School of Languages and Linguistics - Research Publications

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    A Millenium of Guitars
    Griffiths, J (Contrastes Records, 2022)
    This works argues for continuity in the guitar music of Spain over a period of more than a thousand years. Spain and the guitar are inseparable. They are inseparable for reasons that are inexplicable, no matter how hard we try to invent theories. The guitar and its ancestors have always been there, not just in the time of living memory, but far beyond. Music specifically composed for the guitar and notated for it goes back some five hundred years, but evidence is preserved to show their presence in Spanish culture for at least another five centuries.
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    La música para dos guitarras de Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco
    Griffiths, J (Contrastes Records, 2022)
    Reflection upon and analysis of music for two guitars by Italian composer Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco
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    Las variaciones y remembranzas
    Griffiths, J (Contrastes Records, 2022)
    This essay aims to show the fluid coexistence of the past with the present is one of the marvels of our musical culture. It argues that not only does music of bygone ages continue to move the passions of contemporary listeners, but ideas forged centuries ago still inspire composers to make new creations that join the ends of time into an endless circle.
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    The Lutenist's Garden
    Griffiths, J (Solaire Records, 2022)
    This work provides insight into Lute and guitar music produced in sixteenth-century France. The lute, the most serene of renaissance musical instruments, is always a welcome visitor in the garden of polyphony. As an instrument of measured tranquillity, the lute blends smoothly into the verdant surrounds, so much at home in its protected microcosm that the garden of polyphony becomes indistinguishable from the garden of the lute. Moreover, gardens and lutes have much in common. Above all, they are both places of repose, of peace, and of tranquillity. Secondly, their history has much that is shared, and that relates very closely to the deeper meanings hidden in this recording.
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    Josquin and eternal life - Josquin y la vida eterna
    Griffiths, J (Note 1 Music GMBH, 2021)
    Booklet to accompany the CD "The Josquin Songbook" by María Cristina Kiehr, Jonatán Alvarado and Ariel Abramovitch
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    «il piu bel secreto et arte» Vincenzo and Vidal — a five-hundred-year legacy
    Griffiths, J (Stradivarius Edizioni Musicali, 2021)
    In Venice, around 1517, a lutenist named Vidal embarked on producing a beautiful manuscript of lute tablature, emulating a style he already knew from other lute books published in the same city a few years earlier. His book comprises one hundred and forty pages of music written in numeric tablature consisting of forty-two compositions, preceded by a table of contents and six detailed introductory pages. Vincenzo Capirola is only slightly less of a mystery figure. It has been revealed that he was from Brescia, born into a wealthy mercantile family in 1474 and that he lived a long a life until he was in his mid-seventies. He is last recorded alive in 1548 when he was seventy-four. Documentary evidence confirms his presence in Brescia in 1489, 1498, and 1548. He was in Venice in 1517. His book is one of the most important sources of lute music of the early sixteenth century. Paul Beier performs close to one third of them on this CD.
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    La tiorba encantada
    Griffiths, J (Aula Records, 2021)
    The sumptuous and sensuous sounds of the theorbo are one of the special delicacies of the music of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The theorbo was one of a series of innovations that saw the renaissance lute transformed beyond the wildest dreams of its earlier masters and makers. From the 1580s we learn of experiments taking in place in both France and Italy, musicians endeavouring to bring novelty to the renaissance lute, changes that would allow it to adapt to new sonorities and new ways of thinking about music. The theorbo was one of the products of these experiments, a lute that could compete with the harpsichord and that was to cast its own spell on the music of 17th-century Italy and France.
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    Bach y Bogdanovic comparten escenario / Bach andy Bogdanovic share the stage
    Griffiths, J (Contrastes Records, 2021)
    The point of intersection between Johann Sebastian Bach and Dusan Bogdanovic is significantly deeper than the shared B of their surnames. On the outside, their language is very different but in the depths of their communicative spirit they are on a similar wavelength. We need to hear them in juxtaposition—play the tracks of this CD in an aleatoric (dis_order—to hear the way they intersect in the continually changing musical landscape of our civilisation. One strong link between them is the place of improvisation in their musical identity. Born in 1685, Bach grew up an organist in a family of musicians at a time when improvisation was an essential skill that was widely practised. Bach was renowned for his capacity to improvise fugues of up to six voices, an ability that is also evident in the depth of the contrapuntal works he crafted on paper in his daily compositional activity. Bogdanovic was born 270 years later in 1955 but seems to have inherited both the stylistic complexity and love of improvisation often associated with Bach, but at a different time and place, in a musical world of different stimuli.
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    Per voi ardo
    Griffiths, J (IBS Records, 2021)
    A new style of lute song blossomed along the northern Mediterranean seaboard in the 1530s, especially in Italy and Spain, closely connected with the rebirth of Classical culture, and the activity of literary humanists. It was to remain in fashion for much longer than might have been expected, right until the end of the century. It all began fifty years earlier with Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499) who made the first Latin translations of Plato and awoke curiosity about ancient Greece, its poetry and its music. Per voi ardo thus presents a large number of Italian madrigals in the form they are preserved in Spain in the vihuela books of Enríquez de Valderrábano (1547), Diego Pisador (1552) and Miguel de Fuenllana (1554). They are complemented by settings by Alonso Mudarra, original compositions like Milán’s, using Italian texts of the same flavour, and with accompaniments that parallel the arranged madrigals in many ways.
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    Un círculo, un mundo, una sonata / a Circle, a World, a Sonata
    Griffiths, J (Contrastes Records, 2020)
    The Italian sonata has a n accidental origin in the early seventeenth century but came to be one of the central instrumental forms of the subsequent three centuries. Originally an ensemble work, the solo sonata came to dominate the solo repertoire for keyboard and violin in the eighteenth century through to well into the twentieth. This recital program presents solo sonatas for guitar by Italian composers from 1750 until 1977.