Notes

Corina Paumann (c.1410-1473) was a blind organist and composer whose gravestone declares him "the most ingenious master of all instruments and music" and shows him surrounded by instruments. That the harp and recorder are two of those instruments may indicate that he played them, as well as the organ. He was a keen improviser, and his intabulations are as beautiful as they are virtuosic. These pieces were originally didactic pieces, taken from his composition manual Fundamentum Organisandi.

Par le regard de vos beaux yeux appears as a composit rondear, incorporating both the original three-voice chanson by the great Burgundian composer Guillaume Dufay and two different contemporary intabulations found in the Buxheimer Orgelbuch.

The manuscript of  Robert ap Huw contains music composed by Welsh harp players in the 14th and 15th centuries. The same bray harp favoured by the German and Franco-Flemish composers, with its buzzing strings, was also the high-art instrument of 15th century Wales. A suite of profiadiau or "provings" presents several minatures, which may have been used as exam pieces within the Welsh bardic curriculum. Profiad cyffredin translates as the "common profiad"; Pwnc ar ol pob profiad as the "Pwnc after every profiad"; Y ddigan y droell as the "Harmony ab Adda ap Dafydd as the "Cainc (or musical strain) of (the 14th-century poet) Gruffudd ab Adda ap Dafydd.

Two Italian bassadanza tunes follow. Falla con misuras, with its cantus firmus of La Spagna, comes from De practica seu arte tripudi vulgare opusculum by Guglielmo Ebreo da Pesaro (c.1429-? after 1484). Bel fiore danca is found in the Faenza Codex, which, along with the Buxheimer Orgelbuch, was one of the most important sources of instrumental music in the 15th century. The bassadanza was characterised by elegant steps low to the ground, as opposed to the more vigorous leaping steps employed in the saltarello.

Francisco Fernandez Palero was for many years an organist at the royal chapel in Granada. The solo tenor recorder first plays the Gregorian hymn Ave Maris Stella, and is joined by the harp in a modal accompaniment. Palero's delicate setting follows. Much of the music in 16th century Spain was published for tecla, arpa & vihuela - for keyboard, harp and vihuela. With a strong tradition of harps playing during the mass in Spanish cathedrals, it is likely that such a duo of harp and recorder might well have played this in Palero's day.

Intabolatura nova di varie sorte de balli was published by Antonio Gardane in 1551 and includes popular dance tunes of the day: passamezzos, galliards, pavans and saltarellos. The passamezzo was a quick dance in duple metre, named pass'e mezo in Gardane's index. It may come from passo e mezzo, meaning "a step and a half". Passamezzo I & II heard here are settings of the "passamezzo moderno", and follow the pattern I-IV-I-V-I-IV-I-V-I. Agalliard, such as the Venetiana Gagliarda, requires five steps (cinq pas) within six beats, and gives rise to the term "syncopation". Hemiola rhythms are often used near the cadences.

Defield is my name is found in a four-voice setting by Robert Johnson, a Scottish preist as well as composer who fled to England in the wake of the Reformation, to the court of Henry VIII. The poem has traditionally been linked to Anne Boleyn, Henry's second wife, but this has since been discredited. Strong and defiant, the poet yearns for justice.

The word port is simply Gaelic for "tune". However, the term seems to have originally applied to ancient melodies played on the lute and the clarsach- the wire-strung Highland harp.They are curious tunes, sometimes unresolved, sometimes angular, and sometimes comic. The unnamed Port comes from the Straloch lute manuscript, one of the few collections of Scottish renaissance instrumental music.

There is no question that music was very important in the court of Henry VIII. The king employed almost sixty musicians, whose names and instruments are listed in court records, including players of viols, sackbuts, flutes, recorders, lutes, virginals and rebecs. Certainly, Henry greatly enjoyed music; he sang, danced and was known to play the organ, the virginals and the lute. The Henry VIII manuscript includes many pieces composed by him, some with and some without texts. The plaintive song Ah Robin, gentle Robin is followed by several instrumental consorts, and concludes with a charming canon.

Palestrina's setting of Ippolito Capilupi's poem Vestiva i colli was published in 1566. Subsequent reprintings of his books of madrigals and motets helped to spread his fame. Francesco Rognoni Taeggio's 1620 virtuosic setting is an excellent example of his own conviction, as expounded in his treatise, Selva de varii passaggi, that beautiful singing should express foremost the text, not excessive ornamentation.

Paul's Steeple is a lively dance tune, which appears in John Playford's first edition of The Dancing Master(1651). The tune dates from just before the Great Fire of London in 1666, and its ongoing popularity was no doubt enhanced by Christopher Wren's magnificent restoration of St. Paul's. The Cathedral precinct was a gathering place for social as well as religious activity, as we discover in James Strutt's Sports and Pastimes of the People of England (1801). He gives an account of rope dancing from the battlements of St.Paul's, before the King Edward VI, as he passed in procession through the city of London, in 1546.

Greensleeves is one of the most famous melodies ever composed. It is based on an Italian renaissance ground, the passamezzo antico or the virtually identical romanesca, having the form III-VII-i-V-III-VII-i-V-I. The tune is likely Elizabethan in origin, and was not written by Henry VIII, as is so often assumed. The text first appears in 1580 as A New Northern Dittye of the Lady Greene Sleeves. The song continued to be extremely popular throughout the 16th and 17th centuries, and is presented as a dance tune in the seventh edition of Playford's Dancing Master(1686).

Both versions of Paul's Steeple and Greensleeves performed here come from The Division Flute, which provides players and listeners with a delightful set of variations, in the same way that the Intabolatura nova and the Buxheimer Orgelbuch in earlier times offered examples of how to improvise on a good melody.