[Theme music begins]

Welcome to Harmonia . . . I’m Angela Mariani.

Put on a sweater, because this hour, we’re touring the Nordic countries. Often left out of the discussion when it comes to early music, the regions of modern-day Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Iceland have fascinating musical pasts. Our sonic journey across the icy North will take us from the Viking Age through the seventeenth century. We’ll hear from bards and religious reformers, local musicians like Mogens Pedersøn and imported celebrities like John Dowland. We’ll explore the musical legacies of Nordic royalty, who included saints, patrons, and composers. Then, on our featured recording, Stephan MacLeod, Gli Angeli Genève, and Josquin Desprez carry us back to continental Europe. Join us!

[Theme music fades]

MUSIC TRACK
Ice and Longboats
Ensemble Mare Balticum
Delphian | DCD34181 (2016)
Anonymous
Tr. 23 Anonymous: Nobilis humilis [ca. 1300] (4:46)

Ensemble Mare Balticum with Nobilis humilis, a hymn from around 1300 preserved in the Uppsala University Library. Its text, “Noble, humble, steadfast Magnus,” honors a twelfth-century Norse ruler of the Orkney Islands.

When we think about Nordic history, the Vikings might be one of the first things that to come to mind. Pop culture and nineteenth-century opera often have us imagining Vikings as bearded, horn-wearing seafarers, but their broader society was largely agrarian. Throughout the ninth through eleventh centuries, Norse culture gradually spread outward from Scandinavia, the area of modern-day Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, as the maritime traders and raiding parties we know as Vikings settled parts of the British Isles, France, Iceland, Greenland, and the Baltic coast. Some Viking excursions traveled as far as Newfoundland and Arabia. We’ll begin our own Nordic journey this hour with the sounds of Viking Age instruments reconstructed from archaeological finds.

MUSIC TRACK
Ice and Longboats
Ensemble Mare Balticum
Delphian | DCD34181 (2016)
Anonymous
Tr. 1 Drømde mik en drøm i nat [Codex Runicus, ca. 1300] (1:10)

Ute Goedecke of Ensemble Mare Balticum playing the anonymous East Norse tune “I dreamed a dream last night” on a reconstructed Viking Age bone recorder. Next, we’ll hear Benjamin Bagby singing [an] Old Norse epic to another reconstructed Viking Age instrument, the Germanic lyre.

MUSIC TRACK
Edda: Myths from Medieval Iceland
Sequentia
Harmonia Mundi 2301487 (1999)
Anonymous
Tr. 2 Veit ek at ek hekk (5:40)

Benjamin Bagby of Sequentia singing “Odinn’s rune-verses,” part of the Poetic Edda, a collection of Old Norse literature preserved in thirteenth-century Iceland.

Christianity reached the Norse people gradually, as Viking merchants found that conversion improved their trade relationships; missionaries made their way into Sweden and Denmark; and Norse settlements in Britain and Continental Europe fell to military campaigns by Christian rulers. As a result, some of the earliest notated music that survives from these regions was created for Christian worship.

St. Olaf, Olaf the Second Haraldsson was a king of Norway in the early twelfth century who is credited with advancing his kingdom’s assimilation to Christianity. His martyrdom in battle is commemorated in the sequence text “Lux illuxit” by Eysteinn Erlendsson, who was Archbishop of Nidaros, Olaf’s burial place, in the later twelfth century.

MUSIC TRACK
Ice and Longboats
Ensemble Mare Balticum
Delphian | DCD34181 (2016)
Anonymous
Tr. 6 Lux illuxit “Joyful light” [Sequentia: Eystein Erlendsson, ca. 1170] (5:48)

Lux illuxit, a sequence for St. Olaf of Norway performed by Ensemble Mare Balticum.

A manuscript preserved in the city of Kiel on Germany’s Baltic coast, which had been Danish territory until the mid-nineteenth century, tells of another Nordic prince turned saint. The victim of a political murder in the twelfth century, Knud Lavard was canonized following a series of miracles reported at his resting place.

MUSIC TRACK
Mare Balticum Vol. 1
Ensemble Peregrina, Agnieszka Budzińska-Bennett, Benjamin Bagby
TACET Musikproduktion | TACET243DIG (2017)
Anonymous
Tr. 11 Ave martyr dux Danorum [antiphon, Knud Lavard's office, 13th century] (1:52)

A thirteenth-century office antiphon, Ave martyr dux Danorum, for the feast of St. Knud Lavard, Ensemble Peregrina led by Agnieszka Budzińska-Bennett and Benjamin Bagby.

In 1397, the three kingdoms of Denmark; Sweden, including much of what is now Finland; and Norway, including its colonies in Greenland, Iceland, and the Faroe Islands, united under a single monarch. This entity, known as the Kalmar Union, lasted until 1523, when Sweden seceded after a series of rebellions. The first king of the newly independent Sweden was Gustav Vasa, who, like Henry the Eighth of England, broke ties with the Catholic Church over political disputes, eventually establishing a Lutheran state church. Lutheranism was also codified as the state religion of Denmark in 1536, which at the time included the former Kingdom of Norway.

MUSIC TRACK
The Royal Court of the Vasa Kings
Hortus Musicus
Musica Sveciae | MSCD202 (1995)
Anonymous
Tr. 22 Tanz Diomedes (2:39)
Erik XIV
Tr. 27 Fragment (:24)

The Estonian ensemble Hortus Musicus performed a dance called Diomedes from the Vasa court collections, followed by a fragment of a motet composed by King Gustav’s son Erik the Fourteenth of Sweden.

The Nordic countries’ geographical separation from Rome resulted in less anxiety about the assimilation of Catholic traditions, and some practices that were abandoned in other Protestant areas, like singing in Latin, were maintained. The first hymnal printed in Finland was the Latin Piae Cantiones of 1582, in which a number of local hymns in practice well before the Reformation were transcribed and published with only minor textual adjustments.

MUSIC TRACK
Piae Cantiones: Latin Song in Medieval Finland
Retrover Ensemble, Markus Tapio
Naxos (Alte Musik) | 8.554180 (1998)
Anonymous
Tr. 20 Aetas carmen melodiae,, PC 1582 (1:17)
Daniel Friderici
Tr. 23 Aetas carmen melodiae, PC 1625 (2:39)

Markus Tapio led the Retrover Ensemble on two versions of Aetas carmen melodiae, first an anonymous hymn from the 1582 print of Piae Cantiones, then an adaption by Daniel Friderici from the 1625 second edition.

[Theme music begins]

Early music can mean a lot of things. What does it mean to you? Let us know your thoughts and ideas. Contact us at harmonia early music dot org, where you’ll also find playlists and an archive of past shows.

You’re listening to Harmonia . . . I’m Angela Mariani.

[Theme music fades]

(1:00) Mid Break Music Bed:

MUSIC TRACK
Edda: Myths from Medieval Iceland
Sequentia
Harmonia Mundi 2301487 (1999)
Anonymous
Tr. 6 Baldrs minni

(Music fades)

Welcome back. We’ll continue our tour of Nordic early music with the legacies of some of the most famous instrumentalists working in the region. King Christian the Fourth of Denmark had a taste for English music, bringing first, string player William Brade and then lutenist John Dowland to work at his court in the 1590s.

MUSIC TRACK
Mascharada
The King’s Noyse, David Douglass
Harmonia Mundi | HMU907165DI (1996)
William Brade
Tr. 6 Der Satyrn Tanz (Dance of the Satyrs) (1:16)

MUSIC TRACK
A Pleasing Melancholy
Chelys Consort of Viols, Emma Kirkby, James Akers
BIS | BIS-2283 (2017)
John Dowland
Tr. 8 Mourn, mourn, day is with darkness fled (1:31)

A sample of John Dowland’s Danish works. We heard Emma Kirkby and James Akers performed “Mourn, mourn, day is with darkness fled” from John Dowland’s Second Booke of Songs or Ayres, dedicated from Denmark in June of 1600. We started the set with a performance by The King’s Noyse of William Brade’s “Satyr’s Dance.”

There were also plenty of local musicians working at Scandinavian courts in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, like Mogens Pedersøn, who was selected to join Danish kapellmeister Melchior Borchgrevinck on a trip to Venice to study with Giovanni Gabrieli in 1599. Pedersøn’s surviving compositions include Italian-style madrigals as well as the first collection of church music in which Danish texts are set by a Danish composer, the Pratum Spirituale of 1620.

MUSIC TRACK
Mogens Pedersøn: Pratum Spirituale
Weser-Renaissance Bremen, Manfred Cordes
CPO | 555216-2 (2022)
Mogens Pedersøn
Tr. 1 Nu bede vi den Helligaand (Nun bitten wir den Heiligen Geist) (3:48)

Manfred Cordes led Weser-Renaissance Bremen on Mogens Pedersøn’s setting of a hymn which you might recognize by its German title “Nun bitten wir den Heiligen Geist,” literally “We now implore the Holy Ghost.”

By all accounts, Swedish poet Lars Wivallius was quite a character. After leaving university in Uppsala in 1625, he lived a life of petty crime, travelling Europe in disguise, and becoming engaged under false pretenses to the daughter of a nobleman. We’ll hear a setting of his ballad “Ack, Libertas!,” “Ah, liberty” written during a stint in prison around 1632.

MUSIC TRACK
Ack Libertas! Songs with lyrics by Lars Wivallius
Ensemble Mare Balticum, Martin Bagge, Mikael Paulsson
Footprint Records | FRCD066 (2012)
Anonymous, arr. M. Bagge and M. Paulsson
Tr. 1 Ack libertas, du adla ting! (Ah, Liberty, thou noble thing!) (2:56)

Martin Bagge sang the ballad “Ack, libertas!”by seventeenth-century Swedish poet Lars Wivallius with Mikael Paulsson and Ensemble Mare Balticum.

This hour’s featured recording takes us South, to the relatively balmy climes of Burgundy, France, and Italy. Stephen MacLeod and Gli Angeli Genève released Josquin Deprez’s Missa Malheur me bat with Aparte in September 2023. We’ll start with the Kyrie.

MUSIC TRACK
Josquin Desprez: Malheur me bat
Stephan MacLeod, Gli Angeli Genève
Aparte AP388 (2023)
Josquin Desprez
Tr. 1 Missa malheur me bat: Kyrie (3:17)

Stephan MacLeod led Gli Angeli Genève with the Kyrie of Josquin Desprez’ Missa malheur me bat.

Josquin composed this mass using a technique known as parody, in which part of the polyphonic texture of another piece is imitated or quoted in each of the mass movements. In this case, the source material is the secular song “Malheur me bat; I am struck by misfortune” attributed to Johannes Martini. Next, we’ll hear one of the most famous sad songs of the time attributed to Josquin himself.

MUSIC TRACK
Josquin Desprez: Malheur me bat
Stephan MacLeod, Gli Angeli Genève
Aparte AP388 (2023)
Josquin Desprez
Tr. 8 Mille regretz (2:19)

Gli Angeli Genève and Stephan MacLeod with “Mille regretz, a thousand regrets at leaving you,” attributed to Josquin.

Director Stephan MacLeod conceived the album around works by Josquin in the mournful Phrygian mode. We’ll hear one more of these, Josquin’s Déploration or elegy on the death of Johannes Ockeghem.

MUSIC TRACK
Josquin Desprez: Malheur me bat
Stephan MacLeod, Gli Angeli Genève
Aparte AP388 (2023)
Josquin Desprez
Tr. 4 Nymphes des bois (5:20)

Josquin’s elegy for Ockeghem “Nymphes des bois” sung by Gli Angeli Genève and Stephen Stephan? MacLeod on this hour’s featured release, Josquin Desprez: Malheur me bat, released in 2023 on the Aparte label.

[Fade in theme music]

Harmonia is a production of WFIU and part of the educational mission of Indiana University.
Support comes from Early Music America: a national organization that advocates and supports the historical performance of music of the past, the community of artists who create it, and the listeners whose lives are enriched by it. On the web at EarlyMusicAmerica-dot-org.

Additional resources come from the William and Gayle Cook Music Library at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music.

We welcome your thoughts about any part of this program, or about early music in general. Contact us at harmonia early music dot org. You can follow us on Facebook by searching for Harmonia Early Music.

The writer for this edition of Harmonia is Chelsey Belt.

Thanks to our studio engineer Michael Paskash, and our production team: LuAnn Johnson, Aaron Cain, and John Bailey. I’m Angela Mariani, inviting you to join us again for the next edition of Harmonia.

[Theme music concludes]