Search - Johannes Ghiselin, Johannes Ockeghem, Francesco Spinacino :: Tous Les Regrets

First, Let's Establish Some Premises ...

Giordano Bruno | Wherever I am, I am. | 05/20/2010

(5 out of 5 stars)

"... for considering the music that has survived in manuscripts from the opulent courts and cities of 15th C Europe, and specifically for music associated with the Burgundian court of Marguerite of Austria. Let's assert right away that the composers of the era knew their business. That is, they knew what "music" should sound like, they knew what their sophisticated 'audience' wanted in music, and they knew what the voices and instruments of their world could do. Obviously so, the latter! They were all singers and/or instrumentalists themselves, whose credibility as composers was entirely dependent on their skills as performers. They were their own "first audience". Understand, please: musicians were and are the "first audience" for all composers, and composers know it; if your compositions are not persuasive to performers, they will never be heard by anyone else. Fifteenth C Burgundy was a society that devoted a very generous share of its energy and resources to music; the performers, even the courtly amateurs, were exceptionally cognizant of musical taste and styles. Musical skills conferred social status, even among the wealthy and the aristocratic. It's patently ridiculous to suppose that those skills were rough and undeveloped. They sang and played extremely well on the average, and the best of them were equal to the best of any time or place. Why wouldn't they be?



But the premise that Medieval and Renaissance composers knew how their music should be sung and played leaves us with a plethora of questions, some answerable and some not, the central question being "how can we know what they heard?" That was the central question for musicologists and performers of Early Music throughout the 20th C. What has been learned fills volumes and shelves of volumes, and the results are obvious to the ears on hundreds of concert stages every week. Here's a very quick look at it:

First, Notation: it took several generations of transcriptions, but we now understand the several notational systems of Early Music with assurance. The notation of the late 15th and 16th Centuries is in many ways very precise and expressive, especially regarding rhythm and phrasing. It was also explicated and expanded by a remarkable body of contemporaneous theoretical writing, a whole literature of the philosophy of music of the times. Many of the finest performers of this music today prefer to perform it from original notation facsimiles rather than from `misleading' modern transcriptions.

Second, the Surviving Instruments: There are enough of them that we can gather a lot of info about pitch, tuning, timbre, and `playing potential.' From careful examaination and measurement of museum instruments, artisan builders have painfully, painstakingly relearned how to make instruments worthy of the music, and performers have learned to play them very skillfully indeed.

Third, Social History: Along with deeds and wills and transcripts of criminal trials, the archives of Europe are replete with records of musical activities -- records of commissions, salaries, lists of employees, etc. Astonishing as it sounds, we now know many examples of who sang/played what, where and when and why and for whom.

Fourth, Experience: hands on! Singing it or playing it is in effect learning it; learning how it CAN sound opens the way to intuiting how it should sound.



But now, what about this CD of "Music from the Court of Marguerite of Austria" performed by The Modena Consort? Hey, it proudly embodies the results of all those studies. In many ways, it's a `state of the art' rendition of secular chansons and instrumental fantasies by the "greats' circa 1500: Ockeghem, Busnois, Desprez, de la Rue, Isaac, Agricola, plus a few lesser luminaries like Gaspar van Weerbecke and Vincenzo Capirola. It's a very skillful performance, despite which I have a few reservations about it.



The 16 pieces on the CD include chiefly two modes of performance. Roughly half are sung by soprano Ulrike Hofbauer, with accompaniment on the typical six-course lutes of the era. The other half are performed polyphonically by a "closed consort" of keyless wooden transverse flutes (not recorders!) replicated from a very small number of museum models.



A "closed consort" is a set of similar instruments of different sizes; the modern string quartet is a closed consort. There was a marked fashion for closed consorts in music from roughly 1450 to 1650, and certain families of instruments came and went historically with that fashion. The capped reed "krummhorns" were the most extreme example; they existed only to play together and vanished when the taste for mixed consorts captured music. Recorders in the 16th C were prredominantly valued as `closed consort' instruments, also. Transverse flutes were built in various sizes and there's no reason not to suppose that closed consorts of such flutes would have been accepted as normal, but such consorts must have been very rare, an interesting novelty even then. That's effectively what they are on this CD, a novel variation on the sound of pieces that we have heard far more often on other instruments. Can I get away with saying, for instance, that Heinrich Isaac's fantasy "La Mi La Sol" is such a familiar chestnut of the EM repertoire that it's fun to hear it performed on flutes? The Renaissance keyless flute is a devil to play, by the way, especially the tenor and bass sizes; I have very large hands (larger than OJ Simpson's), but on the bass traverso I feel that my fingers have been betrayed to the inquisitors' torture rack. The four flautists of The Modena Consort play extremely well, with excellent intonation and tight ensemble. Even so, the expressive limitations of their instruments make it fairly clear why the transverse flutes didn't "come into their own" until the Baroque.



It's even harder to claim any certainty about the vocal technique of Med/Ren singers than about instrumental technique. When and how often did women sing? If men sang the discant parts, were they using falsetto or were the naturally high voices of older boys and a few mature men preferred? Chest voice or head voice? Clear or nasal? We CAN be sure that huge operatic voices were not cultivated; it would be absurd to imagine Jessye Norman or Bryn Terfel accomapanied by a six-course lute or a lap-held harp! We can also be sure that "tuning" was the first requisite; the music of the era, built on modal scales with perfect triadic consonances made piquant by well-prepared passing dissonances, depends on exquisite "mean" tuning, without the prop of vibrato. Besides, theorists of the era explicitly condemned vibrato as tasteless bungling.



Soprano Ulrike Hofbauer has a clear concept of how these chansons should sound, and she has the vocal control to achieve it. Her `sound' is pure white (i.e. straight, vibrato free, a `head' voice of flute-like clarity, the voice of a folksinger but with far stronger technical control). She has, I think, chosen to interpret the music in keeping with the texts as she understands them. Those texts are almost all strict fixed-form poetry on themes of Love, and usually of the pangs of Love rather than the thrills. They are sophisticated plaints of heartbreak and such. If one takes the sentiments of the words seriously, then Hofbauer's aetherial langor is utterly convincing, and the slight studio-resonance of her singing is proper enough. Personally, I'm not at all sure the very stylized and convention-ridden texts were indeed always taken seriously. I really think everyone - composers, singers and listeners - would have welcomed a lilt of humor, a playful irony once in a while. Between the flutes and Hofbauer's flute-like timbres, this performance does settle into a blue vein of polished melancholy.



That overall tenor of sophisticated melancholy can be challenged on grounds of tempi. The tempi chosen by The Modena Consort are uniformly quite slow - as slow as the music could be performed coherently - and languid. The "time signatures" of mensural notation, however, are precise and explicit, employing symbols that indicate the "tempus" as the longus (a square open note) or the breve (usually a diamond-shaped note). Also, there are statements in the theoretical essays of the era that link `tempus' to human pulse. I've poured over some of these pieces in original notation myself, and I think I'm justified in saying that The Modena Consort has chosen to perform them too consistently at too slow tempi.



Nevertheless, this is a CD that conoisseurs of Burgundian music will enjoy a good deal, and I heartily recommend it to them."