Adults playing recorders? Believe it! When you think of recorders, you may think of kids playing small soprano recorders, but recorders come in a wide range of sizes and shapes and enable performers to play a broad spectrum of music spanning the centuries. Professional and amateur musicians alike perform solo and ensemble music, some written specifically for recorders and some adapted from vocal music or instrumental music.

We open our program with the medieval tune, Alle Psallite, written in three part rondellus form. That is, the top two parts exchange music back and forth, while the repetitive bottom line, called a pes (foot), acts as a musical support for the upper two lines. The version we play and sing today is transcribed from the 13th century Montpellier Codex (France). However, all known examples of music in rondellus form are English and the melody to Alle psallite is found in the 13th century “Worcester Fragments.”

The Abbey of Santa Maria la Real de Huelgas in northern Spain, founded in the 12th century, is the source of the Codex Las Huelgas, comprising 170 parchment folios of works from the 13th and early 14th centuries. Most of the repertory, settings of Latin texts, was composed for the major feasts of the Virgin Mary. The two works that RONY performs today are motets in three parts. In this form of motet, the lowest line, the slow-moving “tenor”, is often based on portions of particular chants, with two upper lines, each with a different text and melody, written both to fit over the tenor line and with each other. The two three-voice motets Salve porta and Castrum Pudicicie are examples of this style. For example, Salve porta takes as its tenor the Marian introit Salve sancta parens, while for Castrum Pudicicie/Virgo viget/Flos filius, the tenor Flos filius is excerpted from ending of an early 12th century chant from France. Margaret Cowden performs the segment of chant that introduces Castrum Pudicicie. A much simpler modern example is the song “You’re Just in Love” by Irving Berlin – the two melodies are performed simultaneously.

C’est la fins by Guillaume d’Amiens dates from the 13th century and is an example of a secular work composed to a poetic text in “virelai” form, one of the three poetic forms of the time often set to music in France. Given our current understanding of historical practice, we augment the single line of music with drones at appropriate pitches, and play as well as sing. The composer was a noted trouvère – an aristocratic poet-musician. Tim Campbell is our lead singer.

The 14th Century Llibre Vermell de Monserrat (Red Book) is the manuscript source for the beautiful O Virgo splendens. The mountaintop abbey of Monserrat, Spain attracted pilgrims seeking the reputedly miraculous powers of its black wooden statue of the Virgin Mary. The monks composed or collected devotional music in her honor to assist the pilgrims, and to publicize the shrine. The music was written to be performed as a canon for two or three voices. We perform it first in unison and then in canon with three vocal lines entering in turn.

French composer Claudin de Sermisy was in the group of highly regarded choirboys at Sainte Chapelle nabbed by Louis XII for his private chapel choir. Sermisy then served French royalty as a singer and composer during the 16th century and directed the musicians and singers of the king’s chapel for several years. Sermisy, one of the most important contributors to the early French publications of polyphonic music was well known for both his religious and non-religious music. His settings of poetry to secular music – chansons – were greatly admired. They were so popular that other composers arranged them for various vocal or instrumental combinations. (In those times this was considered an act of homage, rather than piracy!). Today we perform Sermisy’s chanson Tant que vivray, followed by two dance versions by others – Tanz and Hupfauf.

Orlandus Lassus was one of the greatest composers of sacred music in the late 16th century. As a boy, his singing voice was so admired that he literally was twice abducted from his church school by recruiting agents. Finally his family allowed him to enter the service of a viceroy of Emperor Charles V. Later he was hired as a singer, then served as Kapellmeister at the court of the Duke of Bavaria until his death. His musical style encompassed Franco-Flemish counterpoint and Italian harmony, and one commentator notes that his music ranged from French vivacity to German severity to Venetian opulence. During his lifetime he produced over 2000 works in secular and sacred settings. In common with musical practice of the day he wrote numerous motets – polyphonic settings of sacred Latin texts. Lassus’ musical style was strongly influenced by his dramatic interpretation of texts. His motet Salve Regina which we play today is based on the much older Gregorian chant of the same name.

Composer Tomas Luis de Victoria is considered the greatest Spanish composer of the Renaissance. His musical training as a choirboy at Avila cathedral was followed by studies in Rome. In addition to occupying a variety of musical positions as organist and cantor, he wrote music for church services and served as a priest. He only composed religious music, including masses, motets and other forms of sacred works. His five part motet O Magnum Mysterium is perhaps his most frequently performed work in contemporary times. Today we play his Ascendens Christus in altum (Christ Arose.)

Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck was a Dutch composer, organist and teacher. Not only a famous organist, he was one of the most influential and sought-after teachers of his time and one of the leading composers of vocal as well as of keyboard music. He, his father and his son held the important position of organist of the Oude Kerk, Amsterdam, for nearly 100 years. Sweelinck never traveled far from Amsterdam but his reputation as a teacher attracted pupils from Germany, including Scheidt, Scheidemann and many others. One of Sweelinck’s important vocal collections, the Cantiones sacrae (1619), includes 37 motets on texts from the Catholic liturgy one of which we perform today – the five part Gaude et laetare (Rejoice and be glad).

Johann Sebastian Bach is one of the widely recognized and most revered composers of the late baroque period. Much of his music was written in an older, polyphonic style, but his gift for melody, harmonization and sense of structure looked forward towards the classical era. The emotional and dramatic power of his religious music reaches generations down to the present. Der Hilft unser Schwachheit auf (The spirit also helpeth our infirmities) BWV 226 is one of six motets written for double choir that were composed for important civic funerals. The opening andante in 3/8 time is clearly double choir (8 parts) in form, but as the work progresses into an allegro in 4/4 time, the two choirs begin to merge and, for the alla breve and chorale sections, the writing is in four parts. The final chorale section is taken from a work by Martin Luther. The instrumental parts were written to double the vocal lines and we perform it here in a setting for recorders.

Noted English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams was born in 1872 in Gloucestershire. Though his parents belonged to the privileged intellectual upper middle class, Vaughan Williams worked all his life for the democratic and egalitarian ideals in which he believed. His education at the Royal College of Music and Cambridge University were followed by studies with many important composers of his day. Although he wrote opera, symphonies and the like, he was particularly drawn to English folk music. Vaughan Williams realized that folk songs were rapidly dying out owing to the decline of oral tradition in rural areas. He travelled the countryside, transcribing and preserving many songs himself. Later he incorporated some into his own music, being fascinated by the beauty of the music and its unrecorded history in the working lives of ordinary people. The English Folk Song Suite is one of his most famous works for military band. We play the first movement, a march based on folk tunes -- “Seventeen come Sunday” plus the tunes “Pretty Caroline” and the rollicking “Dives and Lazarus,” a tour de force that pits high instruments playing in relentless 6/8 time against the rest of instruments in duple meter.

Eileen Silcocks, contemporary British composer, teacher, recorder player and conductor, has written several works for recorder ensemble. We play her five part Fantasia, written for the opening of an art exhibition by Susanne Schnabel in 2008. Silcocks writes “I particularly liked the way that she uses white in her work, and that was the inspiration for this short piece.” One of Schnabel’s paintings is reproduced on the program cover.

As Time Goes By is a song written by Herman Hupfeld for the 1931 Broadway musical, “Everybody's Welcome.” In the original show it was performed by jazz singer, tap dancer and actress Frances Williams. That same year it was recorded by several artists, including Rudy Vallee. The song was re-introduced in 1942 in the film Casablanca, sung by Dooley Wilson and a re-issue of Rudy Vallee's 1931 recording became a major seller. Later the song was performed by many artists, including Billie Holiday, Perry Como, Frank Sinatra, Barbra Streisand, Carly Simon, Tony Bennett, and Willie Nelson. Hupfeld was born into a musical family in 1894 and as a child, studied violin in Germany. Later he was a saxophonist in the US Navy Band. In the early ‘30’s he had a string of songwriting successes and later made radio and stage appearances and entertained the troops during WWII.

Nancy M. Tooney