The Roaring Fifteen-Twenties

The 1520s mark the consolidation of music printing in Europe. The start given by Ottaviano Petrucci in 1501 gains scale and regularity: Paris, Venice, Antwerp, Nuremberg and Lyon establish themselves as printing centres, and printers such as Pierre Attaingnant, Andrea Antico and Jacques Moderne become agents of a network that stabilises notation, spreads models and helps works and techniques circulate.

Five hundred years later, the anniversary passes almost unmarked. Returning to the motets printed in that decade allows one to hear a common musical language taking shape, and opens the field to composers and pieces rarely — or never — heard.

Eight performers — four singers, two recorders and two bowed strings, viola da braccio and viola da gamba — sight-read from full-scale facsimiles. The reading stops whenever a choice needs to be made explicit: a tempo, an articulation, an editorial variant. Pedro Sousa Silva leads the musical mediation; Pedro Braga Falcão comments on the theology, the imagery and the codes of the sacred texts, restoring layers of reading that the composers — churchmen in many cases — knew intimately.

Visitors enter freely, ask questions, request repetitions and may return on the following days to follow the work as it develops. What is played follows the curiosity of those present.

The recorders are exact replicas of originals by Sigmund Schnitzer (Nuremberg, c. 1520), a choice that brings sound and gesture closer to the context in which the motets were printed.