Let me start by saying that my tastes in music have always been pretty odd. I also have some weird issues about listening to music that I particularly like around other people. When we were kids, my dad would sometimes get drunk, sit on the front stoop (ick! That just felt so low class), and blast the music that he liked. It just felt intrusive onto others, and just made me squirm. So, I am sort of neurotic about listening to recorded music around anyone. Yet another of my many oddities.
For a long time, I have loved Baroque, Renaissance and Early Music. I seem to recall writing a play in high school English class about a guy who developed an addiction and was mainlining harpsichords, or something like that. (This would be the same high school where we used the French phrase for "leather underwear" in a Christmas exchange.)
I was looking on iTunes for "Mon Coeur Se Recommande a Vous" by Orlando DiLasso. When I was in the Society for Creative Anachronism, it was one of the songs the Stormsport Cacophonic Consort had down fairly solidly. I can still make a passable attempt at singing the melody or tenor line from memory.
At the time, we would have consort practice on Sundays. The previous Saturday, I went to a friend's birthday party and there was some wildness late at night. It was the start of what I refer to as "My Very Jerry Springer Summer." I got almost no sleep that night (ooh, but the good kind of no sleep!) and I figured that I would be useless the next day at rehearsal. However, our director was telling me something like I had made a rather large leap forward in getting some stuff. (Maybe I was too tense?) So, I felt really good about doing better with the song, which was Mon Coeur.
I found a relatively traditional a capella arrangement on Sunday, and then a tremendously cool one by The New World Renaissance Band. The guy doing the singing, Owain Phyfe, has a voice that just knocks me out. He has also done SCA (no surprise) and is also Pagan, apparently (ditto on the no surprise for that as well.)
I was looking through some recordings and came across one entitled "A Lieta Vita," which was in Italian and sounded like your stereotypical Italian period piece. When I listened more closely, I realized it was the same melody as "Sing We and Chant It" by Thomas Morley . I found it unaccountably funny and sort of guffawed. How tragically un-hip is tha?? Maybe I should just have "Incredibly Nerdy Geek" stamped on my forehead. Sigh. I googled it and it looks like Thomas Morley borrowed the tune from Giovanni Gastoldi. But Morley's version seems to have been a bigger hit than Gastoldi's.
Leave a comment