Juan de Esquivel's 'Ave Maris Stella' (a4): Observations on the Spanish Polyphonic Hymn Repertory (original) (raw)
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Pure Gold: Golden Age Sacred Music in the Iberian World. A Homage to Bruno Turner, ed. Tess Knighton / Bernadette Nelson. Series De musica 15, Kassel: Reichenberger, 2011. || ABSTRACT: This collection of essays was conceived as an homage to Bruno Turner who has done so much to promote knowledge of sacred music of the Golden Age Iberian world. As choral director, editor and broadcaster, Turner brought this music to the attention of the wider musical public and made it available to choirs all over the world through his specialized publishing firm, Mapa Mundi. Scholars of Iberian sacred music are equally indebted to him for his research, especially on sources, plainchant and liturgy of the Iberian Peninsula and the New World; indeed, he can be considered the eminence grise of musicology in this field. The essays by seventeen scholars, all of whom have been influenced by and are indebted to his life’s work, bring together the latest research and thinking on wide-ranging aspects of sacred music by Iberian and Hispanic American composers in three main areas: sources and repertories; music and liturgy; motets and musical tributes. These contributions, which enrich and deepen current knowledge of Iberian music of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, are framed by a Prelude by the composer Ivan Moody and a Postlude that takes the form of an interview between Turner and the writer, critic and translator Luis Gago. || CONTENTS: • A heart of pure gold / Tess Knighton • Ayo visto lo Mappamundi : working with Bruno Turner / Ivan Moody • A sixteenth-century manuscript choirbook of polyphony for vespers at Toledo Cathedral by Andrés de Torrentes / Michael Noone • Manuscripts Oporto, Biblioteca Pública Municipal, MM 40 and MM 76-79 : their origin, date, repertories and context / João Pedro D'Alvarenga • The unica in MS 975 of the Manuel de Falla Library : a musical book for wind band / Juan Ruiz Jiménez • A tale of two queens, their music books and the village of Lerma / Douglas Kirk • The vicissitudes of some printed fragments of polyphony / Juan Carlos Asensio • Music prints by Cristóbal de Morales and Tomás Luis de Victoria in surviving Roman inventories and archival records / Noel O'Regan • Two post-Tridentine lamentation chants in Eastern Spain / Greta Olson • Juan de Esquivel's "Ave Maris Stella" (a 4) : observations on the Spanish polyphonic hymn repertory / Michael B. O'Connor • A polyphonic hymn cycle in Coimbra / Bernadette Nelson • Performance contexts for the Magnificat in the Iberian Peninsula in the sixteenth century / Eva Esteve • "Jesu Redemptor" : polyphonic funerary litanies in Portugal / Owen Rees • Music for the dead : an early sixteenth-century anonymous requiem mass / Tess Knighton • Unedited motets by a little known composer : Alonso Ordóñez / Cristina Diego Pacheco • A sixteenth-century ostinato motet for Barcelona's patroness saint Eulalia / Emilio Ros-Fábregas • Musical tributes to an attributed apparition of the Virgin in Spain and in Mexico / Robert Stevenson Pure passion : a conversation with Bruno Turner / Luis Gago.
Textus & Musica [En ligne], Les numéros, 7 | 2023 - Performance of Medieval Monophony: Text and Image as Evidence for Musical Practice, Performance of Medieval Monophony: Text and Image as Evidence for Musical Practice, 2023
This article addresses the transmission context of a formerly unknown text on music theory, copied on the verso of the last folio of a gradual (Lisbon, BnP, L.C. 238), which was part of a set of choirbooks commissioned by Catarina d’Eça, abbess of Santa María de Lorvão (1471-1521). The article discusses this source within the broader context of the production and circulation of liturgical books, particularly among Cistercian nuns. It reviews some assumptions concerning women’s agency in creating and performing liturgy and the negotiation between nuns and priests over nearly every aspect of liturgical care. It shows how the role of both lay and religious women as mediators across and between religious orders and kingdoms or territories can no longer be overlooked. The last section examines the theoretical sources of this brief musical treatise to determine whether the author of the text drew on the tradition of the Bernardian reform, or on other kinds of musical sources from outside the Cistercian tradition. Both the sources and the use of the Castilian language shed light on the origins of the text’s author.
Infunde amorem cordibus: an early 16th-century polyphonic hymn cycle from Seville
Early Music, 2005
The article studies the characteristics of the polyphonic hymn cycle contained in Tarazona Cathedral, Ms. 2–3 within the context of the transitional period in the liturgy of the Iberian Peninsula in the 15th and 16th centuries. New information on the biographical profile of the composers of these hymns, as well as the analysis of breviaries and other chant sources, some of them previously unknown, from the places with which the Tarazona anthology has been associated, establishes a Sevillian origin for the cycle and by extension for the rest of the repertory in the manuscript. The conclusions reached in the article permit the identification of the chant melodies, from a Sevillian hymnary, that would be most appropriate for alternatim performance of the polyphony in this most important source from the time of the Catholic Monarchs.
The Library of the sanctuary of El Pueyo (13th century), located about 6 km from the episcopal see of Barbastro (Huesca-Aragon), holds three choirbooks hitherto practically unknown: a Gradual and two Antiphonaries copied at the end of the 15th century. Their Roman cursus strongly suggests that they were not brought by the Benedictine community that inhabited this place between the years 1890 and 1961; on the contrary, they give evidence of the liturgy observed by the Chapter settled there and dependent of the Cathedral of Barbastro. These manuscripts are relevant from both a liturgical and musicological perspective since they record a border tradition between Aragon and Catalonia; at the same time, they let us appreciate the characteristics of a “marginal” liturgy and the modus operandi that was followed when compiling and adapting the material for its liturgical books. Our comparative study of the responsory series reveals the place of these codices within the Iberian Roman rite’s liturgical geography prior to Trent. Likewise, our musicological analysis explores two phenomena of high interest: on the one hand, the adjustment of the musical uses —notation, typology and organization of the repertoire— to the characteristics of a small ecclesiastical community; and on the other hand, the peculiarities of the square notation employed in Spanish plainsong sources predating the 16th century.