¡Cancionero!

Romances, Villancicos, & Improvisations of Spain, circa 1500

Morena me llaman  Avrix me galanica  LaSpagna  Recercada La Spagna  Danza Alta	Anonymous Sephardic  Anonymous Sephardic  Anonymous 15th c.  Diego Ortiz,Trattado de Glosas 1553  Francisco de la Torre, Cancionero de Palacio ca. 1505
¿Qu,es de ti, desconsolado?  Levanta, Pascual	Juan del Encina 1468-1529  Juan del Encina
Ora baila tú  Calabaça, No sé, buen amor	Anonymous, Cancionero de Palacio  Anonymous, Cancionero de Palacio
Con que la lavaré  Ríu, Ríu Chíu	Anonymous, Cancionero de Upsala 1556  Anonymous, Cancionero de
Intermission
La mañana de Sant Juan  Conde claros  Di, perra mora	Diego Pisador, Libro de musica de vihuela 1552  Luis de Narvaez, Los seys libros del Delphin de musica 1538  Pedro Guerrero, Cancionero Medinaceli, ca. 1569
Sagaleja del Casar  Cucú, Cucú, Cucucú	Anonymous, Cancionero de Palacio  Juan del Encina
Triste 'stava el rey David	Alonso Mudarra, Tres libros de musica en cifra para vihuela 1546
Yo me soy la morenica	Anonymous, Cancionero de Upsala 1556
Recercada primera  Recercada segunda	Diego Ortiz, Trattado de Glosas  Diego Ortiz, Trattado de Glosas
Una sañosa porfía  Ay, triste que vengo  Oy comamos y bebamos	Juan del Encina  Juan del Encina  Juan del Encina

 

THE BALTIMORE CONSORT

Mary Anne Ballard — treble, tenor, and bass viols
Mark Cudek — guitars, recorder, crumhorn, bass viol, percussion
José Lemos — countertenor
Larry Lipkis — tenor and bass viol, recorders, crumhorn
Ronn McFarlane — lute
Mindy Rosenfeld — flutes, recorders, crumhorn

 

Biographies of the Performers

Founded in 1980 to perform the instrumental music of Shakespeare's time, the Baltimore Consort has explored early English, Scottish, and French popular music, focusing on the relationship between folk and art song and dance. Their interest in early music of English/Scottish heritage has also led them to delve into the rich trove of traditional music preserved in North America. Recordings on the Dorian label have earned them recognition as Top Classical-Crossover Artist of the Year (Billboard), as well as rave reviews elsewhere.  Besides touring in the U.S. and abroad, they often perform on such syndicated radio broadcasts as St. Paul Sunday, Performance Today, Harmonia and the CBC's OnStage.

Mary Anne Ballard researches many of the Consort's programs. She also plays with Galileo's Daughters, Brio and the Oberlin Consort of Viols. Formerly, she directed or coached early music at the Peabody Conservatory, Princeton University, and the University of Pennsylvania, where she founded the Collegium Musicum. She is now on the faculty of the Oberlin's summer Baroque Performance Institute

Mark Cudek plays many early instruments and also appears with ensembles such as Hesperus, Apollo's Fire, and the Catacoustic Consort. In recognition of his work as Founder/Director of the Peabody Renaissance Ensemble at Johns Hopkins University and also the High School Early Music Program at the Interlochen Arts Camp, Mark received from Early Music America the 2001 Thomas Binkley Award and the 2005 Award for Outstanding Contribution to EM Education.

José Lemos, countertenor, is the 2003 winner of the International Baroque Vocal Competition in Chimay, Belgium. A native of Uruguay, Mr. Lemos received his MM in Music from the New England Conservatory (2003), and has appeared in opera roles at Tanglewood (as Oberon in Britten’s A Midsummer Night's Dream in 2004) and with Martin Pearlman's Boston Baroque. April 2005, he performed in Handel’s Giulio Cesare with Cecilia Bartoli and the Zurich Opera under Marc Minkowski. He also performs Brazilian songs with guitarist Marco Sartor.

Larry Lipkis is Composer-in-Residence and Director of Early Music at Moravian College in Bethlehem PA. His cello concerto, Scaramouche, appears on the Koch label, and his bass trombone concerto, Harlequin, was premiered by the Los Angeles Philharmonic to rave reviews. The trilogy was completed when his bassoon concerto Pierrot was performed by the Houston Symphony. He has also served as Director of Pinewoods Early Music Week.

Ronn McFarlane has released over 25 CDs on Dorian, including solo music of John Dowland, lute song recitals, and recordings with the Baltimore Consort. Inspired by the lutenist-composers of the Renaissance, he has also composed over 30 new lute solos. In 1996 Shenandoah University conferred upon him an honorary Doctorate for bringing the lute and its music to a worldwide audience. He made his London debut in April, 2004.This Spring he is a guest professor in lute at Indiana University.

Mindy Rosenfeld, a founding member of the Baltimore Consort whose flute-playing graced our first decade, recently returned. Since 1989 she has been a member of San Francisco's Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, and a frequent guest artist/soloist with numerous West Coast ensembles. Mindy is the mother of five boys whose active life includes performing, teaching, and raising her family.

 

Notes on the Program

For nearly eight centuries, Muslims and Christians lived together on the Iberian peninsula through alternating periods of peace and conflict, until the final defeat of the Moors in 1492 at Granada (the Reconquista). This victory emboldened Christians to intensify their persecution of Spain's Jews (Sephardim), and in that one cataclysmic year — which we normally associate with Columbus's discovery of the New World — both Muslims and Jews were expelled from the region.

The Sephardim scattered across the Ottoman Empire, resettling in North Africa and in European safe havens such as Amsterdam, Venice, and Ferrara where they preserved their Judeo-Spanish language (Ladino) and a wealth of beautiful folk music. This program opens with Morena me llaman and Avrix mi galanica, songs from the oral tradition of the Balkan settlements published by Isaac Levy in his Chants Judeo-Espagnols, 1970-1973. The melodies are most likely not from the fifteenth century — for these tunes have been subject to many generations of oral transmission &mdash but the words are traceable to the Iberian Sephardic community.

In Renaissance Spain itself, artifacts of Moorish musical culture survived in the prevalent poetic forms of courtly song and in the stories they related. Tales of great battles (La Mañana de Sant Juan), some told as if from a Moorish perspective (Una sañosa porfía), as well as love songs involving Moorish women (Di, perra mora — cited by several writers including Cervantes and Lope de Vega) are to be found in all the cancioneros and the books of the vihuelists.

The Cancionero de Palacio (“Palace Songbook”), a monumental collection of nearly five hundred pieces in three and four parts, is extraordinary for its large and diverse repertory: salacious villancicos (e.g. Cucú, cucú, cucucú and Calabaça) appear alongside non-liturgical religious pieces and heroic romances. The seven published books of vihuela music (1536-1576) must also be mentioned as a prime source, and they provide concordant settings to many works in the Cancioneros.

The repertory preserved in all these books is of two principal genres: romance and villancico. Often paired, the villancico (a lighter dance-like refrain form also called deshecha) commented upon the preceding romance, a strophic, narrative poem which was the Spanish corollary to the English ballad (e.g. Qu'es de ti des consolado and Levanta Pascual.)

Juan del Encina was a master of these forms, and his Cancionero (Salamanca, 1496) was the first Spanish publication devoted entirely to the works of a single author. It is a collection containing the verses to his romances and villancicos as well as his short pastoral plays (Eglogas), ten of which conclude with villancico deshechas, thus providing musical finales for these dramatic miniatures. The musical settings of his romances and villancicos, sixty-two compositions in all, are found in the Cancionero de Palacio. Encina's representation in this songbook is three times larger than that of any other composer. Oy comamos, the villancico Encina wrote as a deshecha-finale to his carnival play, Egloga representada la mesma noche de antruejo o carnestollendas concludes our program. Its message is "live for the moment" (a sentiment which we hope will inspire spontaneity in our performances).

Improvisation pervaded the instrumental practice of sixteenth-century Spain, indeed, of all of Europe. In addition to embellishing cadences, performers routinely expanded upon, or “glossed,” pre-existing tunes, using them as repeating tenors or foundation melodies for ornamental improvisation. We present two distinct genres of improvisation in today's program: the fifteenth-century basse dance, in which a single, lengthy bass line lies beneath a newly spun-out melody, and pieces based on the shorter “standard tenors,” typically four or eight bars long, which are repeated a number of times, resulting in predictable chord progressions not unlike the modern twelve-bar blues. (E.g. Ortiz’s recercadas primera and segunda, are based on the minor mode passamezzo antico and the major mode passamezzo moderno, respectively.) Ortiz's basse dance La Spagna and De la Torre's Alta are each settings of an old basse dance tune called variously La Spagna, Re di Spagna, La baixa de Castilla, Spanier Tantz, etc., which was so popular in its time that over two hundred pieces, including an entire mass by Isaac, employed it as their foundation.

Diego Ortiz was director of the Spanish viceroy's choir in Naples, and his Trattado de glosas was published in Rome. The Trattado, along with the Cancionero de Upsala, mirrors the close relationship between Spain and Italy that developed through the Spanish popes and through the Aragonese court at Naples. The music of the Cancionero of the Duke of Calabria was published in Venice in 1556 under the title Villancicos de diversos autores, but it is now known as the Cancionero de Upsala, after the library in Sweden where it is housed.

Obvious evidence of Moorish influence in Spain is seen in our instruments themselves: Percussion such as the riq (tambourine) and strings like the rebab (rebec) came into Spanish courtly culture with the Moorish musicians and instrument makers. The predecessor of the lute (oud or al'ud) was introduced into Europe via Sicily and southern Spain. Due to its Moorish origin, the role of the lute diminished in Christian Spain during the late Middle Ages, but it became the prime instrument elsewhere in Europe during the Renaissance. Spaniards replaced it with the guitar-shaped vihuela, an instrument with stringing, tuning, and notation identical to the lute. Lutenists and vihuelists inevitably played each other's music. European lute music appears in vihuela books just as vihuela pieces exist in lute sources. One of the most popular pieces of Spanish music, the romance Conde Claros, exists in several settings, including over a dozen sets of variations from Spain as well as England and France.

Even the “tablature” notation for lute and vihuela derives from the Moors. Using numbers and/or letters to indicate fingerings, it is a graphic representation of the strings on the fingerboard. Known as early as the ninth century in al'Andalus (Arabic southern Spain), it may have been invented by a court musician and oud player, Abu-'l-Hasan, or Ziryab, a black slave who reportedly had fled Baghdad.

— Notes by Mark Cudek