Old German tunes

[Gelsenbury]

One of my favourite CDs is a collection of German dance music from around 1600, ingeniously entitled "Tanzmusik um 1600". There's something special about these tunes, like a greeting from the Holy Roman Empire reminding us that people already loved music then.

I have learnt one of these tunes by playing along with the CD. The composer is Erasmus Widmann (1572–1634) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erasmus_Widmann) and the CD gives the title as "Daenz und Gaillarden: Sophia / Anna". It seems to be a clever set of two distinct tunes, in an A-minor-ish key that I don't quite understand.

I'd be grateful if one of the resident experts could tell me what sort of tune or dance this represents. I know that my tremolo needs work and that I snap at the strings because the camera makes me nervous! I made a special effort with the costume though. I feel as if I should be on a set of playing cards!



From the same CD, this is a piece of which I accidentally found the notation in a friend's piano book. The composer here is Johann Hermann Schein (1586-1630) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Schein), and the tune is the Allemande from Suite Nr. 5 in G. I have previously posted this in the "Medieval Mandolin" social group.



With musical greetings from the past!

[Martin Jonas]

Nice tunes, nicely played -- you're getting a good tone on these. On tunes like this, my choice would be not to play any tremolo, and that should also help with fluency as you're wavering a bit when you brace yourself for the next tremolo note. These are dance tunes, so play positive and rhythmic, with a good strong pulse.

I like German music from that period, circa 1600-1620, which doesn't have a very high profile (with the possible exception of Michael Praetorius) but prepared the way for the Baroque explosion of German musical excellence about to follow.

One of my favourites is Paul Peuerl (1570-after 1625), who merged Italian dance styles with German ones and pioneered the variation suite, a hybrid of dance suite and theme/variation compositions. His suites had four parts: a Padouan (i.e. pavane), an Intrada, a "Dantz" and a Galliarda. This essay suggests that the Intrada/Dantz pair was intended as a more distinctly German counterpart to the then-fashionable Italian pavane/galliard pairing, with the Intrada slower and less energetic than the Dantz.

The Widmann Dantz and Galliard you've learned would then correspond to uptempo dance movements, one in the German and the other in the Italian style. They come from Widmann's 1613 collection "Musicalischer Tugendtspiegel gantz neuer Gesäng (Daentz und Gaillarden)". IMSLP has the score for one of the two tunes you've recorded, Sophia. There is a collection of all twenty of the Widmann dances for recorder quartet here, but without the individual names.

Here are two Peuerl recordings I've made in the past, both from his seminal 1611 collection of suites:

1) Variation Suite No. 2 (Padouan, Intrada, Dantz and Galliarda variations of the same basic melody):



2) Padouan IX and XIII (just the Padouan movement from Suites Nos. 3 and 4):



Another one I like is Valentin Haussmann (c. 1560 - c.1614) -- here is a Pavan and Galliard pair of variations on "Go From Your Window" (an English tune given a German treatment):



Music to all of these is at IMSLP.

Martin

[brunello97]

Thanks, Gentlemen, nice stuff.

Always something new from you, Martin. Pavane ~ Padovana ~ Paduana? Feeling dopey now, but I had no idea. My godparents were Paduanas (I suppose their name was Ellis Islandified) and so I've always had connection to the city. Not to mention St. Anthony and of course the Arena / Scrovegni Chapel.

My prayer book from church when I was a kid was illustrated with Giotto paintings. I couldn't read yet, but I poured over every detail in those pictures.

Nice little loop closed this morning, amigo.

Mick

[JeffD]

Very nice stuff.

[Jim Garber]

Thanks for posting these tunes. I have a folio of some German dance tunes arranged for two mandolins -- I will have to check to see what the title is when I get home.

[Bertram Henze]

You're definitely looking very authentic in that attire Dennis. I second Martin's suggestion to go without tremolo, mainly because these tunes are somehow associated with fingerstyle instruments like the lute or theorbo in my mind.

Mick, the more probable (in my book) etymological source for "Pavane" is the Latin word "pavo" (peacock), because of the pacing character of the dance.

[Jim Garber]

Pavane ~ Padovana ~ Paduana? Feeling dopey now, but I had no idea. My godparents were Paduanas (I suppose their name was Ellis Islandified) and so I've always had connection to the city.[/URL].

[QUOTE=Bertram Henze;1285984Mick, the more probable (in my book) etymological source for "Pavane" is the Latin word "pavo" (peacock), because of the pacing character of the dance.[/QUOTE]

Wikipedia agrees with you both...

The origin of this term is not known. Possibilities include the word being

from Italian "[danza] Padovana", meaning "[dance] typical of Padua" (as in Bergamask); this is consistent with the equivalent form, "Paduana",[1]
or from the Spanish pavón meaning peacock (Sachs 1937, 356),
though the dance was "almost certainly of Italian origin" (Brown 2001).

[brunello97]

Wikipedia agrees with you both...

One thing I've learned around here is never to doubt Martin.....

Mick

[Gelsenbury]

You're definitely looking very authentic in that attire Dennis.

I do sometimes think that I was born a few centuries too late. The costume was a gift from my friends at my stag party. My task was to dress up and serenade innocent passers-by with poetry and mandolin music. It seemed like a good occasion to get it back out.

I'm practising my tremolo at the moment, so that's how it got into the tune. I agree with you and Martin, I'll leave it out in the future. The CD track from which I learnt the tune has a lot of woodwind instruments with high sustain on these notes. We don't really have a way to emulate that on the mandolin.

[Bertram Henze]

I do sometimes think that I was born a few centuries too late.

Some of us may have been there, done that at the time - no way to find out. But a person's attachment to a certain music style is certainly not a coincidence.

[scifi]

Thank you for the inspiration :-) I gonna try some of that stuff on the OM.