SERENISSIMA
map of Venice (panel; detail), first half of 17th c. / Museo
Correr, Venice, Italy / Bridgeman Images Rose Consort of Viols photography: Jim Poyner
Design: Drew Padrutt
Booklet editor: John Fallas
Delphian Records Ltd – Edinburgh – UK www.delphianrecords.co.uk
Rose Consort of Viols
John Bryan, Alison Crum, Andrew Kerr, Roy Marks, Susanna Pell
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16 Claude Le Jeune (c.1530–1600) Première Fantasie [6:41] 17 Tylman Susato (c.1510–1570) Doulce mémoire a
Pierre Sandrin (c.1490–c.1560) Doulce mémoire [3:04] embellished by Diego Ortiz (Tratado de glosas, Rome, 1551)
Cipriano
Christopher Tye (c.1505–1572/73) In Nomine ‘Howld fast’ [1:19]
Philip van Wilder
The Rose Consort of Viols would like to thank the following organisations and individuals who made this CD possible: the National Centre for Early Music, the University of Huddersfield, Andrew Fowler, Linda Hill, Judith Morgan, Mitch Phillips, and above all, Richard and Vivien Jones.
The years around 1500 witnessed an explosion of innovative musical ideas and resources that became the very essence of Renaissance music-making, sweeping across European borders as composers and performers moved from patron to patron. One particularly significant concept was the development of instrumental ensemble music in which all the parts bore an equal weight, and of families of instruments of the same type (such as viols, violins, recorders or crumhorns) but varied sizes to play it. The repertory for these instrumental consorts initially owed much to the vocal ensembles that they imitated, and throughout the sixteenth century there is a wealth of evidence of vocal material being adapted to instrumental performance – the playing of ‘songs without words’, or new pieces based on older vocal originals – as well as of dance music being written or arranged for ensemble.
Much of this activity appears to have started in the rival courts and cities of Italy in the last years of the fifteenth century. None of these was more important than Venice, known as the Most Serene Republic – la Serenissima. This was a fiercely independent city, a crucible in which experimentation led to the first printing of music as well as the development of viols such as those made by Francesco Linarol. Venice was also a magnet for musicians of many different nations, mingling there to exchange new ideas and creating the rich variety of musical styles which we have
explored here using Richard Jones’s copies of those surviving Venetian instruments.
The music on this disc, then, is truly panEuropean. Composers, instruments and manuscripts crossed geographical borders throughout the sixteenth century, and it is almost impossible to locate much of their work in any specific place. Henricus Isaac, for instance – originally from Brabant in the south Netherlands – spent much of his working life in Florence under the Medici, and then in Vienna as court composer to the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I. Palle, palle was composed to honour his Medici patrons, incorporating the five red ‘balls’ and three silver fleurs de lys of their shield by representing them in the long notes of the tenor’s thrice-repeated phrases, while we know from contemporary reports that La my la sol was written in just two days when Isaac was visiting the d’Este court in Ferrara in 1502. The tenor part here is based on two different permutations of the four notes of the hexachord encapsulated in the piece’s title, doubling in speed at each repetition until they link up seamlessly with the free-flowing conversation of the rest of the consort.
Composing new counterpoint around a pre-existent slow melody, or cantus firmus, was a common technique shared by much early Renaissance music, both vocal and instrumental. Costanzo Festa, a singer in the Sistine Chapel and one of the first important
native Italian composers of sixteenth-century polyphony, wrote 125 contrapuncti in two to eleven parts, all based on the famous basse danse tenor ‘La Spagna’. Despite their shared tenor part, these pieces show a remarkable range of styles, from the richly flowing five-part writing, mostly based on rising scale patterns, of Centesima Terza, or the energetic triple time cross-rhythms of Settuagesima Settima, to the spacious texture of Nonagesima Terza, where ‘La Spagna’ is ingeniously interwoven with the plainsong melody of the hymn ‘Ave maris stella’.
Some of the most influential early madrigals were written not by an Italian, but by the French composer Philippe Verdelot, who was working in Florence by the early 1520s and whose output attracted widespread attention through several printed collections in the following decade. Altro non è’l mio amore was published in Venice in 1538, and since its setting of the text is less closely allied to the music than was the case in the works of later Italian madrigalists, its resonant sonorities lend themselves well to performance on viols. Dance music in sixteenth-century Italy established two principal forms as favourites – the stately stylised walking steps of the duple-time pavan, usually followed by a faster triple-time galliard that encouraged young men to show their heels in sprightly leaps. These dance idioms, and music for them, also swept across Europe: the examples here – La morte de la ragione, La manfrolina and La traditora – probably
date from around 1530, and come from a set of Italian manuscript partbooks which are now held in the British Library, having possibly arrived in England with Henry FitzAlan, 19th Earl of Arundel, after a journey he made to Italy in 1567. Such journeys of cultural exploration, made in the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods by those who could afford them, might be seen as precursors to the ‘Grand Tour’ which socially aspiring young men made from the middle of the following century onwards, always taking in Venice, Rome and usually also other leading Italian, German and French centres of musical and artistic innovation.
Orlande de Lassus was the pan-European composer par excellence, born in Mons, singing in Naples and Rome before gaining his appointment in the chapel of the Duke of Bavaria in Munich. He set texts in Latin, Italian, French and German, all with equal felicity, and in Munich worked in a lavishly funded court. There is a reference in Munich court records to six large viols made by the Bassanos, a family originally from Venice who had settled in London in 1540: these might well have been similar to those made by Linarol. With its rich seam of polyphony, Lassus’s music is well suited to such a consort, whether playing a motet such as O sacrum convivium, based on a plainsong melody, or the rumbustious German Lied Im Mayen, where the lusty cries of ‘Ich kumm, ich kumm, ich kumm’ are not too difficult to hear, even without singers.
Isaac’s later career, too, was divided between his Italian bases and employment for the Emperor Maximilian in Vienna, Augsburg and Innsbruck. Somewhere he came across the beautiful melody of Ich stund an einem Morgen, and created the perfectly poised setting in four-part counterpoint heard here. Two settings of the same melody by Isaac’s student and successor, Ludwig Senfl, demonstrate the younger man’s extraordinary compositional virtuosity. Senfl places the tune in the lowest part of his threevoice version, initially in doubled note lengths and then at normal speed. Above this, two higher parts weave a filigree of counterpoint, some of which takes melodic elements from the main tune. In the four-part setting, three parts share the tune’s melodic arches: treble and bass doubled at the tenth, the tenor syncopated against them, alternately a beat ahead or behind, while the remaining part wanders in and out of the texture with little decorative flourishes.
Senfl’s ability to fabricate stunningly original pieces from existing material is also demonstrated in Fortuna ad voces musicales. This uses the tenor of the widely disseminated Italian song ‘Fortuna desperata’ (often attributed to Antoine Busnois) for its own tenor part, while Senfl’s superius part is cleverly fabricated out of the notes of the Renaissance six-note scale or hexachord: the ‘voces musicales’ of the title. The remaining altus and bassus parts revel in their freedom with playful dotted rhythms, occasional triplets and plenty of scurrying figuration.
The reworking by different composers of each other’s music was commonplace in sixteenthcentury Europe: imitation was then definitely seen as a sincere form of flattery, as well as a way of demonstrating a composer’s abilities to manipulate another’s material in novel and artistic ways. Pierre Sandrin’s chanson Doulce mémoire, setting a text attributed to François I, was first published in Paris in 1538, but by 1544 the Antwerp-based arranger Tylman Susato had brought out a clever version that combined Sandrin’s tune with two new lower parts, one of which could be omitted if you wished (useful if the bass player failed to arrive!). In 1551 the Spanish viol player Diego Ortiz published in Rome a decorated setting of Sandrin’s original chanson, to show players how they might improvise upon this by now world-famous piece. Cipriano de Rore was another Flemish composer whose career was made south of the Alps, mostly working at the d’Este court in Ferrara where, a decade before de Rore’s birth, Isaac had written ‘La my la sol’. De Rore’s five-part mass based on ‘Doulce mémoire’ was published in Venice in 1566. The Kyrie uses elements from Sandrin’s chanson (sometimes the top part, but also the tenor line) and subtly reconstructs them in different ways, so that the listener is aware of the original being refracted and imbued with new life.
While viol consorts continued to play music originally intended for voices, they were also exploring new forms devised specially for instrumental performance, some of which took
imitative counterpoint to great lengths. Claude Le Jeune’s Première Fantasie, one of three published posthumously in 1612, consists of a series of overlapping ‘points’ of imitation, gently varied in mood through increasingly complex rhythms and ending with a final section in tripla. There are some interesting harmonic excursions too: with viols tuned in quarter-comma meantone (in which home ‘keys’ are tuned more purely than remote ones), this can lead to a real sense of having journeyed from one tonal centre to another.
Viols reached England in the reign of Henry VIII, Isaac’s ‘La my la sol’ being copied into a manuscript that also includes several of the King’s own compositions. The real growth in the instruments’ popularity seems to have followed the arrival of a number of Italian viol players in 1540, several of whom established families that succeeded them in filling many of the posts in the royal music for decades afterwards. They came from Venice, and may well have brought Linarol-type viols with them. Little of their music survives, though the Pavan and Galliard by Augustine Bassano, a member of the second generation of the immigrant family, might give us some indication. This is fundamentally functional dance music, with a clear melodic line, relatively simple harmony and just enough counterpoint to keep everyone on their toes. The Galliard is ‘made out of’ the Pavan, as Thomas Morley described it in 1597: much of the pavan’s material is reused, but
is converted into triple metre. Dance music remained popular throughout the sixteenth century, and the Pavana, Gallyard, Ronda and La Represa included here come from a set of manuscript partbooks collected for use by Lord Lumley in the 1560s or 1570s. By 1599 the Elizabethan courtier Antony Holborne felt there was a sufficiently large market to publish his collection of Pavans, Galliards, Almains, and other short Aeirs that he says are intended as much for ‘refined eares’ as for physical dancing. His Pavan and Galliard provide wonderful examples of true chamber music, with an equality of interest in all five parts and beautifully controlled pacing of the music’s unfolding fabric, showing considerable artistry and ingenuity in their composition.
The In Nomine, in which one part holds the Sarum plainsong ‘Gloria tibi Trinitas’ in slow notes while the other instruments weave delicately around it, was a peculiarly English phenomenon that had a lifespan of over 150 years, with contributions from most of the leading composers from John Taverner in the 1520s through to Henry Purcell in the 1680s. Osbert Parsley’s four-part setting places the cantus firmus low down in the texture, creating a mysteriously brooding piece that is in stark contrast to Christopher Tye’s invigorating ‘Howld fast’. This latter is an unusual instance of the genre, not only being in triple time, but also incorporating a section just before the end where each part has its own independent
Notes on the music rhythmic pattern. Tye’s title is good advice to the players, since everything does fall into place eventually.
For Thomas Morley, writing in 1597, the most principal and chiefest kind of music which is made without a ditty is the Fantasy, that is when a musician taketh a point at his pleasure and wresteth and turneth it as he list, making either much or little of it according as shall seem best in his own conceit.
This description applies equally to a tiny gem like William Byrd’s Fantasia of three parts, and to a rather earlier four-part piece by the Flemish composer Philip van Wilder, whose musical career was almost entirely based in England. His Fantasia con pause e senza pause skilfully uses the same notes twice over, but the first time intersperses longer rests, judiciously creating a sparer texture than in the more condensed version ‘without rests’. The wonderfully melancholic five-part A Song of Mr Robert Parsons is a fantasia in all but name. It survives in a manuscript copied in ‘table-book’ format, with each part facing outwards on a different side of the open book. In convivial surroundings the players sat around the table each playing their own part, enjoying the exchange of short phrases shared between them and the sweet bitterness of the dissonances created in passing.
©
2014 John Bryan
Richard Jones on making the Linarol viols
I have been making things out of wood in workshops since I was four years old. I was fourteen when I made my first guitar (which still hangs in our stairwell), and I made several more in the intervening years between training in cabinet-making at Loughborough and establishing and running a traditional woodworking workshop in a private school in Scotland. This is where I fell in love with early music. My first Linarol viol was the third viol I made, having adapted a kit from The Early Music Shop for the first one, and concocted my own idea of what a Renaissance viol might be for the second. By then I had learnt about the Francesco Linarol viol (c.1540, currently held in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna). I read the article on Venetian viols of the sixteenth century by Martin Edmunds in the Galpin Society Journal (Vol. XXXIII, March 1980) that described the instrument in great detail, with drawings. And so I embarked upon my Linarol.
I have often been asked if I had a sound ideal in mind for the instruments. I wanted more than anything to hear what sound that combination of materials and form would make if I made as near a copy as I could of the one extant viol by Francesco Linarol, the earliest viol surviving from the sixteenth century. Working from the information provided by Martin Edmunds, I made my first ‘copy’ in 1986. It wasn’t so important to me that I could predict the sound the instrument would make (though I have
come to love their incisiveness, resonance and warmth), but that I might hear something that was far removed from the string-quartet aspirations that some viol players entertained at the time. I did not believe that the viol that Bach wrote for in the eighteenth century was the same instrument that John Jenkins wrote for in the seventeenth century or that Philip van Wilder wrote for in the early sixteenth century. And I wanted to make a response to Michael Morrow’s comment in Early Music (Vol. 2 No. 3, July 1974) that: ‘Most modern viol players … are all too cheerfully complacent. All they ask for is an all-purpose viol, an all-purpose technique, and an all-purpose style.’
All the viols on this recording are based on the single surviving original by Francesco Linarol. This instrument is in a largely unaltered state, and so makes an excellent model for modern reconstructions. Its construction bears more resemblance to the guitar than to later viols. The soundboard is first planed flat, then bent into a barrel shape, and supported by two transverse bars. There is no sign of it ever having had a sound post. With a string length of around 550mm, a reconstruction of this instrument works well as a tenor viol, and this is the basis of my reconstructions. By then scaling up, and down, from this model, I have designed a set of viols which accord to sizes of instruments in use in the sixteenth century. The set on this recording comprises (using the modern terminology) a treble in D, tenors
in A and G, basses in D and a great bass in A. They are all strung in gut throughout, and work at a relatively low tension.
I am delighted that the debate about exactly which instruments played which lines of early sixteenth-century music is ongoing and lively – I look forward to being asked to produce instruments in other tunings to meet with current researches. Currently my expanded researches include an updated drawing of the Linarol by Benoit Gervaise and a collection of photographs taken by David Hatcher and Alan Crumpler on a recent visit to the museum in Vienna, and I am learning and refining all the time from the instruments as I make them. I am currently making number sixty-nine.
Richard Jones, March 2014
The Rose Consort of Viols takes its name from the celebrated family of viol-makers, whose work spanned the growth and flowering of the English consort repertory. The Consort performs extensively throughout the UK and Europe, appears regularly on the BBC and in the major London concert halls, and has also featured at festivals in Canada and the USA, and as a guest ensemble at the PanPacific Gamba Gathering in Hawaii. Concerts have included guest soloists such as sopranos
Emma Kirkby and Ellen Hargis, mezzosopranos Catherine King and Clare Wilkinson, the vocal groups Red Byrd, Stile Antico and the BBC Singers, lutenists Jacob Heringman, Jakob Lindberg and Christopher Wilson, and keyboard player Timothy Roberts.
The Rose Consort has received awards for its research and performance of newly devised programmes, and has recently been
investigating some of the earliest viol consort repertory using instruments modelled on those painted by Lorenzo Costa in 1497.
The Rose Consort has made a number of highly acclaimed recordings for Naxos, cpo and Deux-Elles, and most recently An Emerald in a Work of Gold, a CD for Delphian of music by Byrd and his contemporaries in collaboration with The Marian Consort. Recent engagements have included performances at the BBC Proms Matinees at Cadogan Hall with vocal ensemble Tenebrae, at the National Gallery in London, and for Semana de Musica Religiosa in Cuenca, Spain. Members of the Rose Consort of Viols are in demand as tutors on courses throughout the world, including those at Little Benslow Hills and Dartington International Summer School.
www.roseconsort.co.uk
Rose Consort of Viols
(l to r) Andrew Kerr, Roy Marks, Richard Jones, Alison Crum, John Bryan
An Emerald in a Work of Gold: Music from the Dow Partbooks
The Marian Consort; Rose Consort of Viols
DCD34115
For their second Delphian recording, The Marian Consort have leafed through the beautifully calligraphed pages of the partbooks compiled in Oxford between 1581 and 1588 by the Elizabethan scholar Robert Dow. Sumptuous motets, melancholy consort songs and intricate, harmonically daring viol fantasies are seamlessly interwoven – all brought to life by seven voices and the robust plangency of the Rose Consort of Viols in the chapel of All Souls College, Oxford, where Dow himself was once a Fellow.
‘cleanly and calmly delivered … The concluding Ave Maria by Robert Parsons is superb, the final “Amen” attaining to genuine emotion but without the saccharine reverence that this much-recorded piece can attract’
– Gramophone, February 2013
Music from the Age of Louis XIV
John Kitchen harpsichord
DCD34109
John Kitchen continues his much-lauded series of recordings of the world-famous keyboard collections in St Cecilia’s Hall with a programme specially designed to highlight the unique qualities of the 1755 doublemanual harpsichord by Luigi Baillon. Built in Cyteux, Burgundy, it has a very different sound from Parisian instruments of the time: cleaner and brighter in tone, and the perfect vehicle for Kitchen’s subtly nuanced playing, which brings the sophistication of the period to new life. The familiarity born of Kitchen’s daily experience with the Edinburgh collections and their setting shines through these performances.
‘Vividly alert to the widest range of styles and moods … a delight from start to finish. The instrument sounds superb, especially in the dashing dance movements, and Delphian’s recording is typically clear and warm’
– Classical Music Magazine, August 2013
Remember me my deir: Jacobean songs of love and loss Fires of Love
DCD34129
Scottish troubadours Fires of Love follow in the footsteps of King James VI on a varied journey through song and instrumental music – deftly weaving their way through Scotland’s rich tapestry of historic manuscripts to unveil attractive unsophisticated melodies, often heavily imbued with the French style, before travelling south to London, where James and his musicians would have been taken aback by the highly active theatre scene. As the Scots courtier-musicians nimbly traded French influence for London’s ‘Englished’ Italian style, one wonders: did they regretfully look homewards?
‘Remember me, my deir …’
‘gentle, intimate and beguiling … [Frances] Cooper’s soprano catches the ear like gilded thread against the woven instrumental textures’ – Gramophone, March 2014
La Royalle: Music for Kings & Courtiers
Gordon Ferries guitars, lute & theorbo
DCD34111
Performed on four instruments matched to the periods in question, and captured in sumptuous recorded sound, Gordon Ferries’s solo recital spans two centuries of music with royal connections – from the chansons and elegant counterpoint of sixteenth-century France’s cultivated humanist courts and the exquisitely melancholy dance-forms heard in the private chambers of Versailles, to the extraordinary place of guitar music in the decadence, sexual intrigue and Baroque splendour of Restoration England.
The Italian-born composer and guitarist Francesco Corbetta (1615–1681) served both Charles II and his cousin Louis XIV, and his music provides a common thread.
‘subtle, rich and probing … The disc is beautifully produced’ – International Record Review, February 2013