Early Music of 14th and 15th Century
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Sacred Songs and Folk Music from Renaissance Germany No fifteenth-century wedding, civic ceremony, feast day, or royal joyeux entree would have been...
Sacred Songs and Folk Music from Renaissance Germany
No fifteenth-century wedding, civic ceremony, feast
day, or royal joyeux entree would have been complete
without the sound of the alta capella, or "high choir."
The term referred not to singers, but to the loud voices
of shawms, trumpets or trombones. The players
performed vocal music, dances, and improvised
counterpoint, much like jazz musicians of today.
Testimony to the high reputation of alta capella players
lies in figures like the shawm player Conrado Piffaro
d'Alemania, who was for decades one of the highest
paid men at the Ferrara court. His name betrays both his
profession and a shared origin with his companions:
most instrumentalists came from Northern Europe. On
their way to Italy, they passed through Austria and
Germany, sharing compositions, styles and techniques
along the way.
Famous for their improvisatory skills, little of their
music survives in writing. In order to capture the
repertory and sound of these players at the crossroads of
their journey, Ciaramella has turned to major German
sources of polyphony from the end of the fifteenth
century. Masses, motets, and songs preserved in the
manuscript sources Munich 3154 (The Leopold
Codex)*, Berlin 40021**, and Leipzig 1494 (the Apel
Codex)*** reflect the courtly wealth of Sigismond of
Tyrol and the Emperor Maximilian I of Austria, and the
growing artistic culture in cities like Nuremberg and
Innsbruck. Intabulated keyboard manuscripts like the
Buxheimer Orgelbuch and Kleber Orgeltabulatur
offer further glimpses into the rich tradition of
embellished song.
During the 1420s, composers experimented with a
style of composition in which two equal Cantus voices
join in fugal imitation over slower moving Tenors. This
"double discantus" technique in Nicolaus Grenon's
Christmas motet Nova vobis gaudia, would be
supplanted by the Tenor/Cantus framework exemplified
in Guillaume Dufay's three-voice chanson Se la face ay
pale, which served as the model for several ornate organ
intabulations and with an added voice reflecting later
fifteenth-century tastes.
Members of the alta capella also performed on bas
instruments like the recorder. Numerous trios surviving
in sources were both sung and performed as
instrumental fantasias. Only its lack of words separates
the textless Trio from works like the motet Gaude,
virgo, mater Jesu Christe. It is tempting to attribute both
to the same composer, one who displays the highest
compositional skill.
During my dissertation research, I recognized an
unnamed anonymous Mass to be based on a famous
French chanson. Although this Missa Je ne fays plus
bears no title or attribution in Munich 3154, it is
certainly the same Mass referred to in 1539 by Giovanni
Spataro as the work of Heinrich Isaac. The Kyrie and
Gloria, with florid redictae (short repeated motives)
typify Isaac's early style and stand out as the type of
Mass section often adopted by instruments. This
instrumental performance of two movements announces
the "rediscovery" of this lost masterpiece.
Composers clothed liturgical chants with new text
and intricate polyphony. The motet O plebs quae Deum
amas adopts as cantus firmus a chant with the funeral
text "Requiem in pacem, dona nobis eum" in a
surprisingly triumphant polyphonic setting. Alma
chorus surrounds the music of O du armer Judas. This
Good Friday leyson--a sacred text ending with the
words Kyrie eleison--would inspire a later five-part
setting by the great composer Ludwig Senfl.
Like wind players, church organists performed
secular songs. Een vroylic wesen ornaments Jacques
Barbireau's Flemish love song, a favourite model for
reworking in both song and Mass. Sometimes the
identity of a song is obscured, as in the Kleber
Orgeltabulatur, for example, where the strange name
Philephos aves corrupts the original French words Fille
vous avez mal garde, revealing its origin in an amorous
French song composed by Heinrich Isaac.
Manuscripts of sacred music preserve secular songs
with sacred Latin texts. Adam von Fulda's O Jupiter /
O diva sollers virgo blends secular German text of a
Tenorlied with a Latin hymn text, performed here on
sixteen-foot recorder consort. Komm Heiliger Geist
paraphrases the famous Latin hymn for Corpus Christi,
Veni Sancte Spritus. Although this famous melody is
ascribed to Martin Luther, he seems to have merely
altered the words found in the earliest surviving
versions preserved in Munich 3154. Little is known
about the composer Johannes Beham, who displays
consummate mastery and a keen interest in subtle
chromaticism. Sancta Maria wohn uns bei also appears
as a hymn whose opening words Luther would change
(now known as Gott der Vater, wohn uns bei) once
again earning credit for an existing song. Our
performance presents the anonymous monophonic
melody, a simple duo, and adds a voice to the existing
three-voice version. In arranging these hymns, we have
imagined a small choir of angels in a miniature chapel,
after the intricate wood carving of contemporary censers
and reliquaries.
Concealed within the intricate polyphony and florid
ornamentation of these sources lie some of the simplest
and most popular songs of the day. Because many of
these songs survive with only fragmentary texts, the
earliest literary sources aid in recovering the song. In the
absence of a single complete original text, we attempt to
recreate something like one of the many versions that
existed within a rich and evolving song tradition, in the
spirit of something the great poetry scholar Paul
Zumthor referred to as mouvance: traditional tunes have
no fixed authoritative version, but consist of families
with numerous fluid variants.
In complement to the polyphonic setting of the song
Mein Herz in hohen Freuden ist in Munich 3154,
Douglas Milliken's arrangement explores techniques
that might have been adopted by the perennial
combination of bagpipe and shawms. In symbolizing the
rustic and carnal nature of humble shepherds, bagpipes
attend the pastourelle genre that takes place in the
woods, where dark temptations to love and murder call
the strongest. Gespiele, liebe Gespiele güt invokes a
time-honoured tradition of two sisters in rivalry over the
same lover. It seldom ends well: often one sister meets
fate through treachery or in a watery death. Often, the
narrator is the voyeuristic lover himself who, listening
to the girls, wonders which to choose. Our arrangement
joins the earliest known tune with the same sixteenthcentury
text that Arnold Schoenberg would later set to
music.
The Latin-texted Invicto regi jubilo presents a
German song through the technique of migrating cantus
firmus, in which the melody travels through each voice.
One manuscript contains only the incipit Wer ich eyn
falck. The nineteenth-century poem collection Des
Knaben Wunderhorn contains a poem with the similar
text War ich ein wilder Falke set to an insipid melody,
but this later text does not scan metrically with its
earliest known music. The closest textual
correspondence we have found survives in a songbook
preserved in a Cistercian monastery. This version takes
the erotic intent of the secular text--about a lover's
desire to fly high above the city into his lover's room--
and transforms it to a song of spiritual longing. It is easy
to imagine these sentiments on the lips of one of the
many convents or lay sisterhoods that flourished
throughout Germanic lands. The trumpet fanfare on this
melody blends speculation about instrumental
capabilities with contemporary contrapuntal techniques.
Manuscripts from Dutch confraternities, German
hymnals, organ intabulations and settings by composers
like Adam von Fulda attest to the popularity of the
hymn Dies est laetitiae, also known as Der Tag, der ist
so freudenreich. Based on contemporary practices,
Ciaramella includes a newly composed duo for shawms
and adds a fifth voice to Fulda's florid setting, bringing
together versions for organ, voice, and instrumental
polyphony, in imitation of the angelic hosts illuminating
old manuscripts.
Adam Gilbert
Nova vobis gaudia (more info)
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Nova vobis gaudia - 2:21
Se la face ay pale (more info)
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Se la face ay pale - 1:18
Se la face ay pale (more info)
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Se la face ay pale - 2:29
Se la face ay pale (more info)
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Se la face ay pale - 1:36
Instrumental piece from D-Mbs Mus. Ms. 3154 (more info)
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Instrumental piece from D-Mbs Mus. Ms. 3154 - 1:42
Gaude, virgo, mater Jesu Christe (more info)
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Gaude, virgo, mater Jesu Christe - 1:58
Wer ich eyn falck / Invicto regi jubilo (more info)
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Wer ich eyn falck / Invicto regi jubilo - 4:55
Missa Je ne fay plus (excerpts) (more info)
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Kyrie - 2:41
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Gloria - 3:33
Fille, vous avez mal garde (more info)
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Fille, vous avez mal garde - 2:56
Alma chorus / O du arme Judas (more info)
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Alma chorus / O du arme Judas - 2:18
Mein Herz in hohen Freuden ist (more info)
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Mein Herz in hohen Freuden ist - 2:36
Gespiele, liebe Gespiele gut (arr. A. Gilbert) (more info)
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Gespiele, liebe Gespiele gut (arr. A. Gilbert) - 3:20
O plebs quae Deum amas (more info)
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O plebs quae Deum amas - 1:48
Een vroylic wesen (more info)
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Een vroylic wesen - 3:00
O Jupiter / O diva sollers virgo (more info)
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O Jupiter / O diva sollers virgo - 1:36
Sancta Maria wohn uns bei (more info)
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Sancta Maria wohn uns bei - 2:36
Komm Heiliger Geist (more info)
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Komm Heiliger Geist - 2:03
Komm Heiliger Geist (more info)
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Komm Heiliger Geist - 1:56
Komm Heiliger Geist (more info)
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Komm Heiliger Geist - 2:07
So steh ich hie auf dieser Erd (more info)
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So steh ich hie auf dieser Erd - 2:03
Uf dieser Erd (more info)
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Uf dieser Erd - 2:05
Mein Herz in hohen Freuden ist (arr. D. Milliken) (more info)
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Mein Herz in hohen Freuden ist (arr. D. Milliken) - 2:42
Fanfare Wer ich eyn falck (more info)
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Fanfare Wer ich eyn falck - 1:01
Dies est laetitiae (more info)
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Dies est laetitiae - 1:46
Dies est laetitiae (more info)
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Dies est laetitiae - 5:39
Pleni sunt caeli (more info)
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Pleni sunt caeli - 1:27