Program Notes

The Folger Consort’s 2025 holiday program, Resplendent Joy, begins with music by the Portuguese composer Vicente Lusitano, the only Black 16th-century composer we know about. Lusitano, like many 16th-century singer/composers, spent time in Rome as well as Portugal. To complement Lusitano’s lush and sonorous polyphonic motets, we’ll perform lively 16th-century Christmas villançicos and splendid motets by Cristobal de Morales and Tomás Luis de Victoria, and there will be flashy dances and virtuoso works for our instrumental ensemble of lute, guitar, viols, and winds.

Vicente Lusitano’s music has only recently become known to modern performers. “Lusitano” is not really a family name; it simply refers to the fact that he was Portuguese. We know little about his life. Since he was described as pardo, a person of mixed heritage, it is likely that his mother was African. According to João Franco Barreto, writing in the 17th century, Lusitano came from Olivença, and was an ordained priest. Interestingly for a 16th-century composer, there is no record of an actual salary as a church singer. He was evidently in Rome by 1551, when he debated the famous and more musically progressive theorist Nicola Vicentino. Several years after that encounter, Vicentino published a possibly misleading account of the debate, which may be partially responsible for Lusitano’s obscurity until very recently.

Most of Lusitano’s surviving music is from one source, his Liber primus epigramatum que vulgo motetta dicuntur, published in Rome in 1551. It contains 23 motets for five, six, and eight voices. Our second and third Lusitano motets are from this collection; the Beati omnes qui timent Dominum which begins our program comes from a manuscript compiled in 1562 for the court at Stuttgart. Lusitano’s treatise on music theory, which was reprinted several times, contains a section on improvising new parts against pre-existing ones. His stunning eight-voice motet Inviolata integra et casta es Maria does just that, with the added parts written out. Honoring the original composer—in this case the revered Josquin des Prez—Lusitano adds three voices to Josquin’s five and expands the piece significantly. By 1561 Lusitano had converted to Calvinism and married. The last reference to him indicates he was living in the Duchy of Württemberg.

The pieces for strings and other instruments performed throughout the Resplendent Joy program are from a world somewhat distinct from that of the Iberian cathedrals and their established systems of patronage in the 16th century. Although he is of a later generation than the rest of our program’s composers, the theorist and organist Francisco Correa de Arauxo (1584 – 1654) wrote in the style of an earlier period. All of his surviving compositions are from his Libro de tientos, published in 1626. Tiento is the Spanish term for a fantasia, derived, appropriately, from the word for “touch.” The 62 tientos in Correa’s book are helpfully arranged in order of difficulty.

Antonio de Cabézon (c.1510 – 1556) was a blind virtuoso organist employed by the court of Charles and Isabella. Most of his surviving music was printed posthumously by his son Hernando in 1578. The collection specifies keyboard, harp, and vihuela, but a lot of the music is admirably suited to consorts of other instruments. There are several sorts of pieces in this large collection, but most interesting are the diferencias, or variations, sometimes called discantes or glosas. The models can be popular songs, dances like our Pavana and Gagliarda, or just a repeating bass pattern like the romanesca or folía. These variation sets seem to have particularly influenced English keyboard composers like Thomas Tallis and William Byrd.

The heart of our program of Iberian Renaissance music for the holidays features the great vocal composers of the period. The three polyphonists included on this program share links to Seville and to Rome. Cristobal de Morales (c.1500-1553) was the most important figure in early 16th-century Spanish vocal music before Victoria. Morales was born in Seville and received his early training there, a thorough classical education. He wrote lengthy Latin dedications in his books of masses and claimed from an early age to have studied the classical Trivium and Quadrivium. The Spanish popes in the 16th century, including Paul III, frequently hired Spanish singers, and Morales was not the first of these. By 1535 he was a singer with the papal chapel in Rome. He remained with the papal choir, singing baritone, for ten years, during the papacy of Paul III. During this period, the size of the choir increased, the singers were given salary increases, and opportunities for additional monetary benefits grew. The choir naturally performed in the Vatican for the pope, but also often sang elsewhere, frequently in front of the great nobility of many countries. The fame of Morales’s compositions thus spread easily and rapidly throughout Europe, and much of it was printed during this period.

He left the papal choir in 1545, after a period of illness (his illness led to frequent absences from work). He probably returned to Seville (Francisco Guerrero reported studying with him there in 1545) and took up the chapel master’s post at Toledo Cathedral the same year. He was not happy there—losing money and again falling ill. The rest of his relatively short life was no happier, full of problems of discipline with singers under his authority. Morales was not an easy person to work with for employers as well as the singers under his leadership. Sources describe him as arrogant and as having little patience for those with lesser talents. Almost all of Morales’s music is sacred—only a few secular and ceremonial pieces survive. There is little that is specifically Spanish about his music—he is really best seen as a worthy successor to Josquin des Prez, concerned with clarity of declamation and expressing the sense of his text. In fact, in the 18th century a biographer of Vatican musicians cited Morales as the most significant papal chapel musician between Josquin and Palestrina.

For an adventurous close to the first half of our program, we could not resist the delightful mash-up La Bomba by Mateo Flecha (1481 – 1553), a Catalan composer who worked at the cathedral of Lleida, then for Duke Diego Hurtado de Mendoza in Guadalajara, and in Valencia, where he directed the chapel choir of the Duke of Calabria. At least a few of his villançicos are included in the Cancionero de Upsala, which was associated with that chapel. Later he taught the Infantas Maria and Johanna, daughters of Emperor Charles V, before joining the Cistercian Order. Flecha is best known for his ensaladas—salads of mixed languages and contrasting musical sections, like our wonderful example La Bomba.

Folger Consort’s 2024 holiday concert, A Mass for Christmas Eve. Photo by Peggy Ryan.

Beginning the second half of the program is Tomás Luis de Victoria (1548 – 1611), indisputably the greatest Spanish composer of his day and pre-eminent successor to composers like Vincento Lusitano and Cristobal de Morales. Victoria grew up and received his early training in Avila and was sent to Rome by 1565 in order to study at the German Jesuit College. After filling many positions as a singer, chapel master, and composer in Rome, he returned to Spain in 1583 and was named chaplain to the Dowager Empress María. As such, he was required to sing Mass daily at the Monasterio de las Descalzas Reales in Madrid for the 33 nuns of the convent, including María and her daughter. The position suited Victoria, and he turned down prestigious positions at cathedrals in order to remain. Many nobles attended services there to hear his music, which was regularly performed. He became maestro of the choir and later took the less demanding position of organist. There were 12 men and four boys in the choir, and provisions were made for instruments as well – a bassoonist for all services, and a larger ensemble for Easter and other feasts. All the chaplains were granted personal servants, meals in their quarters adjacent to the chapel, and a month’s holiday each year.

Victoria’s reputation in modern times has depended upon his magnificent Officium defunctorum, which was composed on the death of the Empress María in 1605, along with some grave Holy Week motets. His best-known work, however, is his setting of O magnum mysterium, beloved today by high school choirs as well as professionals. Not all of his music is somber. According to a 17th-century commentator “his disposition being naturally sunny he never stays downcast for long.”

Francisco Guerrero (1528-1599) was another one of the great Spanish composers of the late 16th-century, second in stature only to Victoria. Guerrero was born in Seville and was employed by the cathedral there for most of his life, although he traveled widely around Spain, to Italy, and even once to the Holy Land. That trip was quite an adventure. After visiting Jaffa, Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and Damascus, his ship was twice boarded by pirates. On his return, the combination of the costs of publishing two books of his music in Venice and the attentions of the pirates left his finances in a state of ruin. Guerrero spent a couple of weeks in 1591 in debtor’s prison, before the Seville cathedral chapter bailed him out and paid his creditors. He wrote a popular book about his journey and stated frequently that he wished to return to the Holy Land. Apparently, he intended to go in 1599 but perished in the plague epidemic that struck Seville that summer.

Unlike his teacher Morales or his contemporary Victoria, Guerrero was a very prolific composer of both secular and sacred music, leaving 18 masses, over 150 other liturgical pieces, and many secular songs, some with texts by Lope de Vega. It was estimated that he wrote at least a page of music for every day that he lived. Guerrero was a master contrapuntalist, capable of considerable artifice. Yet his tonal structures are so lucid, and so modern-sounding that it is possible to forget entirely about the learned techniques he is using in creating music of immediate appeal. Throughout Guerrero’s tenure at Seville, instruments played a prominent part in accompanying singers, so we felt it appropriate to present his Christmas motet Pastores loquebantur with instrumental doublings.

Returning to instrumental music, we turn to Diego Ortiz, a Spanish viola da gamba player who worked in Italy. His Treatise on the ornamentation of cadences and other types of passages in the music of viols, published in Rome in 1553, shows players how to improvise. It is still an important part of the education of viola da gamba players and anyone interested in 16th-century instrumental practice. Ortiz divides his treatise into two books. The first consists of multiple examples of how to embellish standard cadences and intervals, and the second consists of written-out pieces showing how to make up a part against a cantus firmus, how to ornament a chanson or madrigal, and how to improvise over a repeating series of chords.

The vihuela player and composer Alonso Mudarra (c.1510 – 1580) is responsible for some of the most innovative and attractive music for vihuela and guitar. All of the vihuela music, including the two brief fantasias performed here, is contained in his collection Tres libros de musica en cifras para vihuela. Mudarra, who probably went to Italy in 1529 with Charles V, became a priest on his return to Spain and was appointed director of all musical activities at Seville’s cathedral, where he worked frequently with another of our composers, Francisco Guerrero.

We conclude our program with five charming and well-known villançicos from one source, the Villancicos de diversos autoros, printed in Venice in 1556. We know it today as the Cancionero de Upsala, since the only surviving copy is to be found in the university library in the Swedish city of Uppsala. As noted above, this engaging collection seems to have been associated with the chapel choir of the Duke of Calabria. The word villançico is derived from villano, or peasant, and the angular rhythms and lilting melodies found in these pieces certainly have some roots in Iberian folk music. Like the English carol, the villançico came to be associated with Christmas more than any other occasion. A few of the songs are probably by Mateo Flecha, but the other composers remain anonymous. It is hard to imagine a source of Renaissance polyphony more delightful in its selection of simple, lovely melodies and infectiously lively rhythmic settings.