As always, one of the best UA-cam channels out there. As an opera conductor, who has conducted many originals, translated, and also altered versions to fit the desires of directors, this video serves as a proof that these kind of alterations always existed. Thanks for the job.
That 4 part publishing was for singers to read using one central candle. Oh , i never knew that. Thank you a million times for that . A truly grounbreaking piece of research
Thank you, Maestro! Another great lesson on a rarely talked about topic. But above all: Beautiful music, executed to perfection by the most beautiful of voices! Thanks again to you and the ensemble!
This broadens my cultural and historical horizons, painting delicate nuances onto the subjective and objective canvas of reality. Thanks! Oh, and the production quality is amazing! Easy to consume, fun to watch and very engaging!
I really enjoy watching your videos. Please consider making a presentation on the variations on the song "Sonata sopra La Monica" by Biagio Marini. Or a presentation on Monteverdi's Vespro della Beata Virgine.
Wonderful timing! I'm currently working on a singable translation of Ecco mormorar l'onde from italian to portuguese for my final graduation paper. These sources will surely help with the historical background part of my paper. Wonderful video as always!
Elam, congratulations for 8 years of EMS next February 28. I have been a follower, not as frequently a I would have loved, but I have shared with you, one or two anecdotes of my harpsichord student years, more than 50 years ago, with a Landowska pupil, and of my Mexican baroque keyboard music (sometimes reference is made to organ, but in other cases no reference is made to a specific instrument (any in the plucked strings -harpsichord- family or clavichord. Besides the delight of your generous and carefully chosen stories, I was very leased to learn that I was not a loner, and many more people than I thought, have a fervent passion for early music. Muchas gracias!
7:47 Watson may have been very subtle here. The Italian 'fior[i]' can mean 'musical ornaments' (as you know) unlike English 'flowers' . Substituting the English word 'play' on the melisma is a nice touch.
First time in the channel… I’m impressed and absolutely delighted! Thanks for sharing this knowledge with us. I’ve already attempted translating sacred music from other languages into mine (Brazilian Portuguese), and the conclusions I arrived at about the limitations are all in this video. It was so interesting to see how long these issues have been faced by translators and how similar they were to mine! Congratulations on the excellent work!
On Vecchi's So ben mi ch'ha bon tempo! I was was just looking at that a couple weeks ago. It's 4 voices with lute. The lute part supplies the third on the cadences, but almost every vocal version has just a rather early-ish-sounding cadence of pure 5ths. But Morley's version allows the 5th voice to take the role of the lute and give the nice third. These lighter canzoni are not things I usually transcribe, but I did upload transcriptions to CPDL with the lute part, plus a possible alternative version where the canto is modified to supply a third.
I suppose we should give a big round of applause to the middle class for all this richness and variation in language, haha! After all it was their money that motivated quite a few of these efforts. I also got a lot of amusement from the "rip-off" bit, having only just finished a book discussing the history of publishing. That book was mostly focused on the printing of literature of course - but all the same benefits AND problems clearly existed for publishers of musical manuscripts too! Especially the piracy! I expect there has always been a certain amount of borrowing among creatives, and not everyone's going to be transparent about where their inspiration came from (or, exactly whose genius is actually on the page)! Once again beautifully sung and presented, and with just that touch of humor I so appreciate from you all! I laughed aloud at the image of pineapple pizza among the fascinations with Italian, haha!
Beautiful episode. And the musical examples are very beautiful and so well sung too. Were they recorded specifically for this episode, or are they perhaps available somewhere to listen to in full?
The "Sette Salmi Penitenziali": They were first written in Hebrew Then Translated into Latin for the Vulgata Paraphrased in Italian by Croce for his "Sette Salmi Penitenziali" And then RETRANSLATED in Latin by Germans and in English by Englishmen for those who don't speak Italian... WHAT THE HELL? THIS IS FUNNY!
Speaking of languages, I also wondered if non-Italian composers sometimes understood/used the expression/“tempo” markings subtly differently than Italian composers - i.e. Bach writes “Adagissimo” in the lamento movement of the Capriccio in B-flat: does he mean slower or a greater feeling of “letting go”? A further question is, around when did terms like andante, adagio became tempo indicators?
The bilingual editions remind me of Felix Mendelssohn writing Elijah simultaneously in German and English 250 years later, and being scrupulous that the music fitted each language equally well.
In the years that I have been reading and singing Renaissance music, I noticed that there are many pieces inspired by Giovanni Gastoldi's "A lieta vita". In German, Hans Leo Hassler's "Tanzen und Springen", in English: "Sing we and chant it" (Dowland?). If I had the means, I would love to build a concert around this "greatest hit of 1600".
I have always felt that the English wanting to sing like Italians held back English music. English is hard to understand in an Italian style of singing where Italian is very easy to understand. There a part of me that wished England came up with their own style of music much like Spain did.
Italian songs are the first foreign language songs that a student of voice studies and of course Latin.latin to English is usually quite good, ah. New texts to ancient music!
Two cute things in this video (followed by me geeking out): 1. The Cesare de Zacharia publication has all the German text set in what, to my eyes, is a classically “German” type 😂 I find that adorable. 2. The final performance of “Quel espoir de guarir” was very lovely to be performed with the lutist singing the French and another singer providing the translation. It felt a little like an actual real-time interpreter, like you might have an ASL interpreter for a performance, or perhaps like a teacher singing a song with their student, waiting patiently after each section to hear their student’s verse. It felt very cute and lovely! Incidentally I have of late, in no small part due to your past video, been quite entrenched in the practice of translating unaccompanied 4-part vocal dances I’ve written much inspired by the music of the 16th/17th centuries. Though my translating experience is quite different than these, it shares some notable similarities. I have been writing songs in English and translating their texts into my own invented language for the purposes of use as background music in two projects- one of which being a Fantasy Ball and Murder Mystery party. Don’t mistake my language for a proper conlang (though I’ve attempted the like in the past), though there is a facade of linguistic rigor to it. Within my mind I have a sense of the language; it’s melody and shapes and style and phonemes; from which I determine my vocabulary as the text requires it. However, I draw always from all of the previous library of vocabulary I’ve developed for other songs and poetry, such that words and their related words stay true across multiple texts. So it’s half a language, one could say. Therefore, in my translations, I have great liberty to allow for proper prosody and in many cases maintain the proper meaning of the words for certain text-painted passages (though I’ve written few). This is also greatly assisted by my being the composer and lyricist of these works, such that I can alter my music to fit the text with no qualm of disrupting the “original work”, much like Morley in his co-published editions (even if the example provided was quite heavily “inspired” by previous works). Of course, as my original English lyrics are often not performed, there is little pressure, as only their spirit, through the music itself, is visible, seeing as no one can speak the half-language I’ve invented. This brings me to the point of mentioning the topic, however! My most recent piece, for this Ball and Murder Mystery, I’ve elected to include the “English translations” of the texts on the repeats, exactly as you performed the Guédron excerpt! The piece is a dance-like tune in 6/8 which I wrote with the specific intent of using its melody and a Cantus Firmus upon which I could write a voice in canon using the table from your last video!!!! This allowed me to have a verse of the 6/8 dance, followed by the English text, and then feature a slow section in 3/4 in the subdominant key using the Cantus firmus in the bass and writing the voices in canon over top! With my great many ornaments I somehow inevitably made some dissonant “mistakes” which I elected to leave in, though they are certainly not allowed my the common practice conventions. However, this provides a unique opportunity in translation which I offer to those “preparing their next concert” as an addition to the ideas presented here: to sing both texts simultaneously. That is, when you are singing a canon! I chose to give my second verse of text, in my invented language, to the Cantus firmus and the Lead voice, but my Follower voice sings the English “translation” in real time 1 beat after the Lead! It’s like a real-time interpreter; to elaborate upon my previous analogy, similar to the kind who speak into the earpieces of dignitaries at the UN. I much like the effect this gives, and I think it also accentuates and enhances the nature of the canon; just as the music is repeated a beat later “but different”, so is the text “changed” in canon. My work is a far cry from the masterpieces that inspired them, and certainly by no means an attempt at historical recreation, but rather historical inspiration. However, I am very excited to share the piece with you once I am satisfied with the recording! I will comment on this comment once I’ve posted it. In the meantime, for reference’s sake, I will link two of the previous works I’ve written and recorded in this “half-language”, though these two, as mentioned, do not use the original English text. The second, which is shorter and perhaps superior: ua-cam.com/video/V7jxKSTsCkw/v-deo.htmlsi=cusAaw9dxswhzntc The first, which I love dearly, though my performance is lackluster: ua-cam.com/video/DfXnRCC-xxE/v-deo.htmlsi=QGi52qBj9xH3dLcL Edit: not your last video, it was actually back in April, I only watched it recently 😂
I don't think that there's a recording of the English version, but if you'll search "Quel espoir de guarir" you'll find some versions of the original French
Fascinating video! Wanted to share a conversation I had with scholar Bob Prechter, who has found numerous connections between the works attributed to Thomas Watson and Nicholas Yonge and those of 'William Shakespeare'. We also discuss how Lord Edward de Vere may have brought the madrigal form from Italy to Elizabethan England during his travels through Italy in the 1570s. Thanks for your consideration! ua-cam.com/video/DkJRrE1agto/v-deo.htmlsi=q6Cvj0E71sr6CxXU
I not io is difficult because in English I has two vowel sound aiee. ( ayee) The soft palate must be open to avoid the dipthong. I teach English song and it has been very interesting. I studied English song as a solo student for years.
As always, one of the best UA-cam channels out there. As an opera conductor, who has conducted many originals, translated, and also altered versions to fit the desires of directors, this video serves as a proof that these kind of alterations always existed. Thanks for the job.
I was not expecting the historical French pronunciation in the last example. Well done! Congratulations to the ensemble!
That 4 part publishing was for singers to read using one central candle. Oh , i never knew that. Thank you a million times for that . A truly grounbreaking piece of research
Thank you, Maestro! Another great lesson on a rarely talked about topic. But above all: Beautiful music, executed to perfection by the most beautiful of voices! Thanks again to you and the ensemble!
This broadens my cultural and historical horizons, painting delicate nuances onto the subjective and objective canvas of reality. Thanks!
Oh, and the production quality is amazing! Easy to consume, fun to watch and very engaging!
This is one of the most interesting and fascinating lectures I have ever seen. Thanks.
I really enjoy watching your videos. Please consider making a presentation on the variations on the song "Sonata sopra La Monica" by Biagio Marini. Or a presentation on Monteverdi's Vespro della Beata Virgine.
This was so informative and enjoyable. I never knew that Morley's classic was pretty much pinched! : )
Marvelous! Wunderbar! Merveilleux! Balanced, informative, beautifully paced and edited, and visually polished----thank you!
and humorous at times, f.ex. the bored sleeping germans, not understanding the it. text ☺️
You are amazing in every way, I cant imagine research without you! Alfey Grazie Mille
Ooo! Ooo! New Early Music Sources! ... _turns off notifications, settles in for delight_
Wonderful timing! I'm currently working on a singable translation of Ecco mormorar l'onde from italian to portuguese for my final graduation paper. These sources will surely help with the historical background part of my paper. Wonderful video as always!
This is a fantastic lesson, thank you very much and greetings from Italy!
Great to see the video of the song at the end! Excellent work as always!
Elam, congratulations for 8 years of EMS next February 28. I have been a follower, not as frequently a I would have loved, but I have shared with you, one or two anecdotes of my harpsichord student years, more than 50 years ago, with a Landowska pupil, and of my Mexican baroque keyboard music (sometimes reference is made to organ, but in other cases no reference is made to a specific instrument (any in the plucked strings -harpsichord- family or clavichord. Besides the delight of your generous and carefully chosen stories, I was very leased to learn that I was not a loner, and many more people than I thought, have a fervent passion for early music. Muchas gracias!
I've great admiration for your work ande great pleasure listening your italian acento!
Excellent performances
20:01 What a lovely German polyrhythmic piece from the Renaissance!
Love your work!
Bravo!!!!!!!! Beautiful music!!!!
Happy New Year, Elam!
7:47 Watson may have been very subtle here. The Italian 'fior[i]' can mean 'musical ornaments' (as you know) unlike English 'flowers' . Substituting the English word 'play' on the melisma is a nice touch.
Great episode! I am always asking why we do not translate any song nowadays in our concerts
Wonderful stuff, thanks a lot for extremely enjoyable half hour!
The topic is fascinating, but I also learned that 'ditty' apparently meant song lyrics back then.
Me too!
What an endlessly varied mind.
el ultimo clip ❤ gracias!!
First time in the channel… I’m impressed and absolutely delighted! Thanks for sharing this knowledge with us. I’ve already attempted translating sacred music from other languages into mine (Brazilian Portuguese), and the conclusions I arrived at about the limitations are all in this video. It was so interesting to see how long these issues have been faced by translators and how similar they were to mine! Congratulations on the excellent work!
alo
Another great video.
When Morley's "Ballette" has started playing, I just thought: "This reminds me so much of a famous piece..." 😃😃
My oasis of calm and beauty
On Vecchi's So ben mi ch'ha bon tempo! I was was just looking at that a couple weeks ago. It's 4 voices with lute. The lute part supplies the third on the cadences, but almost every vocal version has just a rather early-ish-sounding cadence of pure 5ths. But Morley's version allows the 5th voice to take the role of the lute and give the nice third. These lighter canzoni are not things I usually transcribe, but I did upload transcriptions to CPDL with the lute part, plus a possible alternative version where the canto is modified to supply a third.
Thank you so much for all your wonderful editions!
I suppose we should give a big round of applause to the middle class for all this richness and variation in language, haha! After all it was their money that motivated quite a few of these efforts. I also got a lot of amusement from the "rip-off" bit, having only just finished a book discussing the history of publishing. That book was mostly focused on the printing of literature of course - but all the same benefits AND problems clearly existed for publishers of musical manuscripts too! Especially the piracy! I expect there has always been a certain amount of borrowing among creatives, and not everyone's going to be transparent about where their inspiration came from (or, exactly whose genius is actually on the page)!
Once again beautifully sung and presented, and with just that touch of humor I so appreciate from you all! I laughed aloud at the image of pineapple pizza among the fascinations with Italian, haha!
I cannot inagine how popular italian to german must have been. That Morley /vecci versión was delightful. The Germsn was delightful.
Beautiful singing!
Beautiful episode. And the musical examples are very beautiful and so well sung too. Were they recorded specifically for this episode, or are they perhaps available somewhere to listen to in full?
Oh.. Sorry, I just read the decription and it mentions that they were indeed recorded by you. Really beautiful singing.
19:51 so cute 😂
The "Sette Salmi Penitenziali":
They were first written in Hebrew
Then Translated into Latin for the Vulgata
Paraphrased in Italian by Croce for his "Sette Salmi Penitenziali"
And then RETRANSLATED in Latin by Germans and in English by Englishmen for those who don't speak Italian...
WHAT THE HELL?
THIS IS FUNNY!
Speaking of languages, I also wondered if non-Italian composers sometimes understood/used the expression/“tempo” markings subtly differently than Italian composers - i.e. Bach writes “Adagissimo” in the lamento movement of the Capriccio in B-flat: does he mean slower or a greater feeling of “letting go”? A further question is, around when did terms like andante, adagio became tempo indicators?
Reminds me of the count of Monte Cristo, where a foreigner is identified in Italy by only knowing musical terms (shouting allegro to the coachman)
@ ma non troppo!! 😆
O Algorithm, please make this blow up for no reason.🙏
The bilingual editions remind me of Felix Mendelssohn writing Elijah simultaneously in German and English 250 years later, and being scrupulous that the music fitted each language equally well.
In the years that I have been reading and singing Renaissance music, I noticed that there are many pieces inspired by Giovanni Gastoldi's "A lieta vita".
In German, Hans Leo Hassler's "Tanzen und Springen", in English: "Sing we and chant it" (Dowland?).
If I had the means, I would love to build a concert around this "greatest hit of 1600".
And this is why doctoral programs in music history require knowledge of Italian AND German.
I have always felt that the English wanting to sing like Italians held back English music. English is hard to understand in an Italian style of singing where Italian is very easy to understand. There a part of me that wished England came up with their own style of music much like Spain did.
Could you make another video like the Ripel minuet video, but for baroque/renaissance vocal polyphony?
Typically fascinating and charming, even if it's very modern for this early Medieval freak. Lunch invitation still open.
Grüße aus kühlem Wien, Scott
Would really appreciate if you can make a video on an under appreciated composer- Jan Dismas Zelenka
second that!
Italian songs are the first foreign language songs that a student of voice studies and of course Latin.latin to English is usually quite good, ah. New texts to ancient music!
It was so interesting.
Two cute things in this video (followed by me geeking out):
1. The Cesare de Zacharia publication has all the German text set in what, to my eyes, is a classically “German” type 😂 I find that adorable.
2. The final performance of “Quel espoir de guarir” was very lovely to be performed with the lutist singing the French and another singer providing the translation. It felt a little like an actual real-time interpreter, like you might have an ASL interpreter for a performance, or perhaps like a teacher singing a song with their student, waiting patiently after each section to hear their student’s verse. It felt very cute and lovely!
Incidentally I have of late, in no small part due to your past video, been quite entrenched in the practice of translating unaccompanied 4-part vocal dances I’ve written much inspired by the music of the 16th/17th centuries. Though my translating experience is quite different than these, it shares some notable similarities. I have been writing songs in English and translating their texts into my own invented language for the purposes of use as background music in two projects- one of which being a Fantasy Ball and Murder Mystery party. Don’t mistake my language for a proper conlang (though I’ve attempted the like in the past), though there is a facade of linguistic rigor to it. Within my mind I have a sense of the language; it’s melody and shapes and style and phonemes; from which I determine my vocabulary as the text requires it. However, I draw always from all of the previous library of vocabulary I’ve developed for other songs and poetry, such that words and their related words stay true across multiple texts. So it’s half a language, one could say. Therefore, in my translations, I have great liberty to allow for proper prosody and in many cases maintain the proper meaning of the words for certain text-painted passages (though I’ve written few). This is also greatly assisted by my being the composer and lyricist of these works, such that I can alter my music to fit the text with no qualm of disrupting the “original work”, much like Morley in his co-published editions (even if the example provided was quite heavily “inspired” by previous works). Of course, as my original English lyrics are often not performed, there is little pressure, as only their spirit, through the music itself, is visible, seeing as no one can speak the half-language I’ve invented.
This brings me to the point of mentioning the topic, however! My most recent piece, for this Ball and Murder Mystery, I’ve elected to include the “English translations” of the texts on the repeats, exactly as you performed the Guédron excerpt! The piece is a dance-like tune in 6/8 which I wrote with the specific intent of using its melody and a Cantus Firmus upon which I could write a voice in canon using the table from your last video!!!! This allowed me to have a verse of the 6/8 dance, followed by the English text, and then feature a slow section in 3/4 in the subdominant key using the Cantus firmus in the bass and writing the voices in canon over top! With my great many ornaments I somehow inevitably made some dissonant “mistakes” which I elected to leave in, though they are certainly not allowed my the common practice conventions.
However, this provides a unique opportunity in translation which I offer to those “preparing their next concert” as an addition to the ideas presented here: to sing both texts simultaneously. That is, when you are singing a canon! I chose to give my second verse of text, in my invented language, to the Cantus firmus and the Lead voice, but my Follower voice sings the English “translation” in real time 1 beat after the Lead! It’s like a real-time interpreter; to elaborate upon my previous analogy, similar to the kind who speak into the earpieces of dignitaries at the UN. I much like the effect this gives, and I think it also accentuates and enhances the nature of the canon; just as the music is repeated a beat later “but different”, so is the text “changed” in canon.
My work is a far cry from the masterpieces that inspired them, and certainly by no means an attempt at historical recreation, but rather historical inspiration. However, I am very excited to share the piece with you once I am satisfied with the recording! I will comment on this comment once I’ve posted it.
In the meantime, for reference’s sake, I will link two of the previous works I’ve written and recorded in this “half-language”, though these two, as mentioned, do not use the original English text.
The second, which is shorter and perhaps superior: ua-cam.com/video/V7jxKSTsCkw/v-deo.htmlsi=cusAaw9dxswhzntc
The first, which I love dearly, though my performance is lackluster: ua-cam.com/video/DfXnRCC-xxE/v-deo.htmlsi=QGi52qBj9xH3dLcL
Edit: not your last video, it was actually back in April, I only watched it recently 😂
Do you have a recording of the last song "with what wings can I fly"?
I don't think that there's a recording of the English version, but if you'll search "Quel espoir de guarir" you'll find some versions of the original French
@EarlyMusicSources It would be nice if you put all the pieces performed in your youtube videos by your vocal ensamble on spotify or soundcloud.
Fascinating video! Wanted to share a conversation I had with scholar Bob Prechter, who has found numerous connections between the works attributed to Thomas Watson and Nicholas Yonge and those of 'William Shakespeare'. We also discuss how Lord Edward de Vere may have brought the madrigal form from Italy to Elizabethan England during his travels through Italy in the 1570s. Thanks for your consideration! ua-cam.com/video/DkJRrE1agto/v-deo.htmlsi=q6Cvj0E71sr6CxXU
To be honest. Later translations into English are clumsy.
I not io is difficult because in English I has two vowel sound aiee. ( ayee) The soft palate must be open to avoid the dipthong. I teach English song and it has been very interesting. I studied English song as a solo student for years.
This is my world. Thank you as usual Dr Elam Rroten