- Black Cow

play hifi lofi, license, BUY

- Holburns Passion

play hifi lofi, license, BUY

- Josquin des Prez Lute Settings

play hifi lofi, license, BUY

- Blame Not My Lute

play hifi lofi, license, BUY

- Jane Pickeringes Lute Book

play hifi lofi, license, BUY

- Siena Lute Book

play hifi lofi, license, BUY

- The Art of the Lute Player

play hifi lofi, license, BUY

Jacob Heringman has established himself as one of the world's most respected and most innovative solo lute players. He appears on over 50 CDs as a soloist, collaborator and ensemble player, with renowned artists such as Barbara Bonney, Catherine King, and Michael Chance, and with leading medieval and renaissance ensembles including Fretwork, Musicians of the Globe, The King's singers, Virelai and the Dufay Collective. The American lutenist Jacob Heringman studied with Jakob Lindberg at the Royal College of Music in London, and later with Pat O'Brien in New York.

Based in England since 1987, he has established himself as one of the world's most respected and most innovative solo lute players, and as a much sought-after ensemble player performing regularly throughout Europe and North and South America, and making many CD and radio recordings of medieval and renaissance music with leading English ensembles, including The Rose Consort of Viols, Fretwork, Musicians of the Globe, The Kings Singers, The New London Consort, Virelai and The Dufay Collective.

As a continuo player, Jacob Heringman performed and recorded with The King's Consort, The English Baroque Soloists, The Parley of Instruments and The Taverner Consort, among others. In 1993, he left the continuo circuit to focus on renaissance solo and ensemble projects.

Solo Discography:

Holburns Passion
As a soloist, Jacob released his first CD, "Holburns Passion: music for lute, cittern and bandora by Anthony Holborne", on the ASV label in 1998. This disc was chosen by Gramophone Magazine as one of the best CDs of 1999, and given a rosette and three stars in the Penguin CD guide.

Black Cow
lute music by Valentin Bakfark and Matthaeus Waissel was Jacob's first disc for Robert Fripp's DGM label.

Josquin Des Prez
His second, the first lute CD ever to be devoted to the music of the great Josquin Des Prez, was released in the summer of 2000, and has received numerous superlative reviews, noteably in Gramophone and BBC Music Magazine. It had already attracted attention and a cover story in Early Music Today even before its release.

Jane Pickeringe's Lute Book
Jacob's fourth solo CD is entitled Jane Pickeringe's Lute Book. It was released in June of 2002, and has also been highly acclaimed in the music press.

The Art of the Lute Player
A fifth, entitled The Art of the Lute Player, was released in October 2002. This disc is a compilation of material from the first three solo CDs, plus solo tracks from the ASV Milan and Mudarra albums made with the singer Catherine King (see discography page).

The Siena Lute Book
Jacob's sixth and latest solo CD released in the spring of 2004.

Heringman is married to gambist Susanna Pell of the Dufay Collective and plays on several pieces of their album "Cancionero".

Richard Falkenstein's notes about the Siena Lute Book

The works on the present recording have been selected from the contents of two manuscripts produced in Tuscany during the late sixteenth century. The sources are largely the work of a single scribe whose name has been lost to us. While originating from the same hand, they are different from one another in important ways.

The "Siena Lute Book" (The Hague, Gemeentemuseum, MS 28.B.39) is a lengthy anthology of over 150 items that was compiled in Siena. Its highly organized layout suggests careful planning and that it may have been assembled as a preservation copy, a repository for tablatures that could be recopied into other manuscripts. It begins with fantasias and ricercars grouped according to mode and intabulations of French chansons, all for six-course lute. There follows a section of fantasias, toccatas, contrapunti upon "La spagna," and untitled dances, some of which require a lute with a seventh course.

Because of the wide range and high quality of its contents as well as its careful copying, the "Siena Lute Book" is an outstanding source of lute music. It dates from c. 1590, but the time period of composition for its contents spans much of the 1500s. There are a number of pieces by some of the most famous lutenists of the early sixteenth-century: Francesco da Milano, Albert de Rippe, and Perino Fiorentino. The source also has arrangements of ensemble ricercars by the organist Giulio [da Modena] Segni, whose works enjoyed some popularity as lute intabulations in mid sixteenth-century publications. The chanson intabulations include those of music by Clement Janequin, Thomas Crecquillon, and Pierre Sandrin, composers whose songs were popular with lutenists and other instrumentalists from the middle to the end of the sixteenth century. Pieces more contemporary with the copying of the manuscript are those by the Neapolitans Fabritio Dentice and Giulio Severino as well as those by the Sienese composer Andrea Feliciani. Some of the works in the source are found nowhere else, which makes it an invaluable collection of sixteenth-century lute music.

Four pieces in the manuscript are contrapunti (highly ornate melodies) composed upon the famous dance tune "La spagna." For the present recording Jacob Heringman has reconstructed tenors (accompaniments incorporating "La spagna") for two of these contrapunti to create lute duets; this is likely to have been their intended manner of performance.

The other source for the works on the present recording is a manuscript preserved at the Dolmetsch Library in Haslemere (MS II C23). In its present state-some pages are missing-it is a modest collection of less than two dozen pieces for lute and guitar. Most of the compositions are for six-course lute, and they are in the handwriting of the "Siena Lute Book" scribe. A different hand was responsible for two pieces for seven-course lute, and a third hand copied a guitar tablature (with alfabeto notation) into the source.

Haslemere contains fantasias, ricercars, dance pieces, solo intabulations of vocal music, and arrangements for voice and lute. While the casual arrangement and eclectic nature of the manuscript's tablatures indicate that it may have belonged to an amateur rather than a professional musician, the technical demands of its music suggest that the owner was a very proficient lutenist. Perhaps the "Siena Lute Book" scribe copied pieces into Haslemere for a highly gifted student or friend. The manuscript may have been the lute book of a member of the Medici family or household, since the Medici insignia appears in the upper left corner of the first page of tablature.

One of the ways Haslemere differs from the "Siena Lute Book" is that its intabulated vocal works include Italian pieces rather than French chansons. Among them are "Nasce la pena mia" by Alessandro Striggio, "Vivo sol di speranza " by Giovane Domenico da Nola (it is incorrectly attributed to Orlando di Lasso in Haslemere), and "Vestiva i colli" by Palestrina. These mid sixteenth-century madrigals were favorites with lutenists as solo intabulations and in arrangements for voice and lute throughout the second half of the century.

The program of the present recording features works that represent the breadth of the repertory in the manuscripts they are drawn from. They include "classics " by Francesco da Milano and Perino Fiorentino, later works by Fabritio Dentice and Giulio Severino, chanson intabulations, and dance pieces. Thus, the program gives us an idea of the richness of lute practice in Tuscany at the end of the sixteenth century.

Richard K. Falkenstein (c) 2003

Track Notes from Jacob Heringman for the Siena Lute Book

1. This piece is attributed in the manuscript to Francesco da Parigi, whose identity is a mystery. Five pieces are attributed to him in this source, but some of these are known to be by Francesco da Milano or Albert de Rippe. This Fantasia, actually not much like the work of either Francesco or De Rippe, is a fine piece, with a marvellous balance of rhapsodic passagework, and sophisticated counterpoint and dissonance.

2. Next is an anonymous Fantasia which seems related to another Fantasia (21) in the Siena manuscript, attributed to Perino Fiorentino.

5. This fantasia is anonymous, but strongly reminiscent of Francesco da Milano's style.

7. This remarkable four-part Fantasia from the Medici Lute Book is written in strict and somewhat dense four-part counterpoint. Either it was written by a lutenist/composer with an unusually strong commitment to contrapuntal principles, or it is an intabulation of a pre-existing four-part instrumental piece. To test these ideas, I (re)arranged the piece for four instruments, and can report that it is also highly effective performed in this way.

8. The "Passemezo del giorgio" (or "Zorzi") was a well-known chord progression (or ground) at the time. It survives in many versions for ensemble, for keyboard, for cittern and for lute.

10. Fantasia 23 shares its first few bars with those of a Fantasia in the Barbarino Manuscript (Cracow, Mus. Ms. 40032), there attributed to Dentice. This has led to the assumption that Fantasia 23 is by Dentice. However, because only the first few bars are the same, and because there are other instances of sections of Fantasias by one composer migrating into Fantasias by another, I don't believe we can necessarily assume that this piece is by Dentice. But the extremely high quality, and the stylistic similarity to other works by Dentice, suggest that it may indeed be a case in which Dentice wrote two different Fantasias which share their opening material.

13 + 14. The two lute duets are settings of La Spagna. The manuscript includes only the top line for each of these (and for two more like them), but clearly these top lines are "contrapunti" or trebles on the famous and extraordinarily long-lived La Spagna ground, and, like the countless other Spagna settings that survive (including the one for two lutes by Francesco da Milano), are meant to be accompanied by the Spagna tenor in some form. I have here reconstructed lute accompaniments on that basis, choosing to place the Spagna tenor at the bottom of the second lute parts as a bass line, rather than embedding it in the texture. Interestingly, some of the very last surviving settings of La Spagna (from the early 17th century) are Neapolitan. As the Siena Lute Book has a strong Neapolitan connection (through the presence of music by Severino and Dentice), it is tempting to speculate that these anonymous lute Spagnas might have a Neapolitan link.

20. Although this piece is labelled in the manuscript as a Fantasia, it sounds suspiciously like an intabulation of an as yet unidentified three-part vocal original, in the light style of a villanescha or villanella or chanson rustique. The piece bears a passing resemblance to Passereau's "Il est bel et bon", and an even stronger relation to Certon's "Je ne fus jamais si ayse".

21. For me, Severino's Fantasia (42) is the high point of the programme. It sums up perfectly the emotional profundity, sophistication and sweetness to be found in the late renaissance Italian lute Fantasia.

22. This delightful Fantasia occurs twice in the manuscript (40 and 132). Strangely, it is attributed to Francesco da Parigi the first time it appears, and to Francesco da Milano the second time. Interestingly, the version attributed to Parigi has no bar lines. This may be significant: of the five pieces in Siena attributed to Parigi, three have no bar lines. This is a high proportion when one looks at the total number of pieces in Siena which are without bar lines, which is very small--there are only two others (discounting the later seven-course pieces at the end of the manuscript): 22 and 64.

23. This piece survives in many versions from various parts of Europe. John Dowland seems to have appropriated it for his famous almain "Lady Hunsdon's Puffe".

25. Again, many versions survive of this galliard, in manuscripts from all over Europe. These three pieces (tracks 23-25) are the last items in the Siena Lute Book, and, together with the four settings of La Spagna which precede them, are the only dance music in the manuscript.

26. I conclude with another Dentice Fantasia (73). This splendid piece, with its triple-time dance-like middle section, its nearly three-octave range, and its technical demands, must surely be one of the finest pieces in the manuscript, and, indeed, one of the most memorable Fantasias of the period.

Jacob Heringman 2004

Release Notes from Jacob Heringman for Blame Not My Lute (Includes Info on Source Music)

The lutes used on the recording are as follows:

• Tracks 1-29, 36-38, 46-48, 51-55: six-course lute after Gerle by Andrew Rutherford, New York (1997)
• Tracks 30, 33-35, 40, 49, 57-58: seven-course lute after Gerle by Martin Haycock, West Dean (2001) rom Jacob Heringman
• Tracks 31-32, 39, 41-45, 50, 56: six-course lute after early sixteenth-century models by Grant Tomlinson, Vancouver (2002)

The music which Jacob Heringman performs on this recording consists of the contents of the Lute Society's Edition of 58 Very Easy Pieces—played here with the addition of some ornaments, and "divisions" or variations in the style of the time. The primary aim of this edition was to supply a stock of confidence-building pieces for the beginner on the renaissance lute, as commercially available tutor-books tend to supply only rather limited quantities of material for each stage of the student's progress, for want of space. The collection was therefore aimed at the player more than the listener, so it is gratifying to discover that it makes an agreeable listening experience; indeed the recording shows that lute music which is very simple on the printed page can be charming when brought to life by a good lutenist. The material is graded in approximate order of difficulty, which helps give a shape to the programme.

In the selection of pieces there was a strong bias towards unpublished sources, as there was little point in reproducing material (Dowland's half-dozen easiest pieces, music from the early German lute books, and so on) already found in a number of tutors, and in readily available playing editions. The music chosen includes some of the simplest surviving settings of works from two repertoires in particular: early sixteenth-century Italian dance, and Elizabethan balladry.

The difficulty of much of the surviving repertoire of renaissance lute music makes it clear that in the instrument's heyday standards of playing were extremely high. Nonetheless, a good deal of easy lute music survives, mainly in four kinds of source: lute tutors published in the sixteenth century; music manuscripts belonging to amateurs or students; printed works which consist largely of music by and for professionals and virtuoso players, but where a few easy pieces were included, no doubt to help sales, and often it would seem to fill up blank staves at the foot of a page; and finally, dance tutors which supplied music for dances in lute tablature. The lute, alongside the dancing master's 'kit' or pochette violin, was the piano repetiteur of its day.

The music on this recording, listed below, comes from three out of these four types of source, which can be briefly described as follows.

• 1511b Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich, Ms.1511b. An early/mid-sixteenth century lute book, containing mostly Italian dance tunes, in Italian lute tablature.
  
  
• Ballet Trinity College, Dublin, MS 408/1. 'William Ballet's Lute Book', an amateur anthology, compiled by several hands, c.1595 and c.1610.
  
  
• TCD MS 408/2 Trinity College, Dublin, MS 408/2. An amateur anthology, now bound with William Ballet's Lute Book.
  
  
• Caroso (1581) Fabritio Caroso, Il Ballarino (Venice, 1581; facsimile, New York: Broude Brothers, 1967). One of the great dance treatises of the 1500s, with music for each dance in Italian lute tablature.
  
  
• Dallis Trinity College Dublin, MS 410/1. A student's lute book, belonging to a Cambridge student of Thomas Dallis, compiled over a few years from 1583.
  
  
• Le Roy (1568) Adrian Le Roy, A briefe and easye instruction to learne the tableture . . . (London, 1568) A lute tutor, translated fromLe Roy's French original.
  
  
• Lodge Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, MS.v.a.159. A commonplace book in which lute music was written by several amateur players, probably from the 1560s onwards. The notation is very inexpert and requires heavy editing; tentative transcriptions are published in John Ward, Music for Elizabethan Lutes (Clarendon/OUP, 1992).

Sources for each track:

1. Calleno TCD MS 408/2
2. The Owld Man TCD MS 408/2
3. The Bagpipes Lodge
4. A Hornepippe Lodge
5. The Motlye Lodge
6. Buffons TCD MS 408/2
7. Sellingers Round TCD MS 408/2
8. O What it is to Love Dallis
9. The Blacksmith TCD MS 408/2
10. [The Hunt's Up?] TCD MS 408/2
11. Robin Reddocke Ballet
12. Robin Hoode Lodge
13. Larouse TCD MS 408/2
14. All Floures in Brome TCD MS 408/2
15. Bella Gioiosa Caroso (1581)
16. The Hay Dallis
17. Baloo TCD MS 408/2
18. I Am my Lordship's Grees [Man] Lodge
19. Passe Velours Le Roy (1568)
20. La Rocha el Fuso 1511b
21. Il Conto d'Orco Caroso (1581)
22. La Tirantine Le Roy (1568)
23. Passamezzo d'Italie Dallis
24. Passamezzo Dallis
25. Quadro Pavin Galliard Dallis
26. Rogero Dallis
27. The Division of Rogero Before Dallis
28. Trenchmore Lodge
29. [Trenchmore] Lodge
30. Wilsons Wile TCD MS 408/2
31. El Bataino 1511b
32. La Conciera 1511b
33. Lightlie Love Ladies TCD MS 408/2
34. The Spanish Pavin TCD MS 408/2
35. The Earle of Darbyes Caraunta TCD MS 408/2
36. Passa Mesure Galiarde Lodge
37. Blame not my Lute Lodge
38. The Paduane Le Roy (1568)
39. Tiente Alora 1511b
40. Fortune TCD MS 408/2
41. Tu Anderai col Bocchalon 1511b
42. La Devota del Cormio 1511b
43. La Castalda 1511b
44. La Lonbarda 1511b
45. Tantarra Chomartello 1511b
46. Pauls Galiarde Lodge
47. Canson Englesa [Lusty Gallant] Dallis
48. The Hunte ys uppe Lodge
49. Grene Sleves TCD MS 408/2
50. Bertonicha 1511b
51. A Galiard Lodge
52. The Passe A Mesures Pavion Lodge
53. Will Ye Goe Walke the Woodes So Wilde Lodge
54. Passameze Le Roy (1568)
55. The Passemeze Pavin Dallis
56. La Bressanina 1511b
57. Lost is my Lyberty Ballet
58. A Toy for Monica Bishop (new composition, in memoriam, by Chris Goodwin)

The notation in the student's or amateur's sources, especially the Giles Lodge lute book, can be ambiguous, and requires editing, but this is no cause for lying awake at night, for improvising and making a popular piece one's own were very much a part of the lute culture of the renaissance, so the notes on the page need not, or indeed should not, be treated with the same exaggerated reverence accorded to 19th century scores. I hope this and the other lute recordings at www.magnatune.com may entice some listeners to try their hand at lute playing; if so, copies of the sheet music accompanying this recording can be obtained via the Lute Society's website.