The Music of Juan Gutiérrez de Padilla
Tutor: Clive Walkley
Friends Meeting House, Meeting House Lane, Lancaster, LA1 1TX
VOICES & INSTRUMENTS (A=440)
The venue is close to Lancaster Rail Station. Car parking is in the station car park. On this occasion the workshop is for singers in all voice ranges (sometimes 3 soprano parts), and players of viols, cornetts, sackbuts, recorders (tenor downwards) and other similar instruments (A=440).
TIMETABLE
10.00 Arrival and registration
10.30 First session
12.45 Lunch break
14.00 Afternoon session (there will be a short tea break)
17.00 Conclusion
The Music
This workshop provides singers and instrumentalists with an opportunity to perform some of the exciting and rhythmically challenging music by the Spanish composer Juan Gutiérrez de Padilla. Although Padilla spent the best part of his creative life in Mexico, he is Spanish by birth. He was born in Málaga, probably in 1590, and was trained there by the cathedral’s maestro de capilla, Francisco Vásquez. In 1612 he became maestro at the collegiate church in Jérez de la Frontera. As was common in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, he ran into difficulties with the church authorities – the chapter (cabildo). Maybe for this reason he moved to Cádiz cathedral in 1616 where he is recorded in the cathedral’s capitular acts as being an ordained priest.
At some stage, Padilla crossed over to the New World: in 1622 he is recorded as a singer and assistant maestro at Puebla cathedral. In 1629, following the death of the director, Gaspar Fernandes, he was promoted to the post of maestro and spent the rest of his life serving the cathedral in Puebla. It is clear that the composer was highly regarded for, in October 1663, the cathedral chapter ordered that his compositions should be put in good order: all his Latin works were to be bound and the loose parts of his vernacular villancicos were to be placed in folders.
Puebla was clearly a wealthy establishment, for Padilla had what was in the 17th century a large choir of twenty-eight men, fourteen boys and a body of instrumentalists. Many of his works are for double choir, perhaps written in this form to accommodate the large forces available to him. But alongside these works for double choir there are smaller-scale Latin-based pieces: motets, hymns, responsories, two Lamentation settings and a Matthew Passion.
The main work to be studied is Padilla’s Missa sine nomine which is a good example of his exuberant double choir style of writing: there are frequent rhythmic exchanges between the two choirs, frequent syncopations and off-beat entries. The rapid repetitions of dotted rhythms make the music exciting to listen to and keep performers on their toes!
Other music to be studied:
Two Marian responsories: Sancta et immaculata; & Felix namque
Salve Regina
Invitatory: Deus in adiutorium meum intende
Motet: Versa est in luctum
The Tutor
Clive Walkley studied at Trinity College of Music and London University After a period of secondary school teaching in Bradford, he was appointed Lecturer in Music at the former Charlotte Mason College, Ambleside. In 1974 he was seconded for a three-year period to work on an educational research project at Reading University, developing materials to aid the teaching and learning of music in primary schools. After his return to Cumbria he continued to lecture at Charlotte Mason College before ending his teaching career as a part-time lecturer at St Martin’s College, Lancaster, and Lancaster University.
Clive is best known throughout Cumbria as the founder and conductor of the chamber choir the Pro Nobis Singers, now in its 55th year; he is also a cellist and organist. He is a former chairman of NWEMF and directed the annual Summer School for over 20 years. His interest in Spanish Renaissance church music goes back many years and has led to published articles and choral editions and the publication in 2010 of a book on the music of Juan Esquivel, a long-forgotten master of the period.
