This disc, part of a pair covering most of the extant corpus of medieval instrumental music north of Iberia, bears the unusual title Istanpitta, which is nothing more than the Italian translation of the name of the French estampie dance. The program includes the estampies and other French dances that often show up on collections of medieval music: mostly quick, strophic pieces played on a wind instrument and accompanied by a plucked instrument or two (or a small organ) and percussion. The Italian pieces included here are ...
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This disc, part of a pair covering most of the extant corpus of medieval instrumental music north of Iberia, bears the unusual title Istanpitta, which is nothing more than the Italian translation of the name of the French estampie dance. The program includes the estampies and other French dances that often show up on collections of medieval music: mostly quick, strophic pieces played on a wind instrument and accompanied by a plucked instrument or two (or a small organ) and percussion. The Italian pieces included here are rarer and quite intriguingly different; several are much longer than any of the French works, for one thing, and they are cut from different melodic cloth. The question for a performer is what to make of these differences. The music on the disc has come down to us as single-line melodies, leaving performers to use iconographic evidence (i.e., paintings showing musicians, etc.) and occasional written commentaries to fill in the rest. The chief value of this disc is that the booklet...
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