A Light in the Darkness: Villancicos for Christmas

Posted on November 28, 2018 Updated on November 30, 2018

by Colleen Baade

Around this time of year, a short video clip from the 1967 Christmas episode of The Monkees TV show circulates on social media. If you’ve never heard The Monkees sing “Ríu Ríu Chíu,” I encourage you to watch it. I, along with majority of people who’ve posted comments to the video on YouTube, find their performance of the centuries-old Spanish Christmas carol charming.

“Ríu Ríu Chíu” was published in Venice in 1556 in a small book of songs titled Villancicos de diversos autores, also known to music scholars as the Cancionero de Upsala (Uppsala Songbook) for the university library in Sweden that holds the single surviving copy. At the time of its publication, “Ríu Ríu Chíu” and other villancicos like it were fast becoming what could rightly be considered the most important (and certainly the most popular) musical genre in the Iberian Peninsula and its New World colonies for several centuries. Villancicos — religious songs characterized by dance rhythms and words in the vernacular instead of Latin — were heard in churches all over the Iberian world at all sorts of occasions from saints’ days to nuns’ professions. Early in the 17^th century, music theorist Pietro Cerone chided impious churchgoers, normally too lazy to get out of bed, who “when they know there will be villancicos, there is no one anywhere more devout or more vigilant than they are… nor does it bother them to get up at midnight, regardless how cold it may be.”

Some 400 years later, Dulces Voces delights in singing these lively and theologically profound sacred songs from Iberia, two of which are featured on this years’ Christmas program. The anonymous “De la virgen” (“Of the Virgin”) comes from a collection of keyboard music published in Alcalá de Henares just one year after the Uppsala Songbook (and ten years after Miguel de Cervantes was born in that same city). “De la virgen” poses the question “¿De quién?,“ that is, “Of whom [is the Virgin worthy to be mother]?” The answer affirms the Divine Motherhood of Mary, who bore “the eternal God, equal to the Father.” Pedro de Cristo’s “Es nascido” (“He is born”) was likely composed around the same time Pedro Cerone was scolding villancico fans. Its author was a Portuguese monk who served as chapel master at Augustinian monasteries in Coimbra and Lisbon. Like the earlier “De la virgin,” “Es nascido” tells the Christmas story in dialogue form to people who demand to know—“Dinos quien” (“Tell us who”) — just who has been born. The reply explains that the one who is born is the same one whose birth was foretold by the Zechariah, “whose signs are the manger and the stable,” and who is “born into our poverty, so as to give us His riches.”

“De la virgen” and “Es nascido” are featured in A Light in the Darkness, Saturday, December 8, 2018, 7:30pm

Elizabeth Regina: A Note on Versatility from One of Our Singers

Posted on May 31, 2018

Versatility: curse, virtue, or both?

by Jackie Josten, soprano (mostly)

This is my second year singing with Dulces Voces. I begin Elizabeth Regina singing alto on William Byrd’s O Lord, let they servant Elizabeth and, if I’m brave and don’t chicken out and jump up the octave, I will sing a low E-flat below middle C. Then, on the opener for the second half, I sing soprano on Ralph Vaughan Williams’s Just as the tide was flowing, which takes me up to a high A-flat. Provided everything goes according to plan, I will have sung a full two and a half octaves. If, however, this light, lyric soprano doesn’t quite make it down to that low E-flat in the beginning, we’ll only hear a measly two octaves. I’ll try not to disappoint.

I’m far from the first vocally versatile member of Dulces Voces. Holly, who has been with the group since long before I moved to Lincoln, regularly dumbfounds me with her range. She spends a lot of this concert (and most concerts lately) singing tenor — regularly hitting that low E-flat with ease. She’ll then turn around in rehearsal sometimes and break out into a soprano line higher than anything I’ve sung in public to date. We have other members that jump around on parts as well — Laura and I have been trading off singing soprano and alto, John occasionally hops up to tenor from his usual happy place of bass/baritone, and perhaps most impressive to me, Colleen will sometimes take a break from rehearsing her alto line to sit at the piano and play parts.

The concert’s music itself spans a wide range of affects and requires a lot of musical versatility from all of us. We have the stillest of the still in John Tavener’s The Lord’s Prayer (the instructions in the score literally tell the singers to sing with as little dynamic contrast as possible). Contrast that with the very model of lively Renaissance-era polyphony in Thomas Weelkes’ As Vesta was from Latmos hill descending, which is used in almost every undergraduate music history course as an early example of musical variety and text painting. Never mind that those two pieces of music were written four centuries apart.

As much of a challenge as it is to put together such a diverse collection of songs, the members of Dulces Voces have embraced it and had a lot of fun putting it together. One common thread through it all is everything will be in English, even the one with the Latin title, the Orlando Gibbons Te Deum. And after all, the two Elizabethan eras include most, if not all, of England’s most treasured choral music.

Come hear for yourself, Saturday, June 2, 2018, 7:30pm, St. Mark’s on the Campus, 13th & R in Lincoln, NE.