nce a year, ReRenaissance builds a whole programme based on a special print source. Various Petrucci prints have held center stage in the past, but this year we shift our focus because of a spectacular new find!
Among the mostly three-part ‘Carmina’ of the German-speaking world in the 16th century, a 1535 collection from the Egenolff printing house was considered lost; until five years ago, only a discantus partbook in Paris and a copy of the bassus in Heilbronn were known. Without the tenor, the backbone of that music, including nine unica, remained silent.
Based on the recent discovery of Royston Gustavson, who was able to locate two tenor partbooks in the Swiss National Library in Bern through skilful research, David Fallows has finished transcribing these nine pieces in their entirety. The characteristic ReRenaissance blend of research and performance is on full display in our May 2025 concert.
Doron Schleifer – voice
Elizabeth Rumsey – Grossgeige, recorder
Claire Piganiol – harp, recorder
Ryosuke Sakamoto – lute, Grossgeige
Tabea Schwartz – recorder, Grossgeige; direction
Free entry – Donations
The multi-instrumentalist and Renaissance specialist Elizabeth Rumsey answers questions from Dr. Thomas Christ.
TC: Dear Liz, you were born in England but spent all your school years in Australia. This begs the question of how you found your way to early music and how you discovered the European viola da gamba as a flautist.
ER: That’s always a good question for musicians of my generation. The younger players and singers, especially here in Switzerland, will sometimes start on an “Early music” instrument like the viol, but for me it was a process of discovery to learn that earlier music was written for different instruments, and to learn what those instruments were.
I’ve always preferred to play or sing something than to listen to it, so it makes sense that I tried to learn quite a few different instruments. My first instrument was the violin, and since my mother was a music teacher I also learned recorder and piano quite early. When I was in high school I tried a few other instruments – trombone, double bass, clarinet – but mainly played oboe and viola, which meant that I had the experience of playing in many different groups – youth orchestras, the school string quartet, some wind ensembles – as well as singing in various choirs. So by the time I started my Bachelor degree with recorder and oboe, I knew a lot of music from different perspectives. Then in the first year at the Conservatorium I discovered the viol and started playing that more than the recorder.
I always liked Baroque and Renaissance music, and when I started playing the viol as well as recorder it made sense to focus on early repertoire. I do sometimes miss playing later music like Schubert or Dvorak, but one can’t do everything!
TC: Maybe you can tell us in a few words about the size and importance of the Sidney Conservatory, is there an Early Music Department?
ER: Actually I’m not sure what they have now in terms of an Early Music department. But when I was studying there, it was a normal Conservatorium – very well-regarded in Australia at least – with a very small fringe element teaching harpsichord, traverso, and recorder. There were already a couple of teachers there who took the concept of historical performance practice seriously and included it in their overall curriculum, which is what I would hope for in the Sydney Conservatorium, and indeed any Musikhochschule: that an Early Music department would become irrelevant because every instrument and every type of music would be taught according to those principles.
TC: You then became an expert in medieval music at the Schola. The fiddle, the vielle, was undoubtedly one of the most popular instruments of the Middle Ages, both for religious celebrations and for secular festivals, where it was used to accompany dancing and singing. Can you tell us something about the origins or predecessors of the fiddle?
ER: I don’t know much about the origins of the Medieval fiddle, but that term covers several hundred years of music and many different instrument shapes, tunings, and playing styles. There is a lot more research still to be done, and a lot that will never be known without a time machine. Some kinship with European and Arabic folk instruments is apparent, but the relationships can be tenuous. However, from treatises and from iconography we can associate certain types of fiddle with certain styles of music and ways of playing, and the transition from Medieval to Renaissance instruments is easier to follow; we can trace the viola da gamba back to the vihuela, and the violin back to the rebec. One of the things that makes the 16th century repertoire so fascinating is that it’s a period of enormous variety when it comes to instruments – most of them settled into some sort of standardised shape and tuning in the following century – and the music much more often has indications of exactly which instruments should be used. Our ReRen programme of music from the Rouen Christmas play in the late 15th century is striking precisely because it has such explicit instructions for the orchestration of some of the songs. So this period of overlap between fiddles and violins and viols is fascinating for many reasons.
TC: We regularly hear you in the formations of exquisite Renaissance works for viol consort and we still vividly remember the rebirth of the Grünewald great violin from the Isenheim altarpiece. The viola da gamba played an important role in the European music world from the 15th to the 18th century. Why was it then supplanted by the four-string cello, or is the cello a further development of the six-string viola da gamba?
ER: For me, it always helps to think of the instruments in families. Violins, violas, and celli are actually a completely different family to viols. As we saw last month, the violin family of the 16th and 17th centuries can have many different sizes of instrument, and I think when you compare the sound of the violin band to that of a viol consort it’s easy to see why the violins started to replace viols. They have a stronger and more brilliant sound, and are much more useful for bigger performance spaces. We sometimes think of the viol as having disappeared between the mid-18th century and the Early Music revival in the 20th, but apparently there were always people who continued to play, just mostly at home for their own pleasure.
TC: You’ve been travelling with your Renaissance instruments for several decades now – have you noticed that interest in music from before 1600 is becoming increasingly popular or is the rich repertoire of this period still a niche phenomenon?
ER: Both! Renaissance music in general is definitely more a part of the classical repertoire than when I started playing, but there is still a huge volume of music that might seem strange to many concertgoers. To be fair, a lot of it is also strange to the musicians – we are constantly working on previously unknown compositions, or finding new ways to perform them. It is a very flexible repertoire, open to different interpretations of scoring and arrangements. And that is part of what we enjoy about the ReRen series, that we can alternate programmes of well-known music, like the Palestrina anniversary concert next month, with programmes of newly-discovered or newly-completed works like in this month’s programme. And hopefully if music education in general continues to move in the direction of historical performance practice applied to all eras, then the interest in Renaissance music will continue to grow.
Newly-discovered sources of early music turn up rather more often than is generally recognized and by the oddest routes. Surprisingly often they are already there in major national collections. A classic example is the chansonnier Uppsala 76a: Howard Mayer Brown was ordering microfilms of the well-known manuscripts 76b, 76d and 76e, so he thought he might as well also order 76a. The priceless printed keyboard tablature of Gonzalo de Baena (Lisbon, 1540), in the royal library of Madrid, was lost because it was catalogued as a book on arithmetic. But none is more surprising than the …
… tenor partbooks of two collections printed by Christian Egenolff in Frankfurt in 1535–6. We already knew the discantus partbooks in Paris, but they had no title. And the Swiss scholar Martin Staehelin found that a large number of the bassus lines had been copied into a manuscript now in Heilbronn. Then the Australian scholar Royston Gustavson identified the titles from a seventeenth-century catalogue and put them into a search-engine to find that they had been sitting in the Schweizer Nationalbibliothek in Bern since late in the nineteenth century. Those who know their musical bibliography may well be wondering how they failed to appear in the famous RISM, the awesome cataloguing project that was launched from the ashes of World War II as a successor to Eitner’s earlier Quellen-Lexikon (1900) and opening with the formidable Recueils imprimés edited by François Lesure (1960). The answer seems to be that the Nationalbibliothek is mainly a collection of more recent material and apparently nobody thought of enquiring whether they had any early printed sources. Well: now we have it, and like the prodigal son, it is doubly welcomed on its return after almost five-hundred years of silence.
Barfüsserkirche
Historisches Museum Basel
Gold-printed paper calendar
