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• Ammerbach, Elias Nikolaus: 4 Dances (1583)

Ammerbach, Elias Nikolaus: 4 Dances (1583)

for 4 instruments.

These dances are taken from Nikolaus Ammerbach´s Orgel oder Instrument Tabulaturbuch, published in Nürnberg in 1583. This collection is one of three substantial collections (the others printed in 1571 and 1575) of keyboard music published by Ammerbach, who is described on his title pages as organist at St. Thomas´church in Leipzig, where J. S. Bach worked 150 or so years later. Most of the pieces seem to be intabulations of pieces originally written in parts; there are motets, chansons, lieder, madrigals and many different kinds of music; the settings of these are interesting more as examples of how to improvise divisions than as compositions in their own right. Both the 1571 and 1583 prints contain a large number of dances: some of these are straight unadorned intabulations of standard dance repertoire of the type that appear in Pierre Phalèse's ensemble dance prints. There are also versions - usually fairly ornate - of dance repertoire from the beginning of the century, such as “Benzenhauer” or “Bruder Conrads Tanzmass”. But the collection also fills a useful gap, for there are no surviving collections of German dance music between the Hessen books of 1555 and the books by Haussmann and others that began to appear at the end of the century. Although most of this material is very simple, the melodies often have a distinctive quality. Some of partwriting seems rather crude for the hand of a church musician, and it is probable that Ammerbach only compiled the dance sections, rather than actually arranging them.
In these transcriptions I have tried to produce versions that work on wind or string ensembles, without entirely recomposing the relatively primitive settings in Ammerbach board; I have not worried too much, for instance, about parallel fifths, which are not particularly unusual in dance settings. Literal transcriptions can be found in the complete edition by Charles Jacobs of the Ammerbach collection (Oxford University Press).
The original note values have been halved throughout. A few editorial accidentals have been added in brackets.