PIAE CANTIONES
Utopia Chamber Choir

Piae Cantiones’ Origins
500 years before 1582

Piae Cantiones (Spiritual Songs), the first Finnish music ever to be printed, was published in Greifswald in 1582 under the direction of Theodoricus Petri Rutha, a Finnish student matriculated at nearby Rostock University. The songs and texts were edited by Jaakko Suomalainen, also known as Finno, Headmaster of the Cathedral School at Turku, who also published the first Finnish hymnal. But although many of the texts are on religious themes, the Piae Cantiones songs are not hymns; they represent a varied repertoire sung as extra-curricular entertainment for the Turku students. Styles range from the lively dance-rhythms and catchy refrains of Gaudete, to the cool renaissance counterpoint of Jesu dulcis memoria to the austere restraint of chant-like melody in Angelus emittitur, the first song in the book.

A second edition, published in 1625 by two scholars from Viipuri, former Rostock University students, was edited by Daniel Friderici, cantor at the church of St Mary’s, Rostock. A celebratory facsimile of the 1582 print was published in Helsinki in 1967. The songs heard on this recording were transcribed from the original 16th-century notation by Mats Lillhannus, with additional work by Valter Maasalo and Andrew Lawrence-King.  Many modern editions transpose the songs freely, for the convenience of church choirs, but we have chosen to perform each song according to the original clefs. Some songs are notated for high voices in treble or soprano clefs; others are written in tenor or baritone clef. Psallat scholarum concio in hoc convivio begins in bass clef, on what is in theory the lowest note of the medieval hexachord system, low G or Gamut, from where it descends! We can perhaps imagine a gang of older students singing and playing instruments (psallere means to sing psalms, or to play a psalm-inspired instrument, such as a psaltery, or King David’s harp) at a Christmas party (convivio).

+ Información en el booklet del CD

ANDREW LAWRENCE-KING