Liner notes for CD booklet by Joëlle Morton

Transcription

1 Das Berliner Gambenbuch recording by Juliane Laake (lyra viol) and Ensemble Art d echo Capriccio, Gambenbuch- Juliane- Laake/dp/B00T73GKZU Liner notes for CD booklet by Joëlle Morton At the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris there exists a very unusual 17 th century manuscript of music for solo viola da gamba (lyra viol), known only by its shelf number Réserve This tiny leather- bound book is elongated, approx. 10 cm tall and 15 cm wide, and has 270 pages. Compiled by at least eight different individual hands, the music is notated almost entirely in tablature and reflects a variety of scordatura tunings. The cover of the book bears the letters, I.B.R., referring to the person who owned it, but so far, no likely candidate with these initials has been identified. The cover also bears the year 1674, although this is somewhat misleading since pieces inside represent a span of at least 75 years, dating back to c1600. Surely this collection was amassed across a period of years, if not decades. The exact provenance is unknown; it was acquired by the library in 1880 from a source in Berlin as part of a large general purchase of items, and is generally thought to originate from the Brandenburg region that is part of northern Germany. Near the end of the Thirty Years War, Brandenburg started to regain its prosperity and stability under the leadership of Frederick William, known as the Great Elector or Große Kurfürst (reigned ). The Great Elector and his wife were well educated and artistically inclined; with their support the Kapelle began to flourish and musicians from all over Europe were increasingly lured to visit and/or take up residence at court. Quite a number of the finest viola da gamba players of the day (such as William Rowe Sr. and Jr., William Brade, Dietrich Stöeffken) are known to have visited or spent time there. Frederick William himself played the treble viol, and an inventory from 1667 lists seven viols and a chest of six more in his possession. The music contained in Rés was surely neither specifically composed for, nor compiled by Frederick William, however, a number of clues suggest it was created at the impetus of a wealthy amateur player who lived in that region. In addition to pieces by some of the named composers who are known to have traveled through the area there are four anon. pieces labeled from Berlin, and four anon. pieces labeled from Belgard (now called Białograd, in Poland, which was then part of Brandenburg) and eight specialized Polish dances (called serra and proportio), genres that only appear in other Northern German and Scandinavian sources. The manuscript is truly international and until other information comes to light, Brandenburg seems the most likely and logical provenance.

2 Rés has never been published in a facsimile or modern edition 1. In order to access this music, one must either visit the library in person with a large stack of manuscript paper (and many hours of writer s cramp ahead), or pay a sizable fee to obtain an authorized digital copy. Once the item is actually to hand, the challenges are not over; while close to all of the 273 pieces are titled, it is not known who composed 220 of them. Let me translate this conundrum by asking you to imagine visiting an art museum only to find that the names of the artists have not been provided! It might be immediately obvious to you that some paintings are truly original and remarkable works, but it s difficult to argue so convincingly without comparing them to other works to which they are directly related. This was the situation that confronted Juliane Laake when planning this project. Not only were there a great number of pieces with which to come to grips, but she also had to find some way to organize them into a coherent and presentable narrative. What you have in front of you is a record of her exploration and sleuthing and discovery. Just because the author can t be determined doesn t mean the music is better or worse than pieces by known composers. And not every piece by anon sounds the same! So that you, dear listener, may better join in this journey and pick out some of the landmarks, here is some context for the manuscript, plus a few of the details that can be identified, and an explanation of what makes it so very unusual and special. Only a very few composers are mentioned formally in the pages of this manuscript: Nicholas Hotman, Le Sieur Dubuisson and August Verdussen, though a few more can be identified from concordances with other documents: Tobias Hume, Thomas Ford, Daniel Farrant, William Young, Charles Coleman, John Jenkins, Simon Ives, George Hudson, Dietrich Stöeffken, Willem Deutekom and François Dufaut. So what we have is an international anthology of sorts, representing a mix of French, English, Dutch, Flemish and German features. Even though they are not related to each other thematically or even by composer, it may help to say that the pieces are arranged into suites. The vast majority of the works are titled as generic dance movements: allemand, courant, saraband, etc. and these are loosely grouped according by tuning/tonality. The dances are generally fairly straight forward, with forms that would allow performance as functional dance music if a lone viol were loud enough to be heard in such a setting. Merely outlining a melodic and harmonic framework, these dances are generally quite short and simple, but could be repeated with embellishments. Sometimes variations are provided by the composer (for example the Sarraband #16 and the Allemand p. 240) but at other times, it was up to the 1 A facsimile edition of this manuscript was planned by Minkoff some years ago, yet never appeared and will not now, since the company has folded. An index and preface for that edition were to have been provided by François- Pierre Goy, to whom I am indebted for generously sharing his unpublished research and insight. The viol player Jonathan Dunford has also worked with this manuscript and I am equally grateful to him for sharing his thoughts and expertise. There are a couple of modern editions of selections of pieces from this manuscript available, one by Jonathan Dunford (Les Cahiers du Tourdion) and another edited by Konrad Ruhland and Fred Flassig (Edition Walhall).

3 player him/herself to create variety on subsequent repetitions. You will hear some of that on this recording. Of the dance form pieces, two sarrabands (#6 and #32) can be attributed to specific composers and these two men surely knew each other in real life. Charles Coleman (d.1664) was a highly respected musician in England, and a member of the King s Musick. His music for solo viol is known only from manuscript sources, and his activities limited to England. So to be represented in this manuscript, his music must have been disseminated through a colleague or student. A possible candidate is Dietrich Stöeffken (d.1673), a German viol player who early in his career spent time at the court of Charles I. Shortly before the Civil War he left England for a position at the kapelle of the Great Elector in Brandenburg. Stöeffken subsequently came to be one of the most admired viol players of his day in Europe, and traveled widely. A further mysterious link between our manuscript and the English court is the anonymous Gavott (#15); this melody was widely known elsewhere by the title The King Enjoys His Own Again. An obviously political and royalist piece, this ballad is known elsewhere with English text by Martin Parker, envisioning the return to power of the Stuart monarchy. It was likely printed secretly when it was first written in the 1640s, but then more openly circulated after the Restoration (1660). There is one very unusual additional element to Rés. 1111: it contains a substantial representation of sacred music. Scattered throughout the collection are approximately forty pieces that are solo viol settings of Lutheran hymns and chorales. Each piece bears a title in German that references the first line of the hymn text, and these works turn out to be some of the best known and most popular religious tunes of the late 17 th century. In part because specific viol composer(s) are not attributed, these pieces have received little attention or study, and this in spite of the fact that there are very few other viola da gamba sources with examples of this genre. 2 These works were surely created as a vehicle for private devotional use in a domestic setting. And the religious affiliation allows us to say with some certainty that the original owner/compiler of our manuscript was a German- Lutheran, since music of this nature was not used by Catholics and would not haven been permitted by Calvinists. It is around this distinctively German repertoire that this recording has been structured. Prior to the reformation, participation in music of the mass was restricted almost exclusively to the celebrant and choir, and that, realized in a non- native language (i.e. Latin). In the early 1500s Martin Luther established a tradition of creating 2 There are relatively few continental manuscripts of music for the lyra viol, approximately one dozen in total. However, across the continental lyra sources many of the composers represented are the same and there are many concordances of specific pieces. But if we are speaking of lyra viol transcriptions of Lutheran hymns, only a few other isolated examples may be found in three or four other continental manuscripts. So we are speaking of a very small, but distinctive repertoire.

4 settings of psalms and hymns with texts in German, in a musical style that was simple enough for the entire congregation to learn and be part of. Some chorales he composed himself creating brand new melodies and other times he took pre- existing tunes (both sacred and secular), but setting them with translations or new religious texts. In many cases these settings follow the tradition of the German tenorlied, where the melody line is buried within the polyphonic setting, typically in the tenor part. The Lutheran chorale settings in Rés. 1111, though scored for solo viola da gamba, are none- the- less loyal to the melody and harmony and text one finds in German Lutheran hymnals of the 16 th and 17 th centuries by authors such as Martin Luther, Michael Weiße, Bartholomäus Gesius, Nikolaus Decius, Michael Praetorius, Johann Jeep, Johann Heermann, Johann van Rist, Johann Franck and Johann Crüger. On this recording, some of the early hymnbook chorale settings are being presented with voice, organ and theorbo, and these are paired with the corresponding solo viol settings. Eighteen chorale/hymn tunes from Rés appear on this recording and a number of them will be familiar to your ears, since they remain beloved works for congregational singing to this day and their texts have over the years been translated to a variety of other languages, including English. Some have also become immortalized through their prominent incorporation into works by composers such as Heinrich Schütz, Johann Sebastian Bach, Johannes Brahms and Anton Bruckner (among many others). Chorales may have an association with a specific time of year, such as Christmas (#166 Christum wir sollen loben schon, #167 Gelobet seist du, Jesu Christ, #168 Der Tag ist so freudenreich) or the Passiontide (#10 O, Trauerigkeit, #101 Herzliebster Jesu). They may also be part of the liturgy (#55 Allein Gott can be used as a Gloria, and #99 O Lamm, Gottes as an Agnus dei) or be based on a psalm (#22 based on Psalm 6: Herr straf mich nicht in deinen Zorn, #63 based on Psalm 42: Unser müden Augen lieder, better known as Wie nach einer Wasserquelle), or funeral music (#23 Jesu, meine Freude). As mentioned above, Lutheran composers of hymns sometimes expanded on older sacred tunes that were originally in Latin. #166 is an adaptation of the old church hymn A solis ortus cardine that dates back to the 5 th century, and #168 is a beloved 14 th century Christmas carol, originally to the text Dies est laetitiae, in ortu regali. Other times, they adapted secular melodies, assigning newly penned sacred texts, as in #61 where Heinrich Isaac s famous Innsbruck, ich muß dich lassen, originally composed in 1490, was transformed more than once, first becoming O Welt, ich muß dich lassen (1505) and then Nun ruhen alle Wälder (1605). Rés contributes a few additional unusual examples to this last category. #19 Nun schläft Sie schon is a widely circulated dance movement for lyra viol by the Englishman Simon Ives (d.1662) that more commonly went by the title The Queen s Masque. And #29 Nun ist alle meine Lust is an adaptation of a hugely popular vocal aria Sommes-nous pas trop heureux from Jean- Baptiste Lully s (d. 1687) ballet de cour, l Impatience, written in Both pieces are clearly secular in origin, and were widely known and circulated internationally in their secular forms. What s curious about their appearance in this manuscript is that they have been

5 given German titles that like the other sacred chorale tunes, are fragments of poetic text. We have only these few words in the titles to judge by; there are not any other known concordances that repeat these titles, nor can the remaining text be found. From these few words, we cannot even know definitively if the texts were secular, or sacred. However, we can say that there are a great many secular pieces in the manuscript (dances, fantasias, preludes), so disguising these works was probably not the motive for changing their titles. So I believe that just as Luther had done for Innsbruck, that these two tunes were probably also given religious texts, so that they could be incorporated for Lutheran devotional use. When we speak of important Lutheran musical contributions, the name Johann Sebastian Bach is one of the first that leaps to mind. With its many Lutheran chorale settings, Bach s Orgelbüchlein is thought to have been compiled c So our manuscript (perhaps we should call it a Gambabüchlein) predates Bach by about half a century, or perhaps more. As mentioned previously, if one wishes to describe something in a coherent way, one needs to understand its context and to consider how it might relate to things that come before and after. The solo viol music is clearly not the work of Bach, and yet it shares a common language and heritage and purpose and helps to clarify German musical traditions, in part by showing that Lutheran music had an established place in both private and public forums, and that there was perhaps not nearly such a divide or stigma against combining sacred and secular elements, as we tend to assume in the 21 st century. The gem of a little manuscript that is Rés contains enough music to fill a lifetime of exploration and contemplation. We very much hope that you will enjoy it! Notes by Joëlle Morton October, 2013