Bergen County Chapter American Recorder Society October 2016 Chapter News Next Meeting: TAKE NOTE: Due to includes The Recorder Or- Wednesday Rosh Hashanah our Octo- chestra of New York October 5, 2016 ber meeting will be on the (RONY) from 2004 to 2008 Date Coach At 8:00PM first Wednesday in Octo- and conducting a yearly ber. highly successful Mass Ap- 10/5/16 Deborah Booth peal for Make Music New Meetings are held at: Our October conductor is 11/09/16 Wendy Powers York. Please come out to Congregation Adas Emuno Deborah Booth. Deborah is our October for a wonderful an active recorder and flute 12/14/16 Susan Hellauer 254 Broad Avenue evening of music-making. Leonia, NJ 07605 performer of historical and 1/11/17 Larry Lipnik modern instruments. Deb- At October’s meeting volun- orah teaches in New York teers for refreshments after 2/8/17 Deborah Booth There is a $10.00 suggested City, Greenwich, CT, directs the meeting are Reita (food) 3/8/17 Pat Neely donation for non-members. the Princeton Recorder and Ellen (drinks). Academy, and has taught and April No meeting Please take note of the date For Information contact: played each summer at the in April for our annual work- 4/29/17 Workshop Reita Powell, President Amherst Early Music Festi- shop. We already have four val and numerous other sum- 201-944-2027 great teachers lined up: Val- 5/17/17 Susan Hellauer mer festivals such as Pine- [email protected] erie Horst, Deborah Booth, woods Early Music Week. 6/14/17 Adas Emuno Larry Lipnik, and Daphna Mideast Workshop, and the Carl Peter, Editor Mor. Also note that there Concert? Long Island Recorder Festi- will be no regular chapter 201-837-1071 val. Conducting experience [email protected] meeting in April. Composer of the Month Costanzo Festa than forty motets, thirty for five voices, his style hymns, thirteen Magnificats, sometimes harked back to (c.1480 - 1545) Guest litanies for double choir, and the chansons of Josquin; Costanzo Festa was an Ital- a large quantity of madrigals. some such madrigals are Conductor ian composer. He served the He was one of the principal written for very low voice d'Avalos family on Ischia composers (and again one of ranges, suggesting solo per- around 1510 and then seems the few native Italians) in the formance with instrumental Deborah to have studied with Mouton generation of early madrigal- support. Festa contributed in Paris. In 1517 he entered ists. Though one volume of two ceremonial madrigals to Booth the service of the Papal his madrigals is for three the Duke of Florence's wed- chapel in Rome as a singer, voices, the majority are for ding entertainment in 1539. remaining there until his four, and are characteristic of He was a distinguished sa- death. He was one of the few the early madrigal in their cred polyphonist, skilfully native Italians in the choir, combination of imitative and varying his writing between which was at this time domi- chordal writing. Festa took pervading imitation, non- nated by musicians from up the fashion for note nere- imitative counterpoint and northern Europe. madrigals (i.e. with black chordal passages. notes, thus faster crotchet Festa's surviving output in- www.hoasm.org movement). Where he wrote cludes four Masses, more October 2016 Bergen County Chapter Page 2 American Recorder Society The Rackett The rackett or Sausage Bas- bores are drilled. These are front seven holes of the family as given by Praetorius soon is a Renaissance-era connected alternately at the crumhorn and blends well are: tenor alt: g to C; bass: c double reed wind instrument, top and bottom, resulting in a with recorders and krum- to FF; great bass: A to DD or introduced late in the six- long, cylindrical wind pas- horns, but with the hands G to CC. The range could be teenth century and already sage placed extended upward by several superseded by bassoons at within a side by more notes since the renais- the end of the seventeenth com- side. sance rackett overblows at century. pact Addi- the twelfth like a clarinet. body tional Praetorius writes in Syn- There are four sizes of rack- which holes tagma Musicum II: "if a ett, in a family ranging from being are cov- rackett is well drilled and is discant (soprano), tenor-alto, able to ered by played by a good musician, it bass to great bass. Relative to carry in the then can be made to produce their pitch, racketts are quite one's thumbs a few more tones." The three small (the discant rackett is pocket an instrument that and second joint of the index extant renaissance racketts only 4½ inches long, yet its will descend as low in pitch finger in order to extend the are housed in two European lowest note is G, an octave as a modern bassoon. range a perfect fourth below collections; one is in the and a perfect fourth below the nominal scale, like the Musikinstrumenten Museum However, its unusual con- middle C). This is achieved curtal. Thus the discant rack- in Leipzig, and two are in the struction requires its finger- through its ingenious con- ett is considered to be in C, Kunsthistorisches Museum ing to be somewhat different struction; the body consists but its range covers a perfect in Vienna. from other period wood- of a solid wooden cylinder twelfth from d' to G. The winds; it is similar to the into which nine parallel ranges for the rest of the Renaissance Music The invention of the printing process. Demand for music bility and prosperity in the years earlier. Opera, a dra- press in 1440 made it as entertainment and as a Low Countries, along with a matic staged genre in which cheaper and easier to distrib- leisure activity for educated flourishing system of music ute music and musical theory amateurs increased with the education in the area's many texts on a wider geographic emergence of a bourgeois churches and cathedrals al- scale and to more people. class. Dissemination of chan- lowed the training of large sons, motets, numbers of singers, instru- and masses mentalists and composers. throughout These musicians were highly Europe coin- sought throughout Europe, cided with the particularly in Italy, where unification of churches and aristocratic p o l y p h o n i c courts hired them as compos- practice into ers, performers and teachers. the fluid style Since the printing press made which culmi- it easier to disseminate singers are accompanied by nated in the printed music, by the end of instruments, arose at this second half of the 16th century, Italy had time in Florence. Opera was Prior to the invention of the sixteenth century in the absorbed the northern musi- developed as a deliberate printing, songs and music work of composers such as cal influences, with Venice, attempt to resurrect the mu- that were written down and Giovanni Pierluigi da Pal- Rome, and other cities be- sic of ancient Greece (OED music theory texts had to be estrina, Orlande de Lassus, coming centers of musical 2005). hand-copied, a time- Thomas Tallis and William activity. This reversed the https://en.wikipedia.org consuming and expensive Byrd. Relative political sta- situation from a hundred .