When
you rewrite something from an old source, it's always
a compromise. My aim here is to make the source a bit
easier to read without changing the content of the basic
information: I've found that people who want a renaissance
experience of music-making have little or no trouble
- singing
from a single part
- you
listen so much more than when you sing from a
score: reading from a score was something for
beginners learning the basics of how the parts
fit together
- or
following the rhythm without bar-lines
- they
were considered violent and barbaric, 'spartire' is what the butcher does... but there are
little strokes to help you at the unexpected points
- or
reading the original note-values
- one
whole-note = one heart-beat, marked by the hand
travelling simply up and down
so
I've left those aspects as they were.
There are three main changes I have made:
- since
some people have trouble finding their starting note
without an instrument, I've given the parts in modern
clefs:
- and
I've grouped the notes more clearly to show which
groups come together in one beat-of-the-hand, following
17thC. Swedish manuscripts and other sources.
-
for
those who like to see as well as hear how the parts
fit together, there's an intavolatura, all the parts put into a "table": you can
even play on a keyboard instrument from it...
Think of these transcriptions as a temporary crutch
you might find helpful until you're functioning properly,
or a bridge which might help you to reach the original
notes, rather than a permanent replacement for them.
The pitch of the music which the notes indicate
isn't fixed as in most music-making today, related to
the a of a piano, @ 440hz - with this music you sing
and play the piece at whatever pitch suits the voices
and instruments you have at hand.
The ranges of the voices don't correspond to soprano-alto-tenor-bass,
either, but rather soprano-alto-alto-tenor, or alto-tenor-tenor-bass.
You can use just voices, just instruments, or a combination
of both. If you have enough people, it's very effective
if you have one group of one sort answered by another
group of a different sort, placed at a distance.
For
example, one group of four recorders and a soft organ
at the front, answered from the back by a solo singer
on the top part with a lute or harp playing the lower
three, then perhaps four stringed instruments with a
spinet or harpsichord to one side, and two groups of
four singers in opposite corners. Two of the groups
might then play or sing together, and the final version
is with all together.
A
section where not all parts are active at once is taken
with one person on each part: so that the phrase beginning
"Son
alliance, c'est ma fiance..." would be soloists, answered by the
tutti at "Puis qu'en
amour i'ay tant de bien": and you'll normally find that this reinforces
the meaning of the words in a very effective rhetoric.
A few details:
- Tenor: the sharp before the e on "age" is there because a renaissance singer would
otherwise be inclined to sing it flat to avoid a melodic
tritone with the previous flat b.
- Superius: the note b at "florissant" and "languissant" is sung sharpened, because the following note
is the end of a phrase, agreeing with the tenor's
sharpened e.
- The
two last notes
are alternative endings: the first of them is the
proper final note, a long, while the whole-note which
is written after the double-bar is used the first
time around, as confirmed by the following custos
- the little mark which shows the height of the following
note.
- The
poem was written,
spoken and sung at a time long before French sounded
as it does in Paris today. If you've heard the rolled
"r" of people speaking in country districts,
you might imitate that rather than the heavily nasal
style and the gutteral "r's" which have
become standard these days. The loveliest French I
ever heard was spoken by people from right near the
Spanish border - I hardly knew whether it was French,
Spanish, Provençal, Catalan or Italian...
"Belle" has two syllables,
"tristesse" has three; final consonants are softly sounded
rather than completely silent, like all three words
in "m'as fait resiouissant".
I've worked from
the 1644 Dutch
reprint of the
'greatest hits' of 16thC. chansons, so some of the spellings are different from
other editions - "faicts" became "fait" and
so on. The facsimile of the part-books is published
at at very reasonable price by Alamire in Belgium:
it's a delightful document and will grace anyone's
bookshelf...
There are more hints on reading and making music
from notes like these in my compendia, Musica
pedagogica practica, Musica
poëtica rediviva and
Musica
calligrafica, and I have
lots more in the pipeline.
This is 'LetMeKnow-ware' - if you
download it, I'd be glad to hear your reactions...
David
Kettlewell
