Una Musa Plebea - Everyday Music from Renaissance Italy

The music on this intriguing release does not cover a single genre or repertory. Instead, it attempts to answer the question "What was the local music scene like in Italy when the courts and the rich families were importing top talent from the Low Countries to write intricate polyphony?" The answer involves several kinds of music, and the creators of the album deserve credit for not trying to force it all into a single mold. Some of the music -- light, chordal, sometimes very sexy songs that went by the designation of frottola and other names -- remained popular, and similar examples were cultivated by Josquin and other Flemish-Italian composers. But the other kinds of music on the album have received much less attention. With some variations, it consists of three types. One consists of improvised stanzaic poems called ottave (eight-line stanzas), performed unaccompanied or with very light accompaniment, and sometimes dialogic, with a pair of singers re-creating an established idea. Sometimes the topic is the art of poetic improvisation itself. These performances, according to the extensive notes, fell out of fashion in the 18th century, but the Italian countryside today has yielded survivals of many of the traditions developed over the last millennium, and what's presented here are live recordings of contemporary Tuscan exponents. It's fascinating stuff if you are interested in oral poetry, and among the ultimate descendents of the music heard here are the corridos that issue from the radios in a million Mexican restaurants. There are also solo settings of cultivated Italian poems by the likes of Leonardo Giustinian (track 12), and a variety of mostly anonymous instrumental dances, featuring a richly buzzing hammer dulcimer, to break up the texture. The vocalists and instrumentalists of the Ensemble Lucidarium give attractive performances, but the real novelty is the persistence of a tradition of oral poetry that is centuries old. Recommended for anyone interested in vernacular traditions.