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• Festa, Costanzo: 2 Contrapunti

Festa, Costanzo: 2 Contrapunti

sopra il canto fermo (La Spagna) for 5 instruments.

These two pieces come from a collection of no less than 157 settings of the same cantus firmus, preserved in MS C36 of the Civico Museo Bibliografico Musicale in Bologna. Due to some misunderstanding, the title page of this collection actually attributes the pieces to Giovanni Maria Nanino (1543-1607), a student of Palestrina, and refers to the melody used as “il canto fermo intitulato la base di Costanzo Festa”. However, it has been known for decades that Costanzo Festa (1490-1545) composed a large collection of settings of the cantus firmus in question, and anyway the style of these pieces is definitely that of the early sixteenth century.
The melody used here is essentially the same as that of the bassadanza La spagna that occurs in many late-fifteenth century settings, and which even forms the basis of a mass by Heinrich Isaac; it is, however, somewhat shortened, with the 45 or so bars usual in the 15th-century versions reduced to 37, by omitting notes that repeat.
In contrapunto 104 Festa has two of parts repeat ostinato figures derived from the names of Ferdinando and Isabella of Spain: the vowels in the name were matched with the vowels in the sol-fa names, so Is-a-bel-la becomes Mi Fa Re La. Elsewhere in the collection the famous Josquin motif La Sol Fa Re Mi is incorporated into the texture in a similar fashion.
In this edition the original note values have been halved throughout. A few editorial accidentals have been added, printed small above the stave: these apply to the one note only. For the sake of simplicity, the original accidentals are taken as applying to the whole bar.
An alternative version of these pieces transposed up a fourth is available as EML 338a.