The CD

Source: Oxford Bodleian Library Ms.Can.Pat.lat.229

This anonymous mass movement – with two descants moving above a framework of tenor and contratenor may have been performed during the Council of Pisa in Milan Cathedral. Colleges of as few as 8 to 12 musicians could make vast rooms resound with the overtone richness of their singing to vielles as well as wind, plucked and percussion instruments.

Source: Cortona VI

The Italian lauda of the 14th and 15th centuries originated at and around the University of Perugia before quickly spreading to the towns of Umbria and Tuscany. It represented the musical expression of a radical movement of opposition to the papal churches of Rome and Avignon that had forfeited their claim to universality and their authority through their schism, mutual excommunications, simony, unashamed grasping after money and power, abuse of office and failure to meet the pastoral challenges posed by the devastating plagues and wars that beset the region at that time.

Feeling themselves abandoned by the church, the faithful chose instead to build upon the legacy of Francis of Assisi. Embracing the poverty movement of his minorites, and having no more use for priests and churches, they celebrated their faith in new popular forms of piety, in the vernacular, in town squares. The emphasis was upon community singing and dancing. The songs had choruses or riprese that everyone could sing along to, so the pattern was one of alternation, with the precentor delivering the often sermon-like verses solo, and the congregation joining in and dancing during the refrain.

This lauda tells the part of the Christmas story that deals with the Annunciation by the Archangel Gabriel. It is taken from the Cortona Laudario of 1320.

Source: Codex Chantilly c. 1390

The voice leading of this ballad is such as to allow each of the three voices – cantus, tenor and contratenor – the greatest possible rhythmic and melodic freedom. Its dense interweaving with improvisational freedoms in the contratenor sets the melodies in the closest proportions of harmony and time to one another. The principle of minor distantia shapes the avant–garde character of the song: a tree moves in the wind, its trunk, branches, twigs and leaves finding their proportions in God's Gesamtkunstwerk, which the composer attempts to recreate.

The result is this ballade, written around the turn of the fifteenth century by an anonymous composer of the ars subtilior school, in which the poet contrasts the fickleness of his own mistress with the devotion of the sorceress Medea, the daughter of a king, who helped her lover, Jason, steal the Golden Fleece from her native Colchis, sacrificing family and home to follow him to Greece and the catastrophe of poison, murder and fire.

Sequences are considered the first contributions of free non–liturgical music to the choreography of the Mass, often to the offertory. They were handed down soon after in the form of virtuoso instrumental works. A tonal bridge in the improvisation of instrumental music between Arabic origins and European adaptation in the Middle Ages.

In the skilful simplicity of its two-part harmony, the melody, played on the organetto, speaks the language of ars nova – a style largely shaped by Guillaume de Machaut.

An elaborate 3–part setting of the Gloria above the original melody. The tradition of constructing entire masses on the elaboration of a well-known melody reached its zenith in the quattrocento, continuing into the Renaissance. Zacharias based some of these settings of the mass upon his own melodies, which had apparently developed into major "hits" of the day.

Source: Squarcialuoi Codex

A subtle ballata by Don Paolo da Firenze, probably also attributed to his teacher, the blind Florentine organettist Francesco Landini. An exhilarating, spirited piece of dance music in a tarantella-like three-step known as the tripudio.

Philipotus, one of the leading exponents of the so–called ars subtilior musical style mentions in a letter "the joyful cantilenas the young folk sing". Admittedly the focus of De ma dolour is upon the pain that love must bring a young man. Perhaps we hear the sounds of that time differently today? And hear only the melancholy of the songs? Or should we consider new ways of interpreting them?

"Let all men with a loud voice / praise the true cross!"

The legend of the true holy cross which, according to a relic legend, washed ashore at Pisa. This lauda recounts the Passion of Christ in response to this miracle.

Secular 3-part ballata based on the original melody. Zacharias has buried a riddle in the text:
"O the first breath, / a twofold rhyme, / twice fifty, then again the first"
The key to the riddle, which this recording also elucidates, is the word AMARYLLIS.

Jacopo da Bologna's madrigal Aquila altera/Creatura gentil/Uccel di Dio is found in the magnificent Codex Squarcialupi. Although the song may have been heard in 1360 at the marriage of Giangaleazzo Visconti of Milan (beneath the emblem of the eagle) to Princess Isabella of Valois (whose emblem was the dove), Jacobus da Bononia introduces into the contemporary discourse of musicians and poets about the truthfulness and value of their art the analogy of an "awe-inspring eagle", who, from an immeasurable altitude, enjoys a panoramic view, can look directly into the sun, and acknowledges only those of its young as can do the same, rejecting the incapable; that is its "justicia", its justice. With an eye no less severe, such is the implication, should contemporary art be judged.

Amid the virtuoso interludes and diminuitions of the treble instrument, a medieval flauto dolce, the outline of the song melody is only still discernible in the tenor – an example of the high art of improvisation of the late Middle Ages. There is a bridge here to the playing practices of the minstrels and Arab musicians of southern Italy but more especially the Iberian Peninsula.

The Marian Antiphon is usually sung as part of the office of compline; it dates from the 11th century. The soggetto at the beginning of the antiphon recalls the original melody of Un fior gentil. Salve Regina is regarded as the "green" antiphon; it is sung throughout the summer from Pentecost to Advent: one of the central melodies in the liturgical year.

A three–part lauda by Arnold de Lantins, a native of Flanders who began his career in Italy as a papal singer alongside Dufay, later winning fame as a musician at various courts as well as in Venice. In the ripresa and piedi of the responsory, this lauda praises the miraculous attributes of Mary, the Mother of God, made manifest in the virgin birth and her role as the central patron saint – this at a time when schism, simony, abuse of power and moral turpitude had robbed the church's male hierarchy of all credibility in the eyes of churchgoers. To this, the unifying figure of the Mother of God, the Madonna of the Sheltering Mantle, is presented here as the female antithesis

This motet by the papal musician reflects music and the world on three levels: forming the foundation, the sacred tenor; then the dance of the stars of the zodiac in the sound of their proportions to each other, and finally a list of the musicians of the papal court at Avignon – some of whom perhaps were even singing and playing this motet – detailing their peculiarities and merits. According to this contemporary view, the musician is attempting in his work, with the limited means at his disposal, to reenact God's creation of the world.

The motet is heard first in its three–part version: to the "sacred" tenor and the contratenor of the zodiac is added the duplum with the sung list of musicians : "Apollo's light is never eclipsed / when he accepts the guidance of the twelve signs of the zodiac,"

In this five-voice polyphonic setting, the various lyrical levels coalesce, with the quadruplum instrumental, and the triplum Pantheon abluitur being added to the duplum Apollinis eclipsatur. "The Pantheon, temple of false gods, is purified and established in its place the Church of Saints".

The underlying "sacred" tenor of Psalm 18:5 of the Vulgate ("In omnem terram") is only quoted but not sung: "Their sound has gone out into all lands, and their words to the ends of the world."

The programme of the work brings our journey to an end: the metamorphosis of the original melody into the dance of the stars of the zodiac, as seen by Bernard de Cluny.