Tomorrow, Dutch public broadcaster Concertzender will be featuring lots of Early Music concerts. Earlier in the day, they'll play a recording of excerpts from two interesting concerts from a couple of years ago and earlier this year featuring Spanish music of the 17th and 18th Centuries.
Thursday morning (8:00AM EST) will be music from a concert recorded in April of this year called "Preludium tot het Slaapkamertje". The complete program isn't listed, but it seems to be cantatas with the theme of mourning. Slaapkamertje means bedroom or sleeping chamber, and in this case it means the eternal sleep of death. It's the theme of the concert (I can't find a complete list of the extracts), and the composers are all North German: Nicholas Bruhns, Johann Christoph Bach, Dietrich Buxtehüde, and J.S. Bach. The Bruhns piece is a Madrigal Cantata entitled Hemmt eure Tränenflut (Restrain the Flow of Your Tears). The performers for this concert are:
Hannah Morrison and Hayat Chaoui, sopranos
Hanna Kopra, mezzo
Immo Schröde, tenor
Michiel Meijer, bass
Collegium AD MOSAM
Huub Ehlen, cond.
(recorded at the North Church in Amsterdam)
The second hour of will feature excerpts from an Early Music Festival from December 2006. This is a really interesting program because they'll have tonadas by Spanish composers, before the Italian style had too much influence in Spain, and then music from the following century which display a more European Baroque style.
It's interesting to notice the difference between the various regional musical styles then and the way the Classical Music world is now. Communication, trade, and other forms of cultural exchange were vastly different, and influences spread more slowly, although not entirely in different ways. I find it refreshing to hear the different regional flavors, the more obvious folk influences, and the stamp the various languages left on music of earlier eras.
These days it seems like almost the only time anyone talks about the influence of language on musical style is when discussing Leoš Janáček or Harry Partch. In the 17th Century, there was a much more obvious connection between the folk music and "serious" music all around Europe. The regional styles were very distinct. Of course, there are still regional styles today, but they manifest themselves in different ways.
In the case of Spanish music, there was already a long tradition of an Iberian musical character by the time the pieces in tomorrow's concert were written. From the early Celtic influences in Galatia to the heavy Moorish influence of the Middle Ages, not to mention the unique Basque traditions and whatever indigenous folk tradition was left over from the Visigoths, Spain certainly had its own style. There's no mistaking a strummed viheula, for instance, and the plaintive Cantigas de Santa Maria of Alfonso el Sabio could not have been created elsewhere. I can't find a useful overview anywhere online; everything seems to be niche sites on flamenco and things. For anyone interested in learning more, this book is a good place to start. There's also some good insight in this interview with Baroque specialist Eduardo Lopez Banzo.
The rhythms of the language are inherent in folk music, and when that gets adapted to the academic tradition of concert music, that character remains for a long time. More modern composers such as Granados, Albeniz, and Rodrigo drew on this tradition heavily. In the 17th Century, musicians traveled, as did printed music, but nothing like what goes on today, or even in the last hundred years. Also, the kind of concert music I'm talking about was, like most places in Europe at the time, largely centered in the courts of the nobility, as well as in the church. That made for a kind of bottleneck of influences (with two different filters, I suppose), allowing certain ones through and blocking others. That kind of situation also tended to magnify the effect of some influences.
One of the biggest changes - and this wasn't unique to Spain by any means - is in form. Gradually, composition grew from the basic strophic-with-refrain format inherent in songs and poetry to a more academically structured work. The shape of the music adapts to the more complex structure, and more emphasis is placed on the big picture. Other differences will become apparent as the concert goes on.
Tomorrow's concert will be particularly instructive because the first half will feature music from the 17th Century, much closer to the folk origins, and the second half will be works written in the 18th Century. The name of the program is "La Rosa que Reyna" (The Rose that Ruled?), after an aria for soprano, two oboes and continuo composed by Juan de Navas at the end of the 17th Century. That's on the program, of course, as are works by Juan Hidalgo, José Marín, Sebatian Dúron, and Juan García.
(Annoyingly, my record collection seems to have a gap between the composers from the late 16th and very early 17th Century and those working at the beginning of the 18th. That will have to change.)
The performers are:
Las Esferas
Maria Estefania Perdome Nogales, soprano
Arwen
Bouw and Maite Larburu Garmendia, violin
Alfonso José
Lopez-Salazar, theorbo & guitar
Jörn Boysen, harpsichord
María
Sanchez Ramírez, cello and director
Later in the day, at 2:00PM EST, they're featuring recordings of some of the top Early Music artists working today, to get everyone in the mood for a new Early Music festival which begins on Friday, Oude Musiek Oude Podia (Old Music, Old Stages). This program is called "De Oude Speeldoos" (The Old Musicbox), and will have music that will be played by these artists live during the Festival itself. They'll have works by Baroque composers including Rameau and J.S. Bach on recordings by artists including Emma Kirkby, Ton Koopman, Lars Ulrik Mortensen, and Jakob Lindberg.
The whole program is here. They'll repeat this program next Thurdsay, Oct. 2, and the actual Festival starts on Friday, Sept. 26. Concertzender will be recording parts of it for future broadcast.
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