DOCUMENTARY COLOMBINA
Recording and editing: Félix Vázquez
Narration: Javier Jiménez Cuevas
Historical research: Lucía Gómez
Musicians
ACCADEMIA DEL PIACERE
Fahmi Alqhai, viola da gamba & direction
Alena Dantcheva, soprano
Gabriel Díaz, countertenor
Ariel Hernández, tenor
Jesús García Aréjula, baritone
Javier Jiménez Cuevas, bass
Rami Alqhai, viola da gamba
Johanna Rose, viola da gamba
Carles Blanch, vihuela
Marta Graziolino, harp
Francisco Javier Núñez, organ
Pedro Estevan, percussion
Jacobo Díaz, shawm
David García, sackbut
Luis Castillo, dulcian
Recording and editing (video and audio): Félix Vázquez
Filmed in the historic church of the former Convent of San Pedro de Alcántara in December 2021, this documentary explores the historical, musical and artistic context of the project “Colombina. Music for the Dukes of Medina Sidonia”. In it, the Seville ensemble Accademia del Piacere and its director Fahmi Alqhai immerse themselves in the study and performance of their own city’s most famous and, at the same time, most forgotten manuscript: the Cancionero de la Colombina. According to recent research by the scholar Lucía Gómez, this remarkable music manuscript, which contains almost a hundred pieces, was compiled in the 15th century for the Dukes of Medina Sidonia and later acquired by Hernando Colón (Ferdinand Columbus), son of Christopher Columbus, for his impressive library. Today it is kept beside Seville Cathedral. Fahmi Alqhai and his ensemble perform a selection of its works with the vocal and instrumental forces for which the music was written, using copies of period instruments.
Notes on the music
Undoubtedly one of the great musical monuments of the Spanish Renaissance, the Cancionero de la Colombina was very probably copied at the ducal court of Medina Sidonia, whose Seville residence stood very close to the central Plaza del Duque. For five centuries the manuscript has been held in the Colombina Library, one of the most important in Europe historically, housed in a building adjoining Seville Cathedral. Compiled in the years surrounding the discovery of America, the book was acquired in 1534 by the founder of the Colombina collection, Hernando Colón (Ferdinand Columbus), Columbus’s son and an extraordinary bibliophile. It contains almost a hundred pieces from the distinctive 15th-century Andalusian school, many of them still anonymous today and others identified as the work of Juan de Triana – a musician linked to the chapel of the ducal house – Juan Cornago and other composers of the time.
Exquisitely written, the manuscript is of enormous importance as the main source of the distinctive 15th-century Sevillian school of polyphony, linked to the city’s immense cathedral, then under construction, where the aforementioned Juan de Triana worked. Most of the pieces are written for three voices and are marked by that peculiar Andalusian style. It was clearly influenced by the international style that emanated from the Franco-Flemish school of polyphony (indeed, the manuscript includes pieces by Ockeghem and Urrede), but it has unique features: its own musical forms – such as villancicos in their original, typically Spanish secular form – and a passionate character explicitly acknowledged by other European composers of the time. The manuscript gains further cultural value from the crucial historical moment Seville was living through: from the city, which would thereafter hold the monopoly on trade with the Americas, its musical style would radiate to all the colonies.
Rarely performed and even more rarely recorded, this music was the focus of Accademia del Piacere’s project, supported by a BBVA Foundation Leonardo Grant, which set itself the goal of recovering this Sevillian jewel of the Renaissance. This makes it especially rewarding for the members of the ensemble and for its director, Fahmi Alqhai.
Juan Ramón Lara
