Rossi music

[cellio]

The Salamone Rossi music collections I ordered arrived today. This will be nifty to explore. I love Rossi's liturgical music and am looking forward to singing some of it.

There were some surprises, though. First, I thought (from the catalog description) that I was ordering two books that together make up the set of liturgical music called "Songs of Solomon". (There are 33 pieces in the collection, according to the recordings I have.)

What I actually ended up with was one book containing 30 of these pieces (haven't gone through to identify the missing ones yet) and a book of his *madrigals*. The madrigals are in Italian, not Hebrew, and there are no translations. I'm sure they're musically lovely; I'd like to know what they say. I'm not unhappy to have the music -- more Rossi is good! -- but I'm a bit puzzled by what I'm holding.

The other surprise, though, is that these appear to be reprints of editions originally written in *French*. So while the music itself has transliterated Hebrew (not actual Hebrew), the transliterations have occasional funky accent marks and things that are presumably meaningful to speakers of French. (I can fix this because I know what the texts should be, but I'll probably have to re-type pieces that the choir is going to do.) The other effect of the French edition is that there is a long introduction to the book, including a discussion of notation and (I suspect) a discussion of decisions made by the transcribers, which I would very much like to read, and *it's* in French, too. There are also two pages of material in Hebrew (almost certainly not the same text as the French), but sans vowels. (My odds of comprehension go from slim to very slim when you take away the vowels.) Dani should be able to puzzle that out for me, at least.

I'm still very happy to have the actual music -- or rather, some apparently-scholarly transcription of the music -- but I'm frustrated that I can't read the supporting materials. I'm a music geek; I actually read those parts of books.

Hey Fianna or Ray, how's your French? :-)

Comments

[fiannaharpar.livejournal.com]

Monica - Je parle le Francais bien, je lit le Francais en peu....

You see, i'm functionally illiterate in French. I can speak and understand the language just fine, reading and writing not so good. I can give it a shot.

[cellio]

Your French is better than mine; I wouldn't have known what you said without the gloss. :-)

The intro is something like 8-10 pages long, so it would be significant work for someone who struggles with the language. You're welcome to take a look, but that isn't the magnitude of the favor I intended to ask. I'm hoping I can find someone who reads the language and who would be willing to give me a summary of what it says. If that person is another musician who would actually be interested in the content, so much the better. (Verbal summary would of course be fine. I'm not asking for a written, complete translation.)

[amergina.livejournal.com]

Hey, are we going to get to sing non-Christian religious music?? Whoo Hoo!

(I guess I get to figure out how I feel about Christmas carrols this year.)

[cellio]

That's my plan. :-) And I did talk with Ray about this back when it was clear he was heading for directorship of the choir, and he seemed to be enthusiastic. Now we just need to pick a piece and (probably) I'll re-do the typesetting to clean up the translit. We have pieces ranging from 3-part to 8-part, by the way. (The 8-part pieces are for two choirs, it appears. That's really cool to hear in the right space, but seems impractical for our choir.)

I also talked with Ray a while back about the explicitly-Christian stuff that I won't sing, and offered to drop out of the choir if this posed a problem. (I had the same conversation with Arianna back when she was the director. Ray is much more tolerant on this point, BTW.) So far we've been getting by on me sitting out the occasional piece, and the repertoire in general has shifted a bit away from that, probably in part because of me and Gail. Yes, in the real middle ages (well, renaissance, for most of our repertoire), Christian music dominated, so there's lots of it and not much from other religions (though there is secular music, of course). SCA folks have to walk the line between recreating the period as it was and making things comfortable for the people we have now. I'm glad our choir is doing a good job of this.

[cellio]

And, of course, it's easiest for me to just disappear during Christmas-music season, and Ray's fine with that.

Rossi

[jeannegrrl.livejournal.com]

Where did you order your music? I have a couple of Rossi's thanks to Zemer Chai which I could Xerox and send if you needed them (assuming of course, that Rossi's been dead long enough to negate copyright concerns ) The transliterations aren't bad at all. I'm also really hoping to post Zemer Chai singing Rossi's Halleli Nafshi on our site. I've got it all set as an mp3 and everything - I just have to get the "OK"!

Re: Rossi

[cellio]

I ordered it from Transcontinental Music. The text on the front of each book implies that these are part of some reprint series of out-of-print works. There's a publication note in English (thanking the sponsors and so on), a short overview in English of Rossi's background (same text in both books), and a lot of French text that isn't translated into English. Also some Hebrew in the one book; dunno if that's supposed to be Rossi's introduction/dedication, or what. (It ends with "Amein".)

These reprints appear to have been done c.1954. I didn't see any ISBNs or standard library-style blobs on the back of the title page. I'll try to cons up a bibliographic reference when I get home.

Which Rossi pieces do you have music for? (Obviously Halleli Nafshi is one.) I hope you can get permission for the recording; I'd love to hear it!

Italian Madrigals

[estherchaya.livejournal.com]

Regarding the Italian Madrigals, if you want to send me the text via email or xerox the music and mail it to me, I could probably do a half-assed job of translating them for you. Problem with translating it is that of course I speak, read, and (badly) write Modern Italian, so it's like reading Old English, though not quite as bad. It will remind me of those days of translating Dante...Ick. I'm not sure if my language skills are still up for it, but if you really want to have some idea of what they say, I can arm myself with some other Madrigali, a dictionary, and a cobwebbed memory and go from there.

Anyway, if you want to mail them to me (probably easiest) and you're not in a huge rush for a translation (that's a definite requirement as my schedule's pretty packed right now), I'll email you my snail mail address.

Re: Italian Madrigals

[cellio]

Thanks! How about if we start with the names (on the theory that they'll hint at the rest of the contents)? I can send you the TOC. Then based on that and examing the music, I can figure out which ones are potentially good prospects for performance and we can attack those ones first.

Email me your address, ok? (Maybe I'll just type the TOC in and email it to you, but just in case I decide to go the photocopier route...)

Re: Italian Madrigals

[estherchaya.livejournal.com]

I'll email you the address. For the record, the names don't always hint at the contents of madrigals.

For example, one of Monteverdi's Madrigals, Oi Me... well, it's lovely, but how much can you get from a name like that? The piece is lovely. Truly. And so is the content.

Anyway, I won't rant. I'll just send you an email right now! :)

Re: Italian Madrigals

[cellio]

True -- not all madrigals have useful names. Rossi's names seem to at least be longer than your example (typically about 5 words). Most of the other madrigals our choir does have names that are evocative of the content, such as "O ochi manza mia" and "mon couer se recomonde vous" (spelling *highly* approximate), so that's why I thought the titles might give hints. (Ok, technically those probably aren't madrigals, but...) If you look at the titles and tell me they're useless in this case, then we'll formulate Plan B. :-)