Thought usually to be an English vocal genre that was popular in the Renaissance, the madrigal actually has roots in Flemish music, and going further back, appears to have been a descendant of the Italian frottola, a form noted for chordal accompaniment to a melodic line. Whatever its true origin, examples of the madrigal in all its variety can be found in music from the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Italy, and England, and they offer an ease of style and communicability that keeps them popular with vocal groups today.
For a broad collection of madrigals in three, four, and five parts, sung with energy and charm, The Book of Madrigals by the Leipzig-based ensemble Amarcord is a good place to start. Below are samples from this 2006 release from Raumklang, which presents some of the most famous madrigals.
Thomas Morley: Now is the month of maying
Orlande de Lassus: Bon jour et puis quelles nouvelles
Orlande de Lassus: Bon jour mon Coeur
John Dowland: Come away, come sweet love
Cipriano de Rore: Anchor che cor partire
Ludwig Senfl: Ach Eislein, liebes Eiselein
Anonymous, Scottish: Remember me, my deir
Thomas Weelkes: Since Robin Hood
Thomas Weelkes: Strike it up, tabor
Adrian Willaert: Vecchie letrose non valete niente
Heinrich Isaac: Innsbruck, ich muß dich lassen
Thomas Morley: I love, alas, I love thee
Pierre Passereau: Il est bel et bon
John Dowland: Come again, sweet love doth now invite
Hans Leo Hassler: Mein G’müt ist mir verwirret
John Bennet: Weep, O mine Eyes
Henry VIII, King of England: Pastyme with Good Companye
Adriano Banchieri: Contrapunto Bestiale
Antonio Scandello: Ein Hennlein weiss
Juan del Encina: Cucú, cucú, cucúcu
Juan del Encina: Fata la parte
Josquin Desprez: El grillo
Anonymous, Canciero de Montecassino: Dindirindin
Jacques Arcadelt: Il bianco e dolce cigno
Giovanni Giacomo Gastoldi: La bellezza
Nicolas Gombert: Triste depart
Josquin Desprez: Mille regretz
Thoinot Arbeau: Belle qui tiens ma vie
Alonso de Alba: La tricotea
Juan Vasquez: Gentil senora mia
Baldassare Donato: Chi la gagliarda
Anonymous, French: Quand je bois du vin clairet
Ludwig Senfl: Das Gläut zu Speyer
For everybody who decries the state of contemporary pop music as a vast wasteland of disposable, commercial junk, and for anyone who longs for the days when composers like George Gershwin, Harold Arlen, Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, and Hoagy Carmichael wrote beautifully crafted songs with hummable melodies and clever, story-based lyrics with real characters in them, I present to you the soundtrack to the film Synecdoche, New York.
Featuring music by journeyman producer/songwriter/multi-instrumentalist and Los Angeles man-about-town Jon Brion, the soundtrack also showcases two tracks — “Little Person” and “Song for Caden” — co-written by Brion and the film’s director Charlie Kaufman, sung by jazz vocalist Deanna Storey. Both of these songs are superbly crafted tunes in the tradition of the American Popular Songbook style as well as being reminiscent of the storied ’60s Brill Building sound of writers like Carole King and Burt Bacharach. Furthermore, Storey’s georgeous, subtly emotive voice brings to mind a young Barbra Streisand, who herself made a mark with such Broadway soundtrack hits as “People” from the musical Funny Girl.
Famous for opposing the bloated forms of late Romanticism, and notorious for describing the works of contemporary British pastoral composers as “cowpat music,” Elisabeth Lutyens (1906-1983) was one of the first English composers to adopt rigorous serial methods and join the international avant-garde. Even though her career did not take off until after World War II, Lutyens had planned to be a composer since the age of nine. Her determination carried her through study in France and a teaching position at the Royal College of Music in London, until success came in 1947 with her commissioned setting of Arthur Rimbaud’s poem, O Saisons, O Châteaux. While she had setbacks — she was obliged to compose for television and horror films, and she rented out rooms to support her family — Lutyens eventually found an audience for her lean, angular music and earned the nickname “12-Note Lizzie” from the conservative classical establishment.
Below is a small selection of Lutyens’ adventurous music, to have a taste of her work before deciding to binge.
Born on the 50th anniversary of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s birth , Juan Crisóstomo Arriaga y Balzola (1806-1826) was actually known as the “Spanish Mozart” for early displays of his prodigious musical talents. But his reputation fell into decline after his premature death, just ten days before he would have turned 20 years old. Yet despite his short life and small output, Arriaga left enough of an impression that his cause was taken up in the late 19th century and his music has had periodic revivals ever since. Part of the attraction of Arriaga’s tragically short life and career involves speculation over what he might have accomplished, had he the time to mature. Certainly, we know less of Arriaga’s potential directions than of Mozart’s, who achieved total mastery over his art, whereas Arriaga had just emerged from the Paris Conservatoire and was still developing his style. In any event, his elegant music holds attractions sufficient to please casual listeners and rigorous critics alike; and though his music strongly resembles the styles of Mozart, Franz Joseph Haydn and Ludwig van Beethoven, and at times even anticipates Franz Schubert, there is a unique and youthful voice in Arriaga’s works that has considerable power to charm and move.
Binchois (ca. 1400-1460), also known as Gilles de Bins, was born in Belgium and was a Renaissance composer who provided music for various ecclesiastical and court appointments in Burgundy, Paris, and Soignies. Skilled in both sacred and secular music, Binchois composed choral works as a lay musician to the Burgundian dukes, as well as numerous popular chansons, and probably sang his own songs to harp accompaniment. Binchois did not join the clergy, unlike most 15th century musicians, nor was he awarded a university degree. Yet he was credited with reviving interest in music in Europe, after the long period of creative stagnation following the plague years, and his works were held up as exemplars for the next generation of composers to follow. His influence on his contemporaries was strong, and after his death he was commemorated in laments by Guillaume Dufay and Johannes Ockeghem.
One of the best groups to turn to for Binchois’ mellifluous chansons is, somewhat unsurprisingly, the exquisite Ensemble Gilles Binchois, founded and directed by Dominique Vellard, whose 1998 album, Mon Souverain Desir, gathers some of the best chansons in one collection for greater ease of binge listening. Dig in!
One of the members of the famed Les Six,Georges Auric (1899-1983) never achieved a reputation equal to those of his compatriots and fellow composers Francis Poulenc,Darius Milhaud, or Arthur Honegger, yet he always seemed to be lumped with Louis Durey and Germaine Tailleferre, less fortunate colleagues who are usually overlooked and almost completely forgotten but for a few works. Yet Auric’s standing has improved steadily over the years, thanks to growing attention to his film music. The composer of lavish scores for such films as La Belle et le bête (1946), The Lavender Hill Mob (1951), Moulin Rouge (1952), and The Innocents (1961), Auric has at last come into his own through some highly regarded all-digital recordings that restore his music to better sound and wider distribution than ever before.
Though next to nothing is known of the life of Martin Codax (fl. early 13th century), we have six attributed Portuguese-Galician poems set to music, and a seventh whose music is missing, in a collection called Cantigas de Amigo. (The parchment manuscript was accidentally discovered by the antiquarian bookseller Pedro Vindel in Madrid, lining a copy of a book by Cicero.) Of course, this is scant material from which to deduce any facts of a life, but that doesn’t stop the speculation. Because the songs of the Cantigas de Amigo are about love, it may be reasonable to assume that Codax (also known as Martim Codaz) was a composer at a Medieval court, possibly that of Ferdinand III, the Spanish king of Castille and León. Codax may also have been a Galician troubador.
In any event, the music speaks for itself, and the suave performances by Ensemble Alcatraz are among the most sensitive and attuned to the period. So for this diminutive body of work, this is Binge Listening at its finest and most selective.
Black Jake & the Carnies are a curious octet out of Ypsilanti, MI who specialize in a kind of raucous acoustic Americana that tosses post modern Appalachian murder ballads, Irish drinking songs, skewed, twisted love songs, and general cautionary tales into a stylistic blender that has them sounding like nothing so much as a maverick, hopped-up punk polka band in full 21st Century everything-fits jug band mode. The band itself calls what it does “crabgrass,” but although the instrumentation (banjo, guitar, mandolin, acoustic bass, etc.) suggests bluegrass, the approach is something else again, and the supplementary instruments, which include washboard, train whistle, jug, and all manner of odd percussion toys, make the Carnies something closer to a manic jug and string band from the 19th century.
Thought usually to be an English vocal genre that was popular in the Renaissance, the madrigal actually has roots in Flemish music, and going further back, appears to have been a descendant of the Italian frottola, a form noted for chordal accompaniment to a melodic line. Whatever its true origin, examples of the madrigal in all its variety can be found in music from the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Italy, and England, and they offer an ease of style and communicability that keeps them popular with vocal groups today.![Synecdoche, New York [Soundtrack]](http://image.allmusic.com/00/amg/cov200/drl800/l866/l86631z6234.jpg)
For everybody who decries the state of contemporary pop music as a vast wasteland of disposable, commercial junk, and for anyone who longs for the days when composers like 
One of the members of the famed 
Though next to nothing is known of the life of 
Black Jake & the Carnies are a curious octet out of Ypsilanti, MI who specialize in a kind of raucous acoustic Americana that tosses post modern Appalachian murder ballads, Irish drinking songs, skewed, twisted love songs, and general cautionary tales into a stylistic blender that has them sounding like nothing so much as a maverick, hopped-up punk polka band in full 21st Century everything-fits jug band mode. The band itself calls what it does “crabgrass,” but although the instrumentation (banjo, guitar, mandolin, acoustic bass, etc.) suggests bluegrass, the approach is something else again, and the supplementary instruments, which include washboard, train whistle, jug, and all manner of odd percussion toys, make the Carnies something closer to a manic jug and string band from the 19th century.
