Boethius: Songs of Consolation
  • Geremia
    Posts: 269


    Boethius: Songs of Consolation

    Metra from 11th-century Canterbury

    Schola Cantorum Basiliensis and Glossa Music 2018 (GCD 9225188)

    Total playing time 51:05. Recorded at Topaz Audio Studios, Cologne, from 31 July to 5 August 2017.

    Recording producer: Reinhard Kobialka.

    Executive producers: Thomas Drescher, Katja Zimmermann, Carlos Céster. Booklet essay by Sam Barrett.

    CD notes (PDF)


    Imprisoned in Pavia in the early 520s, Boethius could not have anticipated that his final work would become one of the most widely read books of the Middle Ages. The Consolation of Philosophy [which St. Thomas Aquinas et al. read and quoted] portrays his struggle to reconcile himself to his fate by exploring the ways of man, the role of Fortune, and the major questions of good and evil. Evidence that the poems of the Consolation were sung in the early Middle Ages survives in the form of musical notation added to over thirty extant manuscripts dating from the ninth through to the beginning of the twelfth century. Through scholarly detective work, the members of Sequentia, together with a Cambridge eminence in the medieval melodic tradition linked to Boethius’ work, Sam Barrett, have been able to produce a convincing reconstruction of this lost repertory. Barrett himself signs the main booklet essay and provides some fascinating insights therein.

    Benjamin Bagby, voice, harps & direction
    Hanna Marti, voice & harp
    Norbert Rodenkirchen, flutes
    Tracks

    Carmina qui quondam
    Heu, quam praecipiti
    Tunc me discussa
    Quisquis composito
    O stelliferi conditor
    Cum Phoebi radiis
    Nubibus atris
    Stans a longe (instr.)
    Si quantas rapidis
    Tuba (instr.)
    Bella bis quinis
    Vaga (instr.)
    Quid tantos iuvat
    Thanked by 3M. Jackson Osborn CHGiffen janetgorbitz
  • Geremia
    Posts: 269
    Also worth checking out is Sequentia's Complete Works of Hildegard von Bingen (9 CDs). The 9th CD, the Celestial Hierarchy, is on YouTube, too.
    Thanked by 1CHGiffen
  • Daniel Bennett PageDaniel Bennett Page
    Posts: 837
    I was just covering these in my 11th-grade music history class at the Catholic classical high school where I teach—Boethius being a big name in said world!
  • Geremia
    Posts: 269
    Yes, Boethius was one of the first music theorists / acousticians.
  • VilyanorVilyanor
    Posts: 388
    Are these related to the melodies found in St. Gall?
  • ghmus7
    Posts: 1,486
    Ben Bagby is a legend in the Early music genre. I recall a number of mesmerising performances I have heard.
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