Musica cortesana en la Europa de Juana I de Castilla

The recordings of Iberian Renaissance music by the Spanish group Musica Antigua and its leader, Eduardo Paniagua, tend to be enthusiastic attempts at historical authenticity rather than ascents to the idealized realm of a Jordi Savall -- call Paniagua a Spanish David Munrow. The booklet for this disc is packed with information, with two separate essays that overlap each other. And look at the back cover, which proposes two different titles: "Music of the Court in the Europe of Juana I of Castile" and "The Royal Courts of Europe and Songbooks." The two concepts don't really contradict each other, but the listener new to the music is likely to be a bit overwhelmed. The big picture here is that music in a powerful European court in the time of Spain's Juana I (who ascended the throne in 1505), with royal families linked in an international web of marriages and alliances (Juana's husband was Austrian), would come from all over the continent. Cultural exchange was facilitated by the invention of music printing in the years after 1500; songs and dances were collected into songbooks that traveled easily, and Mille regretz, a song by Franco-Flemish Josquin Desprez, made its way to Spain and became the favorite of Juana's son, Carlos I, later Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. Those who sort through the information, or just ignore it, will find a pleasing collection of predominantly instrumental music here; there are a few famous vocal pieces, including Mille regretz and Heinrich Isaac's Innsbruck, ich muss dich lassen, that would have been known all over Europe, for precisely the reasons above, at the time. Paniagua's basic position is that "Renaissance composers leave nearly all the performance details to the discretion of the musicians and the singers." He offers a variety of instrumentation deduced from artwork showing musicians, some of which is beautifully reproduced in the booklet. Hammered stringed instruments, viols, lutes, and recorders are brought together in various combinations; hear the dulcimer in track 1, the anonymous British My Lady Carey's Dompe, for an example of the enjoyable variety of instrumental timbres on display. As also occurred in Italy, Spanish music of the early sixteenth century split into learned styles imported from the north and simpler, more homophonic local styles -- which were not necessarily thought of as less sophisticated. A little Spanish tune known as "La spagnola" (spelled many ways) spread all over Europe; a set of six lute versions of it by Milanese lutenist Juanambrosio Dalza is heard here, scattered around the disc and breaking up the sequence of polyphonic pieces. Both entertaining and educational, this disc would make ideal listening for anyone headed for Spain on vacation. A note to DJs: the timings given in the tracklist are not consistently accurate.