by Paul Matheson

The Marian Consort: Vicente Lusitano - Motets (Linn Records, Cat No CKD694, )

The Marian Consort has a penchant for rediscovering little-known repertoire that has been unjustly neglected. This groundbreaking recording contains a selection of striking and impressive works by Vicente Lusitano (c.1520-c.1561). In his own time Lusitano was regarded as an important music theorist and composer. His only surviving printed book of compositions, the Liber primus epigramatum, was issued in Rome in 1551. Since that time, Lusitano’s work has been largely overlooked. As with many other musicians of the Renaissance, much remains unknown about the life of Vicente Lusitano: even his surname simply means ‘Portuguese’.

Biography

The existing biographical information for Lusitano comes principally from an encyclopaedia entry by Portuguese Catholic priest Diogo Barbosa Machado in his Bibliotheca Lusitana of 1752. It relates that Lusitano was born in Olivença, became a priest in the order of St Peter, and taught in both Padua and Viterbo ‘with great success, receiving high fees from his students’. Most intriguingly, a mid-seventeenth century manuscript by João Franco Barreto describes Lusitano as ‘pardo’, a term used to denote a mixed-race person of European and African parentage. Because of its foundational involvement in the slave trade, 16th century Portugal had a notable population of people of African descent. (The slavery museum in the Algarve resort of Lagos is well worth a visit). So it may be that Lusitano had a Black African mother and a white Portuguese father. And it may thus also be that Lusitano is the first published ‘mixed-race’ composer in Western classical music tradition.

Records show that Lusitano was in early 1550s Rome in the employ of Dom Afonso de Lencastre, Portuguese ambassador to the Holy See, as music tutor to his son Dinis, to whom Lusitano dedicates his book of compositions ‘Liber Primus Epigramatum’. Lusitano was well-known as a music theorist (he published a treatise on improvised counterpoint in 1553 in Rome). He engaged in a widely reported debate with another music theorist, Nicola Vicentino, in June 1551 in Rome, on the subject of permissible chromaticism in music. Lusitano was adjudged the winner by a panel of musicians that included members of the Sistine Chapel. One of the compositions on this album (‘Heu me, Domine’ - ‘Woe is me, Lord’) was composed with the specific purpose of demonstrating polyphonic writing using melodic subjects made of chromatic scales.

Paul Matheson is a policy advisor on equality, human rights and standards in public life.