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La Martinella (4 settings)

for 3 instruments.

These four pieces come from MS Banco Rari 229 (formerly Magl. XIX 59) of the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale in Florence, one of the most substantial collections of secular music from the end of the fifteenth century.
The first piece here is, as it were, the “real La Martinella”; it was one of the more widespread pieces of its day, surviving in at least twelve other sources; one of these, the Segovia manuscript, has a virtuosic contratenor attributed to Heinrich Isaac (printed inside the cover of this edition). As the piece appears only under this title, it would seem to have been a real instrumental piece, as opposed to a rondeau without text; it could be said to belong to the same family as Josquin´s La Bernadina and Ghiselin´s La Alfonsina. The same can almost be certainly be said for the Isaac piece, which would in any case be a little long for a rondeau, given all the repeats that this form entails. La Martinella pittzulo is also probably an instrumental piece, but there is some doubt over the fourth piece, with appears in two sources with what seem like first words of chansons texts.
Johannes Martini (c. 1440-1497) was, in spite of his name, a musician from Brabant; like many other musicians of his generation from the Low Cotintires, he moved to Italy, and in fact spent most of his working life at the ducal chapel in Ferrara, apart from a short spell in Milan.
In this edition the original accidentals are taken as applying to the whole bar until contradicted, but purely editorial accidentals, printed small above the stave, apply to the individual note only. The original note values have been halved. This does give a very “white” note picture, but allows the cross-rhythms to come through. I would suggest an average tempo of semibreve (whole note) = 60-70 for these pieces.
The pieces are printed here at their original pitch, which is fine for “soft” instruments such as recorders, viols and flutes. It is fairly clear, however, that players of wind instruments such as cornetts., shawms and sackbuts were used to transposing their music up a fourth or fifth. For the benefit of such instrumentalists we have produced a transposed set of scores (EML245a). This edition follows the Florence version throughout, with one exception: bars. 11-12 of the discantus of no. 4 appear after Rome, Biblioteca Casatense 2856, where the range of certain pieces have been reduced to fit wind instruments.