In 2020 I wrote Lavorare stanca for the ensemble C Barré. It’s a piece about work and fatigue – and unfortunately it’s a minute shorter than the commission. To make up for it, I transcribed for the same ensemble a piece from Cancionero de palacio (a collection of Spanish Renaissance music) that invites to pleasure and relaxation: hoy comamos y bebamos. This maneuver of distraction was successful and the ensemble C Barré revived; the project of a revisited chansonnier was born.

– Al alba venid establishes two spaces that do not speak to each other: an interior where the original music resounds to the plucked strings and an exterior where the day awakens the animals.
– In Cucú I have multiplied the humorous (and lascivious) side of the text, embodied by a slide flute and underlined by abrupt loops with a lewd rhythmicity.
– Rodrigo Martines is a hieratic collage of different orchestrations of the theme, which gradually discovers its most intense facets.
– Descansa triste pastor presents two contrasting religious musics that disappear under the weight of their fanatical pulse.
– My version of Tres morillas is inspired by 2000s techno, as these three Moorish enamors would probably do in a club these days.
– These five arrangements are added to the existing one: the invitation to the pleasures of Cantemos y holguemos, which ends the collection.

To transcribe is to write for different means, but also for a different context. The transition that takes place is both acoustic (the music transits from one form of production to another) and perceptual (it transits from one listening to another). I have subjected these renaissance musics to a constant splitting of the acoustic and poetic signs that constitute them, hoping that in this rebound they will find a new way to speak to us.

Mikel Urquiza