Renaissance Recycling: an instrumental workshop (singers welcome) with Alison Kinder

Reusing old material is not a new concept – Renaissance composers did it all the time, sometimes with their own material and sometimes with someone else’s. We’ll look at two such examples in this workshop, in both cases a kind of ‘upcycling’ from a short initial motet or chanson into an entire mass.

The first is a composer reworking his own material: Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina’s beautiful 6-voice motet Tu Es Petrus is then gloriously expanded into a mass, not once, but twice! The first Missa Tu Es Petrus is also for 6 voices, but then he gets a bit carried away and does a setting for 18 voices in three choirs, still based on the same material. We’ll do the motet and a movement from the 6-voice mass, and if we’re feeling very brave then maybe the Kyrie of the three choir version…! The second example is where one composer borrows a piece by someone else. At that time it was thought of as a compliment – today we’d call it plagiarism! The original piece is the beautiful 4-part chanson by Josquin, Mille Regretz, and the recycling is done by Cristobal de Morales, who uses it as the basis for a 6-voice mass setting.

Alison Kinder read Music at Oxford and then studied viol with Alison Crum at Trinity College of Music, being awarded the college’s Silver Medal for Early Music Studies. Her love is of viols in all shapes and sizes, from soundpost-less Renaissance instruments to 7-string baroque basses. Alison is an enthusiastic teacher both privately and on courses, and she runs the Rondo Viol Academy with fellow teacher and player Jacqui Robertson-Wade.

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