Happy Palm Sunday! Apologies for the hiatus on this blog, it's been a busy couple of months- but the commission's done, and now I'm free to move on with other musical projects.
In terms of composing, I've been fleshing out a concept for the arrangements of 15th-century songs. I've decided to centre the project around three New Years' Day songs: Dufay's Estrinez moy + Ce jour de l'an, and Guillaume Malbecque's Dieu vous doinst bon jour et demy. Each would have two parts: one where the song's musical material is introduced fully, and one part where the seperate melodic bits of each song are put into new contexts. Exactly what that entails, I'm not sure yet, but this is certainly a starting point...
As for an update on finding the Hans Schoop rundown of Oxford 213... I couldn't find it. Oh well. I'll have to look a bit harder, but in the meantime I will see how many untexted passages in Ox213 are set apart by rests. An adjunct friend recommended it as a project about a semester ago, on the basis that it would have implications for whether these were intended to be texted (aka sung by vocalists) or not (aka played on instruments). My own opinion, at least for now, is that it doesn't really tell us anything about performance practice, but that it does make for convenient transitions if the untexted parts are performed instrumentally. At the same time, I'm also interested in looking into whether texted contratenors necessarily correlate with imitation/high levels of interaction between all 3 voices in some songs. This one has implications for whether contratenor parts, texted or not, ought to be sung vocally in general, or whether it only matters for songs that require the contratenor to engage closely with the other two voices. Off to making spreadsheets it is...
So yesterday I was in a performance of Bach's St John's Passion, and it also was my first time hearing the entire thing in one go. So pardon me if this week's find is not exactly new: Zerfließe, mein Herze is a beautiful aria, and I'm almost mad I didn't choose to play continuo for this one, having only found out about it in full runs...