REDISCOVERING SPAIN
Fantasias, Variations and Glosas
Fahmi Alqhai, viola da gamba & direction
Patricia Guerrero, flamenco dancer
Accademia del Piacere
Rami Alqhai, viola da gamba
Johanna Rose, viola da gamba
Francisco Javier Núñez, harpsichord
Agustín Diassera, percussion
Video and audio recording and editing: Félix Vázquez
Programme
Di, perra mora – Anonymous, 16th c.
La dama le demanda – Antonio de Cabezón (1510-1566) & Fahmi Alqhai
La Spagna – Glosas by Heinrich Isaac & Fahmi Alqhai
O felici occhi miei – Jacobus Arcadelt (1505-1568), Diego Ortiz (c. 1510-c. 1570) & Fahmi Alqhai
Diferencias sobre Guárdame las vacas – Improvisation & Fahmi Alqhai
Fandango – Santiago de Murcia (c. 1673-c. 1739)
Glosa sobre Mille Regretz de Josquin – Fahmi Alqhai
Tiento III de primer tono – Antonio de Cabezón
Xácaras & Folías – Anonymous & Fahmi Alqhai
Passa Galli – Giovanni Battista Vitali (1632-1692) & Fahmi Alqhai
Marionas & Canarios – Gaspar Sanz (1640-1710) & Fahmi Alqhai
Summary
Accademia del Piacere immerses itself in one of its favourite repertoires, Spanish Baroque music. Together with flamenco dancer Patricia Guerrero (Spain’s National Dance Award 2021), Fahmi Alqhai’s ensemble explores the surprising rhythms of 17th-century Hispanic dances: their unique mixture of duple and triple metres, already driven by the guitar at the time, laid the foundations of what we now know as flamenco.
Espacio Turina, in the historic centre of Seville, is a hall devoted mainly to chamber music and specialised musical programmes. Housed in a restored historic building, it combines understated architecture with carefully designed acoustics that encourage close listening between performers and audience. Its programme focuses particularly on classical, early and contemporary music, and it has become one of the city’s leading cultural venues for music. 🎶
Programme notes
Decadent and self-absorbed, the ultra-conservative Spanish monarchy of the Golden Age sealed the country’s cultural borders shut for fear of heretical influences from northern Europe. With censorship and the Inquisition working at full capacity, the arts suffered the consequences of that regressive nationalism. Paradoxically, however, we can enjoy its musical consequences today: cut off from Italianate currents, Spanish musicians were forced to create a singular and original music, full of archaisms but also of new and personal solutions, influenced by vernacular popular music and also by forms and styles from the vast colonies of the Spanish crown.
While liturgical music remained bound to clichés that had already been in use for a century — Venetian polychoral writing, for example — secular and instrumental music, even that performed in the most privileged aristocratic circles, was profoundly shaped by dances brought across the seas by colonisers and colonised alike. As a result, not only did traditional Spanish rhythms find their way into palace life, but so too did those from Habsburg-ruled Naples, neighbouring Portugal and, of course, the American viceroyalties. Through these, rhythms brought from sub-Saharan Africa by thousands of enslaved people forcibly transported across the Atlantic also found their way into this musical world.
It was concealed behind the strumming of the fashionable instrument, the guitar, that these dances found their way into palace circles: almost always in triple metre and in the form of variations on a basso ostinato – that is, repeated harmonies over which musicians could improvise freely to display their instrumental skills. The most successful improvisations were written down in anonymous sources and in editions such as those published by Santiago de Murcia and the Aragonese composer Sanz. Through them, we can hear how their cross-rhythms and simple, insistent harmonies made their way across Spain, perhaps helping to shape the development of modern tonality and the chord progressions still in use today. Emerging from humble settings and remote corners of the world, these dances became part of an early wave of global cultural exchange. They went on to find favour even at the court of Versailles and inspire great composers such as Bach and Scarlatti, in whose hands chaconas, fandangos, folías and canarios became part of the wider musical canon.
Juan Ramón Lara
