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This record is a collection of ethnic-inspired music from different cultures of the 15th, 16th and 20th centuries. The latest in modern digital technology gave me the opportunity to create a "virtual" orchestra in which I not only play all of the instruments, except the percussion, but am also arranger and conductor.
The instruments I play are all recorders, plus a quartet of crumhorns in the Ortiz Recercada ; their number varies from 6 (Bartok) to 18 (in some of the Renaissance dances).
The recorder has a close relationship to certain folk and ethnic instruments whose music stems from an oral tradition: indeed, much of Early Music either re-elaborates aspects of popular culture or becomes synonymous with it.
Encina, for example, freely borrows from popular Castilian culture, while Gervaise's branles are examples of notated folk music.
In these musical contexts percussion parts, always improvised, play a dual role: decorative and structurally determinant.
The pieces in this recording can be divided into two groups each requiring different solutions: ensemble pieces with all parts of equal importance and solo pieces with accompaniment. The first group includes Brouwer's Paisaje, Bartok's Roumanian dances and most of the Hungarian tunes, whereas the branles, the Ortiz, and the Klezmer dances belong to the second one.
In Brouwer's Paisaje cubano each instrument is "choreographed" to "dance" through the stereo spectrum with a different period of time.
To really appreciate this choreographic effect try listening with headphones and "visually" following each voice with your ears.
In Bartok's dances, I first recorded a synthesis of all the parts on one instrument in order to construct a coherent and stimulating interpretive mold.
I then overdubbed the standard SATB formation of recorders and added two 6-foot basses to support the bass line (like double basses of an orchestra).
The mold, having served its purpose, was then discarded.
As for Gervaise's branles, Ortiz's Recercada and the Klezmer dances, I recorded the accompaniment in a sound-proofed studio and then added the solo part in the natural acoustics of a small church: the orchestration of the accompaniment uses choirs of instruments, like the "registration" on an organ, where one note may be played by several different instruments in different octaves.
Klezmer music, aptly defined by the great Giora Feidman as "Jewish Soul Music," owes its particular oriental flavor to the use of various modes which employ the distinctive interval of the augmented 2nd (for example: D-Eb-F#-G-A-Bb-C#-D).
David Bellugi
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