LA ROSSIGNOL (Anonymous) / Marisa Gómez & Ignacio Gea - Renaissance lutes

Описание: Marisa Gómez and Ignacio Gea (renaissance lutes) plays La Rossignol (anonymous, Jane Pickeringe's lute book, 1616).
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Jane Pickeringe's lute book, technically known as British Library manuscript Egerton 2046, is one of the finest sources of the English lute repertory, but it is also an intensely personal and poignantly evocative document. We know nothing of the life of its original owner: indeed it is pure serendipity that we know her name, for the first section of the manuscript has been lost, the damage narrowly missing the folio containing her signature and a date (1616). However, Jane's manuscript still conveys a vivid impression of her musical taste, technical attainment, and even the type of instrument she owned.

If 1616 marked the beginning of Jane's copying, both her musical tastes and her lute were quite conservative. Much of her chosen repertory is late Elizabethan or early Jacobean, and most of it requires a lute with only 6 courses: some 20 pieces require a 7-course lute, and a single piece requires a fashionable 9-course instrument. Her precise and elegant hand fills the first 36 folios, beginning with a selection of duets. This is a characteristic of many didactic anthologies compiled under the guidance of a teacher, but if Jane was learning to play the lute as she filled her book she was precocious indeed, for the very first pieces reveal the hand of a practised scribe, and require some considerable technique in performance. However such a situation could explain the conservative repertory, which would then be largely that of her teacher's generation. Demonstrable musical accomplishment was a skill much prized in young unmarried women, and it is likely that Jane would have been expected to play for her family, friends and potential suitors, as well as, one hopes, for her own enjoyment.

It appears that Jane worked on her collection fairly intensively, stopped for a period, then returned to it briefly some time later, for her distinctive tablature hand is remarkably uniform until folio 35, whereupon it changes abruptly. Only 3 pieces are added in this later writing style, one of them a duplicate of an earlier entry. Did Jane give up her lute playing, perhaps upon marriage, and return to it later in life? We shall probably never know. Most of the great English lute composers of the day - Dowland, Rosseter, Bacheler, Johnson - are represented in this collection, but Jane did not scorn simple, artless trifles, which are sprinkled liberally throughout the manuscript. She copied them into the tiny gaps remaining at the foot of several pages, after more substantial pieces had claimed most of the space, and we are indebted to her for this endearing habit. If Jane and scribes like her had not seized the opportunity offered by a few inches of blank stave, many of these appealing little tunes, drawn from a largely oral tradition, would have been lost for ever. These simple, melodious titbits serve admirably to warm up the fingers, test the tuning, and gently ease the listener into the subtle and intimate soundworld of the lute.