PROJECTS
Jean Mouton 2022
2022 marks the 500th anniversary of Jean Mouton’s death. In spite of being less popular nowadays than his contemporary Josquin des Prez, whose 500th anniversary has also been recently celebrated, Mouton is a central figure in the transition from the 15th to the 16th century.
The Habsburg Project wishes to honor Jean Mouton’s anniversary with two proposed programs. The first proposition approaches the composer through the book inventories of Phillip II’s Royal Chappel. The program is centered on the Missa d’Allemaigne, that has been discovered in one of the books belonging to Phillip II that were catalogued in 1602. In order to bring today’s audience closer to Mouton’s music and to the richness of the liturgical context in which it was performed, we have inserted the mass in the context of the Christmas liturgy. Besides Mouton’s music, this proposition includes plainchant and improvised counterpoint.
For the second program, the Missa d’Allemaigne functions as a structuring element and is complemented with motets by Mouton that have been preserved in 16th-century Iberic sources. The works included in this program were either known to have been composed by Mouton at the time, falsely atributed to other authors or of unknown authorship. The goal is to offer a comprehensive overview of the sound image that the 16th-century Iberic audience had from Jean Mouton.
In Nativitate Domini ad Vesperas
At Christmas 1576, Felipe II, King of Spain, met with his nephew, the King of Portugal, Sebastián I. This interview took place at the Royal Monastery of Our Lady of Guadalupe (Cáceres) belonging to the Order of San Jerónimo. Both monarchs travelled to Guadalupe with a small group of musicians, leaving the bulk of their chapels in their respective courts. Sebastián brought with him Domingo de Madeira and Alexandre de Aguiar, both chamber musicians who sang and played vihuela, and the keyboard player Alfonso de Silva. Felipe II, on his part, brought a capado whose name we do not know, the keyboard player Juan de Peñalosa and the cornet minstrel Juan de Peraza from the Cathedral of Toledo. He also summoned three capados singers and a tenor chaplain from the nearby Cathedral of Plasencia. These musicians, together with the Jerónimos monks, who, unlike the rest of the religious orders, assiduously cultivated polyphony, were the forces used to solemnize the eve of Christmas that year in the monastery of Guadalupe in front of both monarchs.
Thanks to both Spanish and Portuguese chronicles, we know many details about the development of these ceremonies and the use that music was made in them. Among them is the earliest news about the use of the cornet as a solo instrument accompanied by the organ in Spain. The texts provide enough information to be able to reconstruct the practices of the musicians involved and thus relive the sound environment of those celebrations, but unfortunately, they do not tell us about the authors whose works were performed. However, thanks to Codex 2 of the Guadalupe Monastery [E-GU Codex 2] we can reconstruct the repertoire in use at the Guadalupe Monastery in the second half of the 16th century. In this concert, works by Cristóbal de Morales (Magnificat primi toni) and Juan Navarro (Beatus vir qui timet Dominum), authors who enjoyed a wide diffusion in the convents of the order of San Jerónimo, will be heard. We intend to recreate the sound environment of the ceremony through a repertoire that could be in use at the time the ceremony took place, not to reconstruct the vespers ceremony as it would have been, but to recreate the sounds described by the chronicles.