gyri gyri gaga - Naxos Music Library

of Innsbruck influenced the text. The beginning
of the song originally read „Zuruck muss ich dich
lassen“ (I must go away and leave thee), and was
addressed to a woman and not to the town. The
heart-rending melody, appearing in the discantus
in the setting recorded here, also found its way, in
sacred double structures like O Welt ich muss dich
lassen (O world I must leave thee) and Nun ruhen
alle Wälder (Now all woods are resting), into the
church song repertoire.
The composer in the second song category,
however, was freer in the choice of compositional
method, which is shown in the texts narrating trueto-life
and often erotic stories, containing simple
word choices and verse forms. Here the range of
the musical lay-out extends from artfully imitative
sections to a simple, rhythmically declamatory
movement. Although no written evidence exists,
it seems that some of the melodies were already
known and circulated before the emergence of the
polyphonic setting. They were often taken up by
several composers and worked in different ways,
so that whole families of songs were produced.
Already in the Glogauer Liederbuch (dating from
c. 1480) an anonymous three-voice setting Ach
Elslein liebes Elselein (O little Else, dear little Else)
appeared. This melody is represented on the CD
by the Quodlibet of Matthias Greiter and in a
setting by Ludwig Senfl.
The Swiss-born Ludwig Senfl was a pupil of
Isaac and worked as composer to the court of
the Bavarian Duke Wilhelm IV. The composition
of songs had a particularly important place in his
output, and today there are still more than 250
songs by Senfl extant. In Ich stund an einem
Morgen (I stood one morning), in which the
eavesdropping narrator tells of the dawn farewell
of two lovers, Senfl alone has conceived seven
settings with different characters and numbers
of voices. In the recorded version the melody is
heard in the outer discantus and bass voices with
parallel tenths, and in a rhythmically varied form
in the tenor. The sole freely composed voice,
the alto, is very turbulent with numerous runs
of small note values, which obviously opens up
the possibility of instrumental performance (in
this recording that part is undertaken by the lute).
Senfl displays another variation in the use of a
cantus firmus in polyphonic settings, in Wann ich
des morgens früh aufsteh (When I rise early in
the morning). The melody is heard four times in
succession, though with each run-through it has
wandered into a different voice. It is sung first by
the tenor, followed by the discantus, alto and bass.
In each run-through the voices not carrying the
melody accompany in a free line, and finally the
tenor, as at the beginning, again undertakes the
last line of the song.
The rise in the tradition of German song in the
sixteenth century coincides with the technical
development of printing music. Already by the
middle of the fifteenth century printing with
movable type had created the possibility of
disseminating texts, but around 1500 the new
medium first began to be used for polyphonic
music. While the initial printing of songs took
place in courtly circles, the direction changed in
the second quarter of the sixteenth century when
collections more to the taste of the sophisticated
middle class were printed. The number of drinking
and jocular songs increased compared to the
formal love songs and laments. A particular kind
of these pieces was represented by the Quodlibet
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