Various - Early Music

The Glory of EarlyMusicEarly Music has becomea blanket term to cover a multiplicity of musical forms, ranging from theprimitive to the sophistication of the Renaissance and the complexities of theBaroque, even, at times, extending to anything very much earlier than thepresent day. The present collection of short instrumental pieces consistslargely of music written or conceived before the Baroque, a period generallydated, with simplifying convenience, to the year 1600. In the centuriescovered, there was little distinction made between music for voices and musicfor instruments. While dances would be considered proper only to instruments,other music might be considered and, in the sixteenth century published, as aptfor either one or the other, or, indeed, for a mixture of the two.One of the mostpopular composers of earlier music must be the versatile and long-lived Anon.Inevitably some music must lack a named composer. This is more obviously thecase with traditional music, like the Turkish D??d??l and Macedonian Nevestinkooro, or the Spanish cowherd's Guardame las vacas, the subject of somany sets of lute and keyboard variations in sixteenth century Spain. Anonymouscompositions here include an early example of a French Estampie, datedto the thirteenth century, surviving in a royal manuscript from that period,and examples of the Saltarello, a little hop, a dance included insimilar collections, together with the well known Lamento di Tristano.The music of thefifteenth century French composer Guillaume Dufay, canon at Cambrai Cathedral,is represented by an instrumental version of his ballade J'ay mis mon cuer ('Iput my heart'). The Netherlands composer Jacob Obrecht belongs to the nextgeneration, although included in about 1475 with Dufay in a short list ofcomposers of contemporary distinction. Largely occupied with church music, likeDufay and other composers of the period, he also wrote secular music, includingthe present Stat ein meskin ('A maiden stood').A slightly youngercontemporary and compatriot of Obrecht, Arnold von Bruck was a chorister in thechapel of Charles V, and continued in the service of the Habsburg family, withall its international connections, principally at the court of Ferdinand I.Holder of various church benefices, Arnold von Bruck wrote sacred and secularmusic, the latter including So trinken wir aIle ('So drink we all') and Esging ein Landsknecht ('There went a knight'), five-part and four-partsongs respectively, which, in the custom of the time, allow instrumentalperformance.Other composers ofObrecht's generation include Heinrich Finck, Kapellmeister to Ferdinand I inVienna for the last six months of his life, in 1527, after a career that hadtaken him principally to Poland in the service of three Polish kings. HeinrichIsaac served as court composer to the Emperor Maximilian I and spent some yearsin Florence as cathedral organist in the service of Lorenzo de' Medici. LudwigSenfl, a native of Z??rich, was a pupil of Isaac and al