Bicinia and Love Villancicos in the Uppsala Songbook. "Villancicos (songs) by various composers for two, three, four and five voices, now freshly revised..." (Venice, 1556) - this is the name under which the Duke of Calabria's Songbook (or the Uppsala Songbook) was printed. The selection of villancicos it contains is grouped under three themes: popular songs and pastoral songs; Christmas carols, and love songs. In this album we can listen to a selection from this songbook of works for two and three voices, some of them instrumental works under the title 'Polyphonic song themes", which are structured as exercises in composition around Gregorian techniques.
Leonardo da Vinci's grotesque heads place us far from the search for beauty, in a world at odds with form (deformity) and the norm (abnormality). Is there music in that world? Music –which is, by definition, harmony– has historically found a role in the world of the grotesque thanks to its eternal symbiosis with the word and the body. This grotesque music program dives into those sources.
Ever since its foundation in 1987, the Capella de Ministrers ensemble, directed by Carles Magraner, has developed an important investigative and musicological task in favor of the musical Spanish patrimony, from the medieval times up to the 19th century. The result transformed into musical testimony, brings together the perfection of three key factors: the historical rigor, the musical sensibility and, specially, an uncontrollable desire to communicate and they make us participants of these experiences.
Ibn Hazm of Córdoba: El collar de la paloma / Magraner, Capella de Ministrers
Capella De Minstrers
CD
$20.99Apr 22, 2022
All the works on this release are modal improvisations (mawwal) or adaptations of instrumental music, anonymous Arabic-Andalusian classical and traditional songs. Poet Ibn Hazm of Córdoba was born in 994 and lived through the most critical years of Islamic al-Andalus. His era witnessed the break-up of the Caliphate and the formation of taifas, which inevitably hastened the decline of Moslem power in the Iberian peninsula. He was a privileged witness of these events, and he records them with a rich and prolific, encyclopedic opus. The Ring of the Dove is an eleventh century prose work written in Arabic by Ibn Hazm. The full title of the work is The Ring of the Dove, On Love and Lovers. The title reflects the custom in the Arabic literature of the period to create ornamental titles: a dove is pretty, but it is the ring that allows it to achieve optimal beauty.
