Laudario 91 di Cortone

A laudario is a laud-collection, “laud-arium” (like acquarium or herbarium), an old manuscript containing words and music for a group of lauds. Ours is in the library of he Etruscan Academy at Cortona, numbered 91. Hence our title.

The Lauds were popular traditional religious songs, a kind of sacred folk music, that originated in Northern Italy in the thirteenth century. Their single-line melodies were set to short, rhymed lines, part local Italian dialect, part church Latin. They retell the well known stories and dogma in simple dramatic style, a kind of folk drama and a link between the old mystery plays and the later dramatic church oratoril. The lauds began in the days of St. francis of Assissi, who preached peacefully to the atnimals, and of the tortured flagellants, who went singing through the streets whipping their flesh to shreds to atone for man’s sin; these raw dramatic contrasts are still evident in the laud texts.

The lauds continued as a popular tradition well into the nineteenth century. In this recording, the old single-line melodies are harmonized traditionally— that is, in the musical idiom of recent times. Signor Sgrizzi’s semi-Impressionist “antique” modal harmonies are not unlike those of the folk revival days of the early twentieth century, when the old modal scales first returned to musical favor. In the context of the folk settings of Vaughan Williams and Holst in England, Canteloube in France, the Negro spiritual in America, the lauds are in natural surroundings— for they are actually a form of sacred folk music.

The texts are difficult to translate but, as our English hopefully shows, there is a moving dignity to this story of Jesus in folk terms that is worthy of a tradition 700 years old.