Crossroads of the Celts - Altramar Medieval Music Ensemble

Ensemble: Altramar
Album: Crossroads of the Celts
Video: The Book of St. Albans, XIII secolo
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This is the second recordings that I've found last week, as I wrote in the last video, searching among some terrible 90s/2000s productions of medieval music, deftly dodging the countless recordings of pseudo Gregorian chants with new age pads and keyboards. The Altramar ensemble released many wonderful albums from 1996 to 2002 focoused on the celtics culture but also on Italian, Iberian, Jewish music of the middle ages. On the site of Angela Mariani, founder of the ensemble, we read: "Altramar Medieval Music Ensemble was co-founded in 1991 by Angela Mariani, Jann Cosart, David Stattelman, Chris Smith, and Allison Zelles. Altramar has recorded seven CDs for the Dorian label and toured in North America and abroad, including early music festivals and series with international audiences such as Boston, Regensberg, and Utrecht. In 2009, Altramar was invited to record several pieces for the Norton Anthology of Music, the most widely-used music history anthology and textbook in the English language. Every one of Altramar’s recording projects involved months of specialized research into the medieval musician’s processes and practices; historical instruments; the poetics and historical languages of the texts; the deciphering of the early notation in which these musics were recorded; and the inventive and improvisatory processes necessary to create a fully-realized performance from this relatively non-prescriptive medieval notation."
This one is "Crossroads of the Celts", the first of their albums that I decided to present to you. More wonderful works by the Altramar ensemble will be published in the coming days. Don't forget to purchase their works, available at very affordable prices at the link at the end of the description.
From Medieval.org: "Celtic music continues to be not only a traditional-folk repertory of considerable popular appeal, but a topic of high interest as it relates to what we might more commonly call "early music." The significant distinction is that this is primarily an oral repertory, whereas early music per se has concerned itself with written sources and the correspondingly different social setting from which these would be engendered. It is fairly widely believed that Celtic music underwent a rather substantial change at the beginning of the modern era, as no part of Europe was remote any longer. The present program is one attempt to reconstruct the earlier generation of style, based on the earliest available sources. It therefore represents one in a continuing series of attempts to apply some of the techniques learned in the Early Music Movement to more popularly-oriented musics of the area. In some sense, however, this is misleading, which is one reason that Celtic music continues to draw so much interest. Especially in the earlier medieval period, prior to the advent of polyphony in France and during its early development, Irish poetry was one of the most acclaimed and developed artforms in Europe. It is out of this culture that much of this music emerged, with the significant distinction remaining that there was never a real "troubadour movement" to write down tunes. What ends up happening is that interpretations here are based on copies of copies and in turn on some text structures which did survive from the period, all placed against the context of a culture which was increasingly marginalized over time."
About the video, I've used the wonderful "Book of St Albans" a manuscript of the 13th century preserved at the Trinity College in Ireland.

I wish you happy listening!
Mirkò Virginio Volpe
MUSICA MEDIEVALE
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1 May Song (Oxford Bodleiam)
2 A Vous Amours Ains C'a Nului (Vienna Prose Tris)
3 Cristo Canamus Gloriam (Trintity College)
4 Stantipe Smarmore
5 Brigit Be Bithmaith (Irish Liber Hymno)
6 O Columba Insignis Signifer (Inch Antiphoner)
7 Amra
8 Ecce Fulget (Irish Liber Hymno)
9 The Lay Of The Forge (Duanaire Fionn)
10 Winter (Irish Liber Hymno)
11 Adest Dies Leticie (Trintiy College)
12 Ysgolan
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Jann Cosart - cruit, vielle
Angela Mariani - voice, harp, cruit
Chris Smith - cruit, gittern, speaking voice
David Stattelman - voice, percussion
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