A garden of earthly delights: medieval music from around Europe

This easy dance is notated in the Gresley Manuscript (Derbyshire Record Office, D77 box 38: Gresley of Drakelow Papers). This is the earliest surviving source of medieval dances in England. Our piece survives as a single-line melody. We will learn it, and explore what we can do with it to flesh it out for a plausible, musical performance. [Leah Stuttard]

In this session, we will explore two further easy dances from the Gresley Manuscript, again trying out what possibilities are available to us for reconstructing these dances, within plausible historical parameters, to play on our harps. [Leah Stuttard]

We will get to know Bel fiore dança, an Italian courtly dance from the 15th century. You will receive a short introduction to the Faenza Codex (I-FZc 117), an important source for early keyboard music, as well as the genre known as bassadanza. In this session we will learn to play the tenor: the lower of the two voices. We will also discuss different performance approaches for playing two-part compositions on the harp: solo or in a small ensemble setting. [Carolin Margraf]

The focus of this session will be on the upper voice: the cantus. We will explore how the tenor and cantus relate to each other; we will address ways to play a florid cantus line, which features some chromatic notes, on diatonic harps. Finally, we may get as far as putting the cantus and tenor together to hear a 15th-century Italian dance! [Carolin Margraf]

We will learn to play an intabulation of Ach Lieb mit Leid ['oh love with sorrow'], a tenorlied by Austrian composer, Paul Hofhaimer, surviving in a 16th-century manuscript recently identified as a rare harp 'tablature'. You will understand what a tablature is, together with key facts about this one: the Leipzig Harp Tablature (D-LEm I. 8° 191). We will place this music in context within wider Renaissance music culture, and discover the tenorlied genre as a source of medieval music for our harps. We will also explore the art of 'intabulation', an important historical instrumental arrangement technique based on vocal compositions, and what to consider when making idiomatic intabulations for our harps. [Carolin Margraf]

Over the course of this, and the previous, session we will work towards playing the A and B parts of the piece, finding easy, approachable solutions for challenges relating to playing polyphony, i.e. several voices sounding simultaneously, on diatonic harps. [Carolin Margraf]