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This page has been suggested by Philippa Street
As part of the research into the ambience of the times, I collected and listened to many recordings of Italian Renaissance music. I also found music of other periods inspiring, particularly Elizabethan lute music, Carl Orff's Carmina Burana when I was dealing with scenes of violence, and Beethoven when I was getting too cerebral and needed to reconnect to passion. Mozart and Vivaldi were vital to the spiritual underpinnings of the books. On the same level, I found the works of Arvo Pert to be inspirational.
Sometimes I practised my Italian language and pronunciation by singing along to the carnival songs of Lorenzo de' Medici, belting them out in a gutsy fashion with the windows open, as my neighbours of those days will testify.
It was my very good fortune to meet and befriend several musicians dedicated to early music, and some of my initial research into Poliziano was at the Early Music Centre in Holland Park, where you could read a book to the sound of someone playing the lute in another room. Among those friends are Angela Voss, Anthony Rooley and Andy Green. So if there's a strong musical thread in the work, it's largely due to their influence as well, of course, to the beauty of the music itself.
Angela's reconstruction of Ficino's Orphic Hymns, Secrets of the Heavens, arrived late in my project, but just in time to provide the wedding music at my marriage to David. In a civic ceremony in Britain we are not allowed 'anything religious', by which is meant 'Christian'. So we played the Invocation to Venus and watched the Registrar growing at first bemused (the piece lasts ten minutes) and then somewhat reluctantly enchanted.
We were also extremely fortunate to go to a private performance of the work at St Bartholomew's, London, where fumigations were burned appropriate to each invocation. Unfortunately I saw no angels, but I did see one well-known actor in the audience become so swathed in smoke that he coughed and spluttered in apparent fury.
Apart from the lauds, liturgies and lute pieces of the Italian nobility, there was also the lively rustic music of the peasants and artisans. Lorenzo de' Medici enjoyed both and wrote several songs in pairs, different words to the same tune but played in a different tempo, so one of his lauds is often matched by one of his carnival songs. Poliziano was a star lyricist and between them they created the best pop songs of the day. Many of these rustic songs were inspirational in writing A Tabernacle for the Sun and I remember one particular stay in a friend's farmhouse in the Casentino valley where he introduced me to the CD Musica a Firenze and left me to rock and roll alla rustica in his absence. Happily there were no neighbours within earshot, although my friend Joanna began to tire of it after the first three days.
Angela gave me a cassette copy of Poliziano's L'Orfeo, when the record was no longer available, and I was delighted to find it later reissued as a CD. I played it repeatedly while working on Pallas and the Centaur.
Many of Poliziano's lyrics have been recorded over the years - perhaps all of them - but often they are not credited as being his. Musicians are much more interested in composers. Therefore I had to make my own identifications amongst the works of, for instance, Heinrich Isaac.
Here follows a short list of the recordings in no particular order.