SWEMF Workshop with Mark Wilson.
22nd June 2024 – Yatton, nr Bristol.

It was a lovely summer morning for a drive down to Yatton looking forward to a day of music making, especially with a leader new to SWEMF – great to welcome young blood to our early music world. The list of music and composers given in the details were unknown (except of course Anon) so promised more new experiences.

We had a good mix of singers and instrumentalists with enough singers to cover the usual SATB parts and a mixture of recorders, cornetts, sackbut and double reed instruments covering the whole range with additional percussion occasionally. Mark had the help of his friend Tristan in sorting out parts and instruments which led to very efficient allocation of music and places. Tristan also added his quint bass dulcian to the instrument mix. Mark had also persuaded singers from his choirs to join us and included the soloists for the Mass that we studied.

When we were all gathered for the first piece Mark gave a short introduction about himself and about the music we would be playing/singing. Mark is a very accomplished young musician, leader and organiser of several groups in addition to his position as master of the music at Pembroke College, Oxford. Much of this Spanish and Latin American Renaissance Music has been neglected until recently although Mark had access to research carried out by Lewis Jones who had produced most of the editions we used on Saturday.

We started with a 4-part piece with the daunting title of Hanacpachap Cuissicuinin. As an instrumentalist I thought – “Oh good I won’t have to get my tongue round that, whatever it means”. Hats off to the singers who did get their tongues around it. The first time through Mark had the singers sing it to ‘La’. He then informed us that this was a latin-american language called Cechua (not sure of the spelling) still spoken today and introduced the pronunciation and had all of us (including players) work through the first two verses to see how the stress pattern of the words should be reflected in the music. This was the pattern we followed for the other pieces we tackled though all the other pieces were in Spanish Latin and so a little more familiar for the pronunciation.

We tackled four fairly short pieces through the day: the cechua piece by anon, Tantum Ergo, an incipit by José Picañol, the Gloria from a 6-part mass by Francisco Valls and an 8-part motet on Ego flos campi after J.G.de Padilla. This last could have been called cheating as this motet was reverse engineered from the mass by Lewis Jones, so actually a modern piece, but Mark assured us we wouldn’t be able to tell and I am sure that if he hadn’t told us we would not have known. None of them were technically difficult to play or sing, but this gave Mark more time to spend on the detail and for relating the music to the words and producing a musical performance – not just playing the notes. Even on a run through at the end of the day he stopped us to refine points we had missed or forgotten.

All the way through Mark gave us plenty of background on the composers and the music, even pointing out the tune in one piece was an early rendering of Ravel’s Bolero – the old ones are the best ones.

All in all a wonderful day of playing and singing. Thank you Mark for introducing us to this new (old) music, even to strange languages. Thank you also to the friends he brought along to help out and swell the numbers.

I hope that after this initial experience we will be able to induce Mark to provide further wonderful days of music for SWEMF.

Fenella Spiers.