Francisco de Penalosa & Francisco Guerrero & Juan Bautista Comes.(Review)

Francisco de Penalosa. Lamentations of Jeremiah. Edited by Jane Morlet Hardie. (Collected Works of Francisco de Penalosa, 2.) (Gesamtausgaben/Collected Works, 14.) Ottawa: Institute of Mediaevel Music, c1999. [Acknowledgments, p. v; pref., p. vii--viii; editorial policy, p. ix--x; texts and trans., p. xi--xiii; score, 61 p. ISBN 1-896926-19-3. $60.]

Francisco Guerrero. Missarum liber quartus. Introduccion, estudio y transcripcion, Jose [M.sup.a]. Llorens Cistero; semitonia y estructuras modales, Karl H. Muller-Lance. (Opera omnia, 8.) (Monumentos de la musica espanola, 51.) Barcelona: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas, Institucio "Mila i Fontanals," Departamento de Musicologia, 1996. [Introd., p. 9--10; "Las misas de Francisco Guerrero," p. 11--31; "Los textos en la composicion musical," p. 3--40; "Semitonia de las misas y madrigal," p. 41--48; "Tonalidad y elementos tonales," p. 49--57; score, p. 59--195. ISBN 84-00-07601-X. 5,770 Ptas.]

Juan Bautista Comes. Masses. Edited by Greta J. Olson. (Recent Researches in the Music of the Baroque Era, 95--96.) Madison, Wisc.: AR Editions, c1999. [Pt. 1: Masses for One and Two Choirs. Acknowledgments, p. vi; introd., p. vii--xx; 3 plates; score, 130 p.; crit report, p. 131--33. ISBN 0-89579-427-6. $69.95. Pt. 2: Masses for Three Choirs. Acknowledgments, p. vi; score, 195 p.; crit. report, p. 197--200. ISBN 0-89579-428-4. $79.95.]

The number of fine editions of sacred music from Spain covering the period from 1470 to 1650 published in the last decade is truly a sign of the growing interest in this repertory and the number of productive scholars undertaking research in Iberian music. These editions offer a boon not only to scholars by enabling easier access to important works for study but also to performers by supplying competent editions from which to sing and eventually to make sound recordings. Three of the most recent and welcome newcomers to the published canon of Spanish music include volumes in the ongoing collected works of two outstanding late-fifteenth- and sixteenth-century composers--Francisco Penalosa (ca. 1470--1528) and Francisco Guerrero (1528--1599)--and an edition of Masses (issued in two volumes) by Juan Bautista Comes (ca. 1582--1653), an important but now largely unknown early-seventeenth-century composer.

Perhaps the most gifted of the composers working in the milieus of Ferdinand and Isabella was Penalosa. Edited by Australian musicologist Jane Monet Hardie, volume 2 of the composer's collected works (published by the Institute of Mediaeval Music) now makes available Penalosa's Lamentations of Jeremiah, which are uniquely preserved in one of the most important manuscript sources for the early Renaissance repertory in Spain-- Tarazona, Archivio Capitular de la Cathedral, MSS 2-3. Since the death in 1998 of Robert J. Snow (to whom this volume is dedicated). Hardie has emerged as the leading expert on the relationship of sacred music in late-fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Spain to its chant and liturgical foundations. Such expertise in liturgy is requisite for understanding Spanish music of this period perhaps more than any other contemporaneous repertory because of the connections between the emerging polyphonic genres and the melodic traditions and liturgical performance practices of the underlying chant.

Penalosa is the most intriguing of the composers active around 1490 to 1510 because of both the quality of his music and his use of "foreign" stylistic elements. While Penalosa's music reveals many of the characteristics heard in works by other early Spanish Renaissance composers writing before ca. 1520, it also combines typically Spanish stylistic elements with a much surer sense of imitation and other techniques to create contrasts of texture similar to those found in music by the Franco-Flemish composers. Indeed, several passages in Penalosa's Lamentations reveal that he, perhaps alone of all the Spanish composers of his time, used textural contrasts in much the same way and with similar flexibility as did Josquin Desprez. (With the exception of Pedro de Escobar, a Portuguese native who worked in Spain, most other Iberian composers use a heavier texture, with all the voices sounding throughout much of a work.)

Hardie has already published her thoughts on the general style characteristics of Penalosa's music and the techniques that he employs. Her dissertation "The Motets of Francisco de Penalosa and Their Manuscript Sources" (University of Michigan, 1983) and the first volume of the Penalosa complete works (Twenty-Four Motets [Ottawa: Institute of Mediaeval Music, 1994]) provide a basis for understanding the style and compositional approaches evident in Penalosa's music. During the 1990s, Hardie conducted extensive research on late chant sources, their use of rhythmic indications, and how these might relate to polyphonic settings. Through her studies of the monophonic sources of the Lamentations and their use of mensural or what she terms "proto-mensural" notation (see her "Proto-Mensural Notation in Pre-Pius V Spanish Liturgical Sources," Studia Musicologica Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 39 [1998]: 195-200), Hardie has established that the most likely basis for Penalosa's setting is the Passionarium toletanum (Alcala de Henares: Brocar, 1516). This leads to what must be my only negative comment on the present volume--namely, that the edition does not include an extended introduction centered around Hardie's findings on the chant and liturgical traditions of the Lamentations as they relate to Penalosa's work. Fortunately, all her publications are listed in the footnotes for scholars and performers to pursue.