Doulce Mémoire, Denis Raisin Dadre - Pierre Attaignant: Danceries (2010)

The name of Pierre Attaingnant may be familiar to those who have picked up collections of Renaissance dance music for recorder ensemble. He was not primarily a composer but a publisher, perhaps the first to use movable type to print staff lines. He may, however, have composed some of the music heard here, most of which named no composer. Among his collections of printed music, issued in Paris from the 1530s to the 1550s, were books of instrumental pieces of various kinds -- ensemble dances, lute pieces, viol pieces, and more -- as well as songs. The relationship between the printed page and its realization in music is a complicated topic about which the interested buyer can learn something from the notes here (in French, English, and German). Suffice it to say for the present that the printed music leaves the composers a good deal of room for interpretation, and that the players of the ensemble Doulce Mémoire exploit that freedom here. They pick and choose from among Attaingnant's publications, loosely grouping pieces into sequences that could have been intended for similar forces: loud winds, which would have been played outdoors; viols with or without voice; lute pieces; and some really spectacular recorders called flûtes colonnes. The general mood is lively; the players are free to add zippy ornamentation, and percussion is added to most of the dances. Overall this is a vast improvement on the old-style recordings that covered this repertory, many of which plowed through large numbers of pieces on an unchanging group of recorders. The album touches on questions of interest to specialists -- a good deal of space is given over in the booklet to the fact that the winds and the strings are tuned to different pitches and have to transpose -- but it's also enjoyable for general listeners who have explored this repertory a bit as amateurs.