Shannon Canavin & Paula Downes, soprano
Thea Lobo & Aaron Russo, alto
Jason McStoots & Eric Rice, tenor
Brian Church & Aaron Ingersoll, bass
Saturday, May 5, 2007 at 7pm · St. Anthony of Padua Parish, New Bedford
Sunday, May 6, 2007 at 3pm · St. Anthony's Portuguese Church, Lowell
Tuesday, May 8, 2007 at 7:30pm · St. Anthony's Catholic Church, Cambridge
Saturday, May 12, 2007 at 3pm · First Lutheran Church, Boston
Presented as part of the Boston Portuguese Festival, sponsored by the Consulate-General of Portugal in Boston and with support from the Massachusetts Alliance of Portuguese Speakers (MAPS). Program notes Portugal lays claim to the first church musician known by name on the Iberian Peninsula, one Andreas, who was the princes cantorum (“leader of the singers”) at Mértola from 489 to 525. Polyphony seems to have first appeared in Portugal in 959, the year in which a convent inherited several liturgical books from Muma Donna of Gulmarães. The region enjoyed a long history of musical exchange with neighboring Spain and Italy, and as Portugal's exploration expanded throughout the 15 th century, her travelers encountered foreign musicians and employed many of them in her courts. While the Portuguese composers from 1550 to 1650 were very familiar with the compositional practices of Palestrina (and the church's mandate to emulate that style following the Council of Trent), they were more interested in continuing to model their music on that of the Franco-Flemish school of Dufay, Ockeghem, Josquin, Gombert, and others, finding that this style better suited their inherent expressive and dramatic temperament. When combined with the traditions carried from port to port through oral traditions, the Portuguese school of polyphony amassed a rich repertory of music that has in modern times been woefully underexplored. Our program attempts to shed a small beam of light on this vast repertoire.
Filipe de Magalhães (ca. 1571 – 1652) was ordained in 1585 and was the favorite pupil of Manuel Mendes at the cloister school of Évora Cathedral. An accomplished singer, he joined the choir of the royal chapel at Lisbon in 1602 and conducted the choir of the Capela da Misericórdia. In 1623, Magalhães became mestre of the royal chapel, where he remained until his retirement in 1641. He was perhaps the greatest composer of his time, his works exhibiting an expressiveness that surpasses that of his peers. Asperges me, Domine is based on the chant that opens High Mass, during which the congregation is sprinkled with holy water, and alternates between the single-voice chant and four-part harmony.
Manuel Cardoso (1566–1650) was also a student at Évora, one of Portugal's main musical centers, serving as choirmaster at the cathedral there until 1588; the following year he took his vows for the priesthood at Lisbon's Convento do Carmo and became their organist and choral conductor. From 1613 until his death, he served the Duke of Barcelos at the Vila Viçosa. While the earliest existing example of sacred Portuguese polyphony dates from 1490, the true flowering of Portugal's polyphony is said to have begun in 1613 with the publication of Cardoso's Magnificat settings, the publication of which seems to have been inspired by those of his friend Duarte Lôbo ( 1565 – 1646 ). His Gloria laus is a processional hymn for Palm Sunday that combines imitative counterpoint and homophonic declamation reminiscent of Palestrina.
Pedro de Cristo (ca. 1550 – 1618) was likely from Coimbra, and took his vows at the Augustinian monastery of Santa Cruz—which contains the largest single collection of early sources of polyphony in Portugal—when he was about 21. de Cristo succeeded Francisco de Santa Maria as mestre de capela at Santa Cruz and held the same position at its sister house, Santa Vincente de Fóra in Lisbon. Four manuscript choirbooks copied by de Cristo early in his career are preserved at the Biblioteca Geral of Coimbra Univesrity, but it is clear that not all these works are by de Cristo and he rarely notates the composer of each piece. Although none of de Cristo's music was published during his lifetime and only survives in manuscript, his output is the largest of any Portuguese composer of the period. He probably studied with Francisco de Santa Maria, whose influence can be seen in de Cristo's music through the sweeping 16 th -note passages, syllabic declamation, and simultaneous use of a cambiata figure (approaching a note from the note above followed by a drop of a third to the note below) in one voice over passing notes in another voice.
Nothing is known of the life of Estêvão de Brito (ca. 1575–1641) before his arrival at Badajoz in 1597. His works were praised throughout Spain, and it appears he was a pupil of Filipe de Magalhães. From Badajoz, de Brito traveled to Talavera and later received his holy ordination in 1608, allowing him to be appointed chaplain of the choir (a post which required “pure blood”). In 1613, de Brito transferred to Màlaga where he served as the cathedral's maestro de capilla , composing and giving lessons at the college. The composer asked repeatedly to be released from his teaching duties to rehearse the choir for the very important services of Christmas, Corpus Christi, and other high holy days, for which composers were required to write extensive villancicos and chanzonetas ; while de Brito's are certainly contained in the volumes upon volumes of these works surviving in libraries today, none have yet been identified. A common compositional practice of the Renaissance was to have a portion of a chant sung repeatedly in one voice, while the other voices sing music based on that chant in the imitative style; de Brito's Vox clamantis is somewhat unusual in that the repeated chant appears in the soprano line.
Duarte Lôbo (?1564 – 1646) also studied music with Manuel Mendes at Évora, where he was a boy chorister. He became maestro de capilla at the Hospital Real in Lisbon and from about 1591 until at least 1639 he was maestro de capilla at Libson Cathedral. He taught for many years at the Lisbon Claustra da Sé and was the most famous Portuguese composer of his time. He published four volumes of liturgical music and was one of the leading Portuguese exponents of the Portuguese polyphonic style, notable for the ease in which he combined learned counterpoint with refined and expressive interpretation of the text. The influence of the great Franco-Flemish composers Ockeghem and Josquin can be seen in his work, and several of his parody masses are based on motets by Palestrina and Guerrero. While is Magnificat Quinti Toni exploits the mode in a rather simple fashion, with many arpeggios and little dissonance, it reflects Lôbo's deft use of motivic material.
The vernacular pieces on this program come from a volume of music entitled Vilancetes, Cantigas and Romances of the 16 th century that brings together all the secular pieces of two Portuguese Cancioneiros (song books) of the Renaissance. When it was first published in 1986, this collection added substantially to the 16 th -century Portuguese repertoire and filled in some of the gaps in what is known to have been one of the most productive periods of Portuguese musical history. The texts of the songs in these pieces are in both Spanish and Portuguese; the copyists were certainly Portuguese as many of the Spanish texts contain Portuguese spellings (for example, “ninha” for “niña”). While there are a handful of sacred texts, virtually all the pieces in both song books are in one of the formes fixes (standardized poetic and musical forms) common to the Renaissance; the most common of these were the vilancete and the cantiga which feature a refrain with two or three coplas or verses. While many of the songs are on the somewhat typical subjects of unrequited love, the texts are on various other subjects—the sacred Ay mi dios is in praise of Jesus's sacrifice; Puestos estan frente a frente is based on the battle of Alcácer-Quibir (the “Battle of Three Kings,” which was a major battle fought in 1578 in northern Morocco between Abu Abdallah Mohammed II Saadi, his ally King Sebastian of Portugal, and the new Sultan of Morocco Abd Al-Malik); and Não tragais borzeguis pretos warns against wearing the sandals (“borzeguis”) common to Muslims on the Iberian peninsula. Through additional research and publication of manuscripts and song books such as these, our understanding of the musical, cultural, and political environment of this important time and place will continue to be enriched.
© Shannon Canavin, 2006 |
