Choir organ and fascitol (choir book stand) at Puebla’s cathedral (Undated photo)
Music from Spain and the New World: music by Ribera and Padilla
VOICES
Tutor: Clive Walkley
Location: St Mark’s Church, Natland
Reviewer: Valerie Pedlar
Over the years I’ve become accustomed to doing all sorts of exercises before singing: physical exercises, vocal exercises, exercises for articulation, exercises for pronunciation…but at St Mark’s Church, Natland Clive Walkley added a mental exercise to our vocal warm-up: singing up and down the scale to numbers, but missing out one, and then two notes (and numbers) going up and – even trickier – going back down. It was surprisingly difficult, but fun too, calling for the sort of mental agility that is needed in sight-singing.
St Mark’s is a lovely church to sing in, with a warm acoustic and some beautiful stained glass windows, two of which I learned had been made by Clive and Jill’s daughter. We were a group of about 20, reasonably balanced (though testing for the sopranos when they had to divide into 3 parts), and after the exercises Clive took us through music which I certainly hadn’t encountered before. I don’t think many others had either, so it was a good test of our sight-singing.
The purpose of the workshop was to explore music by Bernadino de Ribera (c.1520-after 1580) and Juan Gutiérrez de Padilla (c.1590-1664). Ribera’s first important post was in Avila, where he would no doubt have had dealings with the young Victoria, but the two motets we sang date from his time at the cathedral of Toledo, where a choirbook of his music was put together. This choirbook has been severely mutilated, but six motets have been recovered and it was two of these that we rehearsed in editions prepared by Bruno Turner.
The first, Regina caeli laetare, was fairly joyful: a polyphonic piece, making use of imitation, with smoothly flowing lines, nothing extreme, nothing unexpected – a pleasure to sight-sing. At this point, there was an interesting discussion about the nature and current vandalised state of some of the choirbooks that have come down to us, and about the difference between performance practice then – insofar as one can discover it – and now.
The second motet by Ribera, Rex autem David, was in a different mood. Like those well-known motets by Weelkes and Tomkins, it sets words of David’s mourning for Absalon. Here there was particular interest in the accidentals suggested by Bruno Turner. As Clive explained, accidentals weren’t usually written into scores of Renaissance music, since the singers (or players) would have just known when a note should be sharpened or flattened. However, in the case of Rex autem David, matters are more complicated because Turner has drawn on two sources for the music, the Toledo choirbook and Valencia partbooks, and the Valencia source does contain a number of accidentals, which if observed give the music a chromatic intensity to match the emotion of the words. His conclusion is that, whether intended by the composer or not, some choirs would have given the repetitions of ‘Absalon’ chromatic flavouring. We sang the motet both with and without the accidentals. It was an interesting exercise, which showed us just how much difference they made.
For most of the afternoon we worked on a Mass by Padilla, not his relatively well-known Missa Ego flos campi, but a Missa sine nomine. Written for the cathedral of Puebla, he sets it for double choir, higher voices in choir 1 (SSAT) and the usual SATB in choir 2. The music contrasts polyphony with homophonic passages, makes lively use of exchanges between the two choirs and is characterised by vigorous, syncopated rhythms and off-beat entries. At times, for instance in the second Kyrie, one could feel the liveliness of South American dance rhythms. Padilla’s writing even gives energy to the Credo, which is helpful when there are so many words to get through. But it does entail a curiously jolly setting of the words ‘Crucifixus etiam pro nobis, sub Pontio Pilato, passus et sepultus est’. I was reminded of a piece I had sung earlier this year in Lisbon, a dancelike setting of words about Christ’s suffering on the cross. I seem to remember Carlos Aransay, our conductor in Lisbon, saying that such a disjunction between words and music is not unusual in Spanish Renaissance music.
As is customary at the workshops run by NWEMF we ended the day by running through all the music we had been rehearsing – far from blemish free, but enormously satisfying.
Valerie Pedlar
First published in December 2014 Newsletter
