from my heart,

But rather the desire of you grew ever more.

Fuggi, fuggi, cor mio

Flee, flee my heart,

Ungrateful, cruel love!

For it is too great an error

To make a blind boy so great a god.

Realize the wasted time,

For a feigning woman one is loaded with deceit!

Go forth from slavery, from labors!

Be no more overwhelmed

By jealousy, suspicion, humiliation and plaints!

For the destiny of blind lovers

Is to repent in vain and end in grief,

Since it is too great an error

To make a blind boy so great a god.

Il Bianco e dolce cigno

The white and sweet swan dies singing, and I,  

weeping, reach the end of my life. 

Strange and different fate, that he dies disconsolate and I die a blessed death, 

which in dying fills me

full of joy and desire. 

If in dying, were I to feel no other pain,

 I would be content to die a thousand deaths a day.

Che piu foc’ al mio foco,

What is more fire to my fire,

Or flames in my heart,

Lady, if I live in fire.

So of my passion

you take so little heed,

Alas poor is your honor,

to see in you the death, the life,

of your faithful lover.

O lights of your eyes high and holy,

Why do you not give help,

It is not that fire in you that burns and inflames,

Why then other fire, or other flames.

Quando col dolce suono

When with sweet sound

the sweet words tune themselves,

that come forth from between white pearls and beautiful rubies,

Marvelling I say: How I have

arrived in heaven, that so near the sun

I look admiringly, and I hear tones high and divine.

O wandering spirits,

If you heard Pulisena (the singer Pulisena Peccorina)

you would say you heard a twofold siren.

I who have seen her swear to you that she

is more than the sun, bright and beautiful.

Ancor che col partire

Since when I part from you

it is a kind of dying,

I would be glad to leave you every hour, every moment,

so great is my joy

as life comes flooding back to me on my return:

and so a thousand times a day

I would that I could part from you:

for so my heart leaps when we are reunited.

Non gemme, non fin’oro

Not gems, not fine gold, Nor the work of cloth

made with wondrous art and skill,

but that which is above all else,

the keen reasoning, the gestures and the manners,

are those bright lights,

that make you bright, and you shine so much

that you seem to give splendour to the gems.

Signor mio caro/Charità di signore

My dear Lord, every thought draws me

devotedly to see you whom I always see;

My fortune (what can it do to me that is worse?)

holds me reined in, and turns and wheels me about.

Then that sweet desire, that love inspires in me,

leads me to death, that I am not aware of it;

And while I call to my two lights in vain,

wherever I am, day and night there is sighing.

Devotion to my Lord, love of my lady

are the chains by which with many labours

I am bound, because I myself bound myself.

A green laurel, a noble Column (pun on the name Colonna),

fifteen years the one and eighteen the other

I have carried in my breast, and from which I have never separated.

O dolce nocte

Oh sweet night, oh holy

hours, nocturnal and tranquil,

that accompany desiring lovers;

In you are summoned so many

happy joys, you are

alone the reason for making souls blessed,

You, the just prizes award

to the loving crowds, to your friends,

For their long labours;

You make, oh happy hours,

every frozen heart burn with love.

Vecchie letrose

Spiteful old hags, you are good for nothing,

Only for lying in wait in the thicket.

Beat, beat, beat with your canes,

Spiteful old hags, murderous and mad!

Signora dolce

Sweet lady, I would like to speak with you secretly,

and tell you the intention of my heart,

which burns to serve you by day, and then by night.

Qual anima ignorante

What soul ignorant or wiser,

What mortal man, what god, what woman or goddess

That does not know from whence my woe derives

And for my great ardour has no pity?

What woods so hidden or so wild,

What laurel growing in the air or what olive tree

That does not know from whence my woe derives

And for my great ardour has no pity?

What part of the world today is not

Full of tears and of laments,

Of voices, sighs, and my griefs?

Not a thing now lies beneath the path

Of heaven that does not know my torment

But she alone whom I alone desire.

Tutto lo di

All day long you say: sing!

Don't you see I am out of breath?

Why all this singing?

I wish you would say to me:

Ring, Not the church bell for Nones 

But your very own cymbal.

O, if I can, ding-a-ling, 

I'd like to get you under me.

Madonna mia pietà

My lady, I beg you for mercy and help,

For unjustly I suffer and die,

And with your consent. 

I cry out, but you hear not: 

'Water, my lady! Fire!' 

For I feel my life slipping away.  

Your lofty beauty, infinite, unique,

Is the cause of my burning,

and with your consent,  I cry out... etc.   

Now my troubled life is fading 

And you believe me not,

though you see it with your own eyes. 

I cry out... etc. 

2010-02-16T09:04:00.000-05:00

Throughout Lent, (the first one is Feb. 21 at 4PM) The Musicians In Ordinary will be performing the cycle of Cantatas by Georg Telemann from his Harmonischer Gottes-Dienst (The Harmonious Church Service) as part of Evensong services at St. John the Baptist Dixie Anglican Church. This music is rarely heard, and even more rarely heard in the context of a church service, for which it was originally composed.

Georg Phillip Telemann was a German composer contemporary with Handel and J.S. Bach; indeed, during their lifetimes Telemann’s reputation was much more widely renowned than Bach’s and, as is clear from friendly correspondence, Handel recognised Telemann as a mentor, he being 18 years older than Handel.

Telemann was church music director and composer for the city-state of Hamburg. Here he had to provide a cantata before the sermon, another after the sermon, and concluding music at the end of the service. The post-sermon cantatas for 1725–6 appeared as Harmonischer Gottes-Dienst. This cycle’s limited scoring (voice, melody instrument and continuo) made it suitable for churches with small musical establishments.

For the first Sunday we'll be joined by Emiliy Eng on Baroque violin, and Kate Haynes, Baroque 'cello.

2009-12-13T16:15:00.001-05:00

Today is St. Lucy's Day

I have already posted a link to Flow my tears. It's from Dowland's Second Book of Songs, which is dedicated to Lucy, Countess of Bedford.

Here is Donne's Nocturnal Upon St. Lucy's Day, Being the Shortest Day. It's thought that the 'she' may be Lucy, Countess of Bedford who was Donne's patron as well as Dowland's.

'Tis the year's midnight, and it is the day's,

Lucy's, who scarce seven hours herself unmasks;

The sun is spent, and now his flasks

Send forth light squibs, no constant rays;

The world's whole sap is sunk;

The general balm th' hydroptic earth hath drunk,

Whither, as to the bed's-feet, life is shrunk,

Dead and interr'd ; yet all these seem to laugh,

Compared with me, who am their epitaph.

Study me then, you who shall lovers be

At the next world, that is, at the next spring;

For I am every dead thing,

In whom Love wrought new alchemy.

For his art did express

A quintessence even from nothingness,

From dull privations, and lean emptiness;

He ruin'd me, and I am re-begot

Of absence, darkness, death—things which are not.

All others, from all things, draw all that's good,

Life, soul, form, spirit, whence they being have;

I, by Love's limbec, am the grave

Of all, that's nothing. Oft a flood

Have we two wept, and so

Drown'd the whole world, us two; oft did we grow,

To be two chaoses, when we did show

Care to aught else ; and often absences

Withdrew our souls, and made us carcasses.

But I am by her death—which word wrongs her—

Of the first nothing the elixir grown;

Were I a man, that I were one

I needs must know; I should prefer,

If I were any beast,

Some ends, some means; yea plants, yea stones detest,

And love ; all, all some properties invest.

If I an ordinary nothing were,

As shadow, a light, and body must be here.

But I am none; nor will my sun renew.

You lovers, for whose sake the lesser sun

At this time to the Goat is run

To fetch new lust, and give it you,

Enjoy your summer all,

Since she enjoys her long night's festival.

Let me prepare towards her, and let me call

This hour her vigil, and her eve, since this

Both the year's and the day's deep midnight is.

2009-12-07T12:59:00.000-05:00

Here is the repertoire we are planning for the New Year's Day concert. Since last year we were sold out and were turning people away we have added a second concert in the usual 8PM Saturday slot on the 2nd of January. The concert on New Year's Day is a matinee starting at 2PM. Doors open a 1/2 hour before concert time so come early, come often.

The Cimarosa we'll be doing is from an undated Viennese print from the very end of the 18th or even early 19th century. Of the 6 arias in the print only 2 use the low E of the guitar and there are many examples of G major chords with the low G missing. You would only do that if you didn't have the 6th course to play the low G on, I think. Anyway, Cimarosa was in Vienna in the 1790s when 5-course guitars would still have been common. Here is a picture of young Mozart with a Baroque guitarist. I wonder what they were playing together?

Cantata – Che prodigo Antonio Caldara

Caldara was a choir boy at St. Mark's in Venice (where he was born). He worked at the Imperial court from 1716. His dad was a theorbo player and violinist at St. Mark's.

Sonata on Wie schön leuchtet uns der Morgenstern Anon.

This is a very interesting piece that is mostly made up of a D major passacaglia bass with the violin playing variations on the chorale tune and there is a Bach cantata on the tune (BWV 1 in fact). The manuscript of the violin sonata is in a monastary in Vienna. It's only just been published so I don't think has been heard here before.

Guitar pieces from a manuscript from the library of the Goëss family (an Austrian noble family). There will be guitar solo arrangements of Lully as well as pieces by Count Wolkenstein-Rodenegg (obviously an amateur) and French guitarist Remy Médard. I'm pretty sure no one has played these pieces here before.

Cimarosa arias arranged for guitar and voice in the 2nd half of the 18th c. There is a picture of a very young Mozart seated at a piano with a man standing over his shoulder holding a baroque guitar.

Harpsichord pieces probably by Fux, the 1st non-Italian maestro at the Imperial court.

Cantata - Lungi dal vago volto - Vivaldi

Vivaldi died in Venice, perhaps trying to set up a commercial opera company there. His music was out of fashion in Venice and he had dedicated some concertos to the Emperor, so had been looking to move to Vienna for a little while. I'm sure this has been heard hundreds of times here before. Emma Kirkby recorded it with Tafelmusik in the late 80s. It's for voice, 1 violin and continuo.

2009-12-05T08:57:00.000-05:00

Here's the program notes from the solo concert last week. Apparently there wasn't enough notes in any of these already very 'baroque' pieces so he took it upon himself to add 50% more.

Sonata Variata

To a turn-of-the-seventeenth-century observer, the choice of the violin for Biber’s bold affirmation of the Catholic faith which opens this programme would have been surprising; though sometimes appearing in the visual artwork of churches, the violin’s function was mostly secular at this time. Its role as the ideal instrument to accompany dancing, however, proved to be the key to its longterm success, for the influential and powerful classes placed a high value on that activity.

Thus, violins of transcendant quality first came into existence, such as those the Amati family made around 1550 for the danceband of Charles IX of France, of which only a few survived the French Revolution. Ongoing improvement in the art of violin making in the latter half of the sixteenth century contributed to the development of a kind of super-soprano instrument that could rival the highly-prized cornetto and even the human voice, and was ideally suited to the new trends in musicmaking taking place in Northern Italy, like opera and the sonata.

The first published sonata naming the violin as its treble instrument is the Cima work, dating from 1610. The practice of instrumentalists taking vocal lines and improvising embellishments on them, however, had been around for decades, and we have many written examples to emulate, some of them quite extravagant. Thus, Susanna’s tale of purity and faith can easily get lost in a torrent of virtuoso display. How delightfully seventeenth-century! Although not based on a vocal original, a similar confluence of tuneful melody and elaborate ornament is heard in the sonata by Fontana, from the only extant volume of his works, published posthumously. The scoring of the Frescobaldi piece, with its obligato keyboard part, is highly unusual for this period, but understandable coming from the leading keyboardist of the time.

The name Biagio Marini can be found on the payroll of San Marco in Venice, ostensibly as a singer, but somebody had to play those violin parts that kept cropping up in Monteverdi’s Vespers and other sacred works, so why not have the best? Marini was certainly the most innovative of his generation in the technique of the violin, exploiting its full range and capacity for doublestops, as can be heard in the Sonata Variata. He also travelled widely during his career, bringing Italian innovations to other parts of Europe. Other composers on our programme made long journeys as well.

Baltzar was a native of Lübeck and served at the Swedish court before settling in England, where he did not fail to astonish, especiallly in his ability to play the violin in multiple voices. The Neapolitan Matteis also emigrated to England, and was particularly noted for the quality of his sound production. (“He did wonders upon a Note”).

Muffat is celebrated for his trips to Lully’s France and Corelli’s Rome, but wrote his only violin sonata in Prague, before taking the post of organist at Salzburg Cathedral, where no doubt he knew Biber, the foremost violinist of his generation. Valentini cut his teeth as a violinist and composer in Rome during Corelli’s heyday; the two dances that form the “double-finale” of this sonata have been compared to coffee and dessert. What better way to finish any meal or concert?

Notes by

Sara at the keyboard:

2009-11-24T09:50:00.000-05:00

Here is the concert program order for this coming Saturday's concert. Above is a picture of us performing at the Heliconian last year (we are at Emmanuel College Chapel on Saturday)

The Resurrection from The Rosary Sonatas Heinrich Biber (1644-1704)

Sonata-Surrexit Christus Hodie-Adagio

Prelude Thomas Baltzar (1630-63)

Suzanne ung jour

Sonata from Concerti ecclesiastici Giovanni Paolo Cima (c.1570- 1622)

Sonata Seconda from Sonate…per il violino Giovanni Battista Fontana (c.1571-c.1630)

Toccata per Spinetta e Violino Girolamo Frescobaldi (1583-1643)

Sonata Variata from Sonate Op. 8 Biagio Marini (c1597-1665)

Intermission

Sonata Violino Solo Georg Muffat (1653-1704)

Adagio-Allegro-Adagio-Allegro

Pieces in E minor Nicola Matteis (fl.1670 - 1698)

Preludio in Fantasia-Allegro-Aria Malinconica-Giga-Sarabanda con Affetto

Sonata Giuseppe Valentini (1681-1753)

Preludio-Allemanda-Largo-Giga-Minuè

2009-11-24T09:30:00.000-05:00

The beginning of the month had us at a conference on Early Modern Women at University of Maryland at College Park. We took part in a session on the women of the Sidney family and performance with Profs. Katie Larson, Linda Phylis Austern and Jeanice Brooks. 'Has she a strong voice? I love a lady when she puts forth her voice makes the room rattle,' Mary Sidney Wroth, Countess of Montgomery has Amphilanthus say.

We then did our concert on music written for girls to learn by John Danyel and Henry Lawes. Here's the cover of the program for that. Always have someone else proofread stuff.

Hallie gets ready for our concert:

Then is was off to Brooklyn where we stayed with Prof. Janette Tilley and her friend More McCormack. We led a seminar at CUNY's Grad Center (formerly B. Altman's department store on 5th Ave.) on "What really happened at Spanish courts in the 17th c. for musical entertainments?" (Answer: Long narrative poems declaimed on stock melodies rather than little villancicos.)

Here's the full program of the girl concert:

Her Leaves be Green

Miss Anne Greene

Coy Daphne fled John Danyel (1564-c1626)

Eies looke no more Danyel

Lyke as the Lute Danyel

Rosamond Danyel

Chast Daphne fled Danyel

Gaspara Stampa 1523-1554

Amor, lo stato tuo After Vincenzo Galilei (c.1520 –1591)

Gagliarda La Gasparina Giulio Abondante (fl1546 -1587)

Excerpt from Rilke’s Duino Elegies

Oimè, le notti mie colme di gioia, Cosimo Bottegari (1564-1620)

Songs for the Egerton Sisters

Sweet stay awhile Henry Lawes (1595-1622)

Coranto René Saman (fl 1610-31)

The God of love my shepherd is Lawes

Countess of Pembrooks Funeralls Anthony Holborne (c1545-1602)

Tavola - In quel gelato core Lawes

Before the Restoration the English stage was not a place where the educated woman was permitted to exercise her skills in the sister arts of rhetoric and music. The more intimate and controlable domestic performance space was hers to command.

John Danyel was the brother of the poet and playwright Samuel, and ‘Lyke as the Lute’ is a lyric by him. John’s Songs for the Lute Viol and Voice of 1606 is dedicated to Mistress Anne Greene, the daughter of a wealthy, if not very well-pedigreed knight, Sir William Greene, who employed Danyel as a household musician. A few lines from his verse dedication will make clear the function of the songs in the collection.

To Mrs. Anne Grene…

That which was onely privately composed,

For your delight, Faire Ornament of Worth,

Is here, come to bee publikely disclosed:

And to an universall view put forth.

Before his court engagement Henry Lawes also worked as a household musician, for the more illustrious Egerton family. His duties included teaching the daughters of John Egerton, the Earl of Bridgewater. Lawes’ dedicated his Ayres and Dialogues of 1653 is to Alice and Mary, by then Countess of Carbery and Lady Herbert of Cherbury. The dedication says of the songs ‘most of them were composed when I was employed to attend to your Ladishipp’s education in musick’. Along with a song from that print, we present a psalm paraphrase by George Herbert, Mary’s brother-in-law, solos from Lord Herbert’s Lutebook, and an ayre from Lawes’ autograph songbook. Since ‘Sweet stay awhile’ preceeds the songs written for Milton’s Comus we can presume it was written when he was still teaching the girls.

Gaspara Stampa and her sister were moved to Venice when her father died and her mother exploited the children’s musical and poetic talents as she opened her house as a salon. We set two of Gaspara’s poems to extant melodic formulas that fit any sonnets as was perhaps the most common way of hearing sung poetry in mid-16^th century Italy. We also present a much later poet’s lines on her to a plainchant melody.

2009-11-07T08:18:00.000-05:00

On Wed. we did a lunchtime concert at St. Paul's on the Green in Norwalk Ct. Lovely place as you can see below.

Then we hopped on a train and came to the conference on Early Modern Women at University of Maryland. Thurs. was the session on the Sidney women and performance. Friday night was a concert of music for Miss Anne Green, Gaspara Stampa and the Egerton sisters. Here's Hallie getting ready for that.

The internets here at the hotel are nearly non-existent. More when we get somewhere with better access.

2009-11-03T17:10:00.000-05:00

A nice picture by Alexandra Guerson from the Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies conference on marriage. Who knew they still make film? Who knew they still make black and white film?

2009-10-18T14:06:00.000-04:00

Here are the program and some pics from the Anatomy of Melancholy show.

Hallie in the hall at CIUT Radio.

The More the Merrier host Donna G.

David Klausner and Hallie before the concert.

The full script, with Burton's words can be read here:

Anatomy of Melancholy 09 height="500" width="100%" > value="http://d1.scribdassets.com/ScribdViewer.swf?document_id=21261409&access_key=key-261t9cv2yfhzeg0l8c4r&page=1&version=1&viewMode=">

The program:

Flow my teares fall from your springs - John Dowland (1563-1626)

If fluds of teares could cleanse my follies past

I saw my Lady weepe

Merry Melancholie - Thomas Robinson (fl. c 1600)

Semper Dowland Semper Dolens

Now cease my wandring eies

Mourne, mourne, day is with darknesse fled

Lachrimae Pavan

A Shepeard in a shade, his plaining made

Times eldest sonne, olde age the heyre of ease

Dye not before thy day, poore man condemned

Intermission

Melancholly Galliard

Cleare or cloudie sweet as Aprill showring

O sweet woods the delight of solitarinesse

Dump Philli - Anon.

Sorrow stay, lend true repentant teares

Please restrain any applause till intermission and the end of the concert.

David Klausner was a founding member of the Toronto Consort, with whom he played for twenty years, specializing in early wind instruments. Since his retirement from the Consort he has appeared regularly as a bassoonist with orchestras in the Toronto area. For the past thirty years he has taught regularly at early music summer schools in Canada, Europe, and the United States. In his other life he is Professor of English and Medieval Studies, and Vice-Dean for Interdisciplinary Affairs in the Faculty of Arts & Science, University of Toronto. His areas of research include the documentary history of early drama in England and the social history of music.

Hallie Fishel, soprano, takes particular interest in the poetry and the historical pronunciation of the texts she sings, and enjoys lecturing on these topics, as well as other aspects of performance practice and the role of music in early modern culture, at colleges and universities across North America. She studied both traditional operatic technique and early music at Indiana University, with Thomas Binkley, Margaret Harshaw and Paul Elliott, and at the Longy School of School of Music with Laurie Monahan. With Musicians in Ordinary, she has also been heard playing the rebec, lira da braccio, and a little guitar. Hallie teaches voice privately and acts as a consultant to both singers and public speakers on matters of vocal health. She has served as soprano soloist at the Church of the Redeemer, Toronto, and as Director of Music at Trinity Anglican Church, Port Credit.

John Edwards specializes in playing numerous historical plucked string instruments, from the medieval lute to the theorbo to the nineteenth century guitar. Though he plays continuo lutes with orchestras, Mr. Edwards has always had a love of song and is in high demand as an accompanist and coach. Recently graduated as an M.A. from York University, he is a Fellow of the Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies at the University of Toronto and has given lectures and demonstrations throughout North America.

An Anatomy of Melancholy

From the last years of Elizabeth’s reign through James’s melancholy and its attendants became a theme, even an obsession with artists. Few Shakespeare plays are without at least one character who exhibits symptoms of this disease. There were plenty of macro reasons to feel melancholy; high unemployment, inflation, a government in debt and a parliament paralyzed. Poets and musicians, though, tend to focus on the micro causes of black bile, or melancholia, to give it its Greek name.

Lucy, Countess of Bedford cultivated an image of herself as the light (‘Lucy’) in the darkness for many artists working with the imagery of melancholy. John Donne, Samuel Danyel and John Dowland were all her creatures. Dowland’s Second Book of Songs was dedicated to Lucy, and it is from this book that all of the songs heard this evening are taken. Dowland compiled the book while working for the King of Denmark, and it seems tailored to cash in on the vogue for melancholy as well as reminding the reader of a society retirement party he wrote the music for (Times eldest sonne), and allying the composer with the ill-fated Earl of Essex (The text of O sweet woods is probably a plaint by Essex to Elizabeth). It also features a song with an amorous shepherd whining on a riverbank, because Dowland knew that pastoral verse was ‘as you like it.’ Dowland, like Lucy, seems to have been cultivating an image he being ‘semper dolens’, ever sad.

Robert Burton, Oxford scholar, wrote only one book in his life, though he revised and expanded it for nearly a quarter of a century from its publication in 1621. One of his aim seems to have been to collect all the information about the melancholy disease, though his stated aim is more personal. ‘I write of melancholy, by being busy to avoid melancholy.’ His straggly life’s work is a mass of quotations from the ancients and ‘neoterics’ frequently digressing into such subjects as the nature of air, spirits, and in the Third Partition, love. His treatise of love melancholy and its causes very often strays from the ‘scientific’ purposes of the book to the edges of poetry. We will leave the last word to Burton:

But to leave all declamatory speeches in praise of divine music, I will confine myself to my proper subject: besides that excellent power it hath to expel many other diseases, it is a sovereign remedy against despair and melancholy, and will drive away the devil himself.

Gearing Up

2009-08-16T12:42:00.000-04:00

We are gearing up for 2009-2010. Hallie and I rehearsed for our first concert which will be a multi disciplinary performance at Tricia Postle's Majlis Arts with dancer Gauri Vanarese and poet Camille Martin. We had a preliminary get together on Friday. We'll be performing some of Camille's poems to 16th and 17th century melodic formulae like Ciacona, Folia etc. and accompanying some dance with the same. Here are a couple of snaps of the preliminary rehearsal which will give you an idea of the space too.

We are also preparing for a show at CUNY Grad Center in NY in early September. More on that tomorrow.

2009-05-01T20:39:00.000-04:00

Here's the program and the notes.
Maria Cortegiano
Ricercar Franciscus Bossinensis (fl 1509)
Se non dormi donna ascolta Anon.
Ricercar Bossinensis
O passi sparsi Sebastiano Festa (d. 1524)
Ricercar Bossinensis
Piango el mio fidel servire Anon.
Ricercar Bossinensis
O dolce diva mia Peregrinus Cesena (fl 1510-20)

Tullia d'Aragona c. 1510-56
Varchi il cui raro
Fantasias (Nos. 5,6 &7) Francesco da Milano (1497-1543)
S'io'l feci unqua

Franceschina Bellamano
Donna se 'l cor Ippolito Tromboncino (fl 1540-60s)
Vostra belta si bella Tromboncino
Io moro Tromboncino
Se voi dolc'et pietosi Tromboncino

Intermission

Gaspara Stampa 1523-1554
Amor, lo stato tuo e proprio quale After Vincenzo Galilei (c. 1520-91)
El Pass'e Mezo – Gagliarda La Gasparina Giulio Abondante (fl1546 -1587)

Veronica Franco 1546-1591
Fors’anco Amor Cosimo Bottegari (1564-1620)

Lucia di Filippo Gagnolanti d. 1593
Romanesca Galilei
Torna deh torna Giulio Caccini (c1550–1618)
Fantasia Anon.
Fillide mia Caccini
Fantasia Anon.
Amarilli Caccini
Dalla porta d’oriente Caccini

If an aristocrat in Renaissance Italy were very liberal minded, he might let his wife embroider a pillow to place on the window sill to cushion her elbow while she watched the goings-on in the street. Wives were seldom anywhere unchaperoned and their lives were largely cloisetered.

The courtesan, on the other hand, was free to roam both amorously and intellectually. The ‘cortegiano honeste’ was musician, poet and muse. She didn’t have a price list and customers, she had ‘friends’ who gave her ‘gifts’. Pietro Aretino, a satirist who knew a thing or two about courtesans, tells us that musical instruments and musical hangers-on were among the most important things for the aspiring courtesan to acquire. In one of Aretino’s dialogues Nanna, an old pro, tells Pippa, her protégé, ‘Ask this man for a lute, another for a harpsichord, this man for a viola and that for a lira. Then get the maestri to come and teach you music, getting them to play for you for nothing, paying them with hopes and promises.’

What we know about Maria the courtesan’s repertoire comes from a manuscript of poetry collected by a Domenico Arrighi. He seems to have been quite smitten by Maria, a Roman who moved to Florence. Many of the poems have notes saying that she sang this one or that and these rubrics are often more effusive: ‘This song was her favorite, and she sang it so well that everyone would fall in love with her on hearing her sing it so beautifully.’ We have intabluated the tenor and bass parts of Se non dormi, Piango and O dolce diva for lute since this was the most common mode of performance for the frottola. O passi sparsi is from an English arrangement of Festa’s frottola which is the most famous setting of Petrarch’s text.

Hardly any music survives for the lira da braccio, an instrument which was used to accompany quasi-improvised solo recitation-song in the 15th and 16th century. Hallie reconstructs such a performance from such sources as do survive to perform poems by the most celebrated of the courtesan poets, Tullia. As well as her sonnets, which include many to lovers and patrons like Varchi, she published a philosophic Dialogue on the Infinity of Love from which this concert takes its name. Who better to write on the subject than a professional?

Pietro Aretino was an avid letter writer, and published collections of them. One letter invites the greatest singing teacher of Renaissance Venice, Ippolito Tromboncino, to dinner, saying that the courtesan, and Ippolito’s student, Francheschina will be there, as will the great painter Titian. A painting of Titian’s shows a disinterested Venus staring off into the distance as a lute player serenades her longingly. Could this be Ippolito and Franceschina? He certainly looks as if he will be rewarded with nothing but ‘hopes and promises’.

The performance of poetic forms to stock melodic and chord changes was perhaps the most common form of song in our period. We perform Gaspara’s sonnet to a formula which fits all sonnets and uses the Folia chord changes. The lute chords are notated in rudimentary notation in the hand of Vincenzo Galilei, though we obtain the melody other sources. We sing a passage from one of Veronica’s long terza rime to a textless ‘aria’ for that poetic form from Cosimo Bottegari’s lute song book. We have also sung passages from Dante’s Inferno to the same tune, since any terza rima can be performed to it.

But it’s not clear who was a courtesan. Gaspara was of noble birth, but her family was broke. She had several lovers who gave her ‘gifts’. Lucia was a singer at the Medici court. When there was some doubt about the potency of a noble who was about to marry a Medici daughter Lucia was sent to Venice (what happens in Venice stays in Venice) with the man in question. When she became pregnant the test was passed and he wed the Medici. Lucia was married to singer and composer Giulio Caccini, who received a dowry of several times his annual salary, paid by Ferdinand de Medici. Sleeping with the boss’ future son-in-law in exchange for a huge cash payment for your household would seem to be far beyond the normal duties of a singer. The edges of courtesanship were quite blurry in the 16th century. We might be more certain saying courtesans were independent women, accomplished poets and musicians than women who took money for sex.

2009-04-04T14:15:00.000-04:00

Hallie and I were working on choosing music for the upcoming courtesan concert. I think we've settled on:

Songs from a poetry manuscript collected in the beginning of the 16th c. The collector, Domenico Arrighi has written beside the poems of Maria Cortigiana 'This song was her favorite, and she sang it so well that everyone would fall in love with her on hearing her sing it so beautifully.’etc. I'll intabulate some of the frottolas that Arrighi says she sang. This set is after an article by William Prizer.

Songs by Ippolito Tromboncino. He, a courtesan called Francesca Bellamano, Titian and Aretino used to hang out together. Tromboncino also was Francesca's singing teacher. Aretino has Nanna (an old courtesan) say to Pippa (new at the job) 'Then get the maestri to come and teach you music, getting them to play for you for nothing, paying them with hopes and promises.’ David Nutter suggests the Titan above is of Ippolito singing to Francesca; the body language suggests he's not going to get more than hope tonight, I think.

Songs sung (and played) by Hallie to the lira da braccio to melodic formulas, with poems by Tullia d'Aragona. She wrote many sonnets and the Dialogue on the Infinity of Love after which the concert is named.

Texts by Veronica Franco sung to textless songs in the Bottegari lute book. There are tunes you can plug any terza rima into, sonnets into etc.

Music by Giulio Caccini. He was given a dowry of several times his annual salary to marry the soprano Lucia di Filippo Gagnolanti, who he worked with at the Medici court. According to Timothy Mc Gee, the Medici family wanted to make sure that a Gonzaga family member was not 'shooting blanks', since he had been married before with no issue, before he married their daughter. Lucia, the future Mrs. Caccini, was sent off to Venice to test this out. She came back pregnant. I don't know whether your household getting a massive chunk of money for your sleeping with the boss's future son-in-law passes the definition of courtesan, but the line between 'female singer' and 'courtesan' was pretty fine.

I think I'll play some Francesco da Milano. He worked for Pope Leo X who was a big supporter of the courtesans. And I think I'll play some dances: Thomas Morely says 'The Italians make their Galliards (which they term Saltarelli) plain .... they have courtesans disguised in men's apparel who sing and dance to their own songs.'

2009-03-07T13:26:00.000-05:00

Yesterday The Musicians In Ordinary did an 'informance' at U of Toronto's Scarborough Campus. The repertoire was songs and solos associated with Philip Sidney and the Earl of Essex. Talked some about who really wrote the 'Essex' poems (himself or his employees Henry Cuff and Francis Bacon?) and Sidney's Astrophel and Stella and The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia. Prof. Katie Larson was the point man on setting this up. Here are some pics:

Hallie remembers to turn off her cellphone.

Hallie fills out the release form for our picture being taken.

Snacks at the reception afterwards.

But the real reason we wanted to go to Scarborough, St. Andrew's Scottish fish and chips shop on McCowan and Ellesmere. That's deep fried mealy pudding in the top left of my plate.

2009-03-04T09:54:00.000-05:00

Here's a snap from last week's concert. It was great fun.

And here's the program:

Fair cruell nymph Alfonso Ferrabosco II (1572-1628)
❀
Songs on Flowers
Go lovely rose William Lawes (1602-45)
To Pansies - Ah! cruel love W. Lawes
On the Marigold - Mark how the blushful morn Henry Lawes (1596-1662)
On the Lillys - White though ye be W. Lawes
To the Sicamour - I’m sick of Love Nicholas Lanier (1588-1666)
Gather ye rosebuds W. Lawes
❀
Loves Constancy - No more may meads Lanier
Now in the sad declension of our time W. Lawes
Be not proud pretty one W. Lawes
❀
Hero’s Complaint to Leander Lanier
❀
Coranto René Saman (fl 1610-31)
Coranto (Jacques?) Gaultier (fl.1617-60)

Intermission

Songs from Plays
Tell me dearest Robert Johnson (1582-1633)
So beautie on the waters stood - Had those that dwell in error - If all the ages of the earth Ferrabosco
The Cutpurse Song - I keep my horse W. Lawes
Care charming sleep Johnson
Full fathom five - Where the bee sucks Johnson
❀
Fuggi fuggi fuggi Anon.
Tavola - In quel gelato core H. Lawes
❀
Pavan Johnson
❀
Woe’s me! Alas Robert Ramsey (fl. 1612-1644)

Darryl Edwards, tenor, has appeared to critical acclaim in oratorio, recital, and opera in England, Germany, France, Italy, Corsica, the United States, and across Canada. His recent and upcoming engagements include Kodály's Psalmus Hungaricus with the National Arts Centre Orchestra in Ottawa, the Verdi Requiem at Dalhousie University, Orff's Carmina Burana with the Toronto Mendelssohn Choir, Mozart Requiem with the Toronto Philharmonia, and Handel's Messiah with the Elmer Iseler Singers. Critics praise him as a ‘rich-voiced, cultured tenor who mastered the high notes effortlessly’ (Coburg Tageblatt, Germany), and an ‘effective communicator who expressed the text with sensitivity and fervour’ (Hamilton Spectator). His recordings and broadcasts include performances with National Public Radio, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and the Canadian Music Centre (Centrediscs). He is the Artistic Director of the Centre for Opera in Sulmona, Italy and the Concert Opera Group.

Named after the singers and lutenists who performed in the most intimate quarters of the Stuart monarchs’ palace, The Musicians In Ordinary for the Lutes and Voices dedicate themselves to the performance of early solo song and vocal chamber music. Soprano Hallie Fishel and lutenist John Edwards have been described as ‘winning performers of winning music’. Now in their seventh season of concerts in Toronto, they perform across North America and lecture regularly at universities and museums. Institutions where MIO have performed include the Canadian Society for Renaissance Studies, Grinnell College, the Universities of Alberta and Toronto, the Kingston Opera Guild, Trent and York Universities and the Bata Shoe Museum. They have been Ensemble in Residence at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania. Their debut CD of Elizabethan and Jacobean songs, Sleep Wayward Thoughts, is available at intermission.

Fair, Cruel Nymph
‘Wilson! There’s more words, let’s hear them all.’ King Charles I so ordered the singer John Wilson during a performance. This not only shows that the King was paying attention, but that he appreciated the disservice that Wilson was doing to the poet by leaving verses unsung.

And the delivery of the poetry had become the most important aspect of songwriting as England imported the new Italian Baroque style at the beginning of the 17th century. The complicated polyphony that the lute song composers of the John Dowland generation was gone, replaced by a bass from which the lutenist improvised chords. For this new style the English also imported the theorbo, a lute that had been invented by the Italians to provide a big bass sound. Inigo Jones, architect and designer of the sets for the court masque, is supposed to have imported the first theorbo. According to a contemporary diarist the weird instrument’s owner was interrogated by the authorities, who thought it might be ‘a machine brought from popish countries to destroy the king’. Indeed, Italian fashions dominated the vocal music of the post-Dowland generation so much that Henry Lawes set the table of contents from an Italian songbook to mock those who sang in Italian without understanding what they were singing.

The English Civil War stopped the slide to absolutism that became the political hallmark of 17th century France. If it hadn’t who’s to say that the heroic declamation of the masque, where the aristocrats assured themselves that they were rightly at the head of the body politic, and even that James’s Queen Anne was greater than Elizabeth, would not have combined with the drama of dialogues like Woe’s me to become court opera like that cultivated by Louis XIV and Lully? It’s moot though; The English were not going to stand for a despot, however benevolent, and the masque, baroque court music and the tradition of the Shakesperean theatre were all cut off by the Commonwealth. Perhaps the theorbo, which was used in these genres, did contribute to the destruction of King Charles, then.