Choirbooks in Portuguese Cathedrals Exhibition
Many times, I’m asked to give some advice on something related to my work, which I gladly do without thinking twice about it. That must be common to all historians and researchers and, in my case, I’m very happy to talk about my work.
That was the present case where I was asked to give some advice in relation to music choirbooks from two Portuguese Cathedral I have been studying almost since the beginning of my musicological career – the cathedrals of Angra (Azores) and Évora. Although my name is not present in anywhere in the programme (I’m not sure about this), I am very happy that music, in this case polyphonic music, was included in this exhibition that is still available at the National Palace of Ajuda in Lisbon, a showcase of Portuguese cathedral art for the numerous foreign and national visitors to the city.
As I announced in an earlier post, I suggested for the Cathedral of Angra a printed copy of Duarte Lobo 1621 Liber Missarum, a book which I identified in May 2002. The Angra print is the 14th known copy of the 200 books printed in Antwerp in the Officina Plantiniana. It is a very special book for me since I studied three of the parody masses Lobo included using motets by Francisco Guerrero and Palestrina as models in my Master dissertation. The book also has a very beautiful Asperges me antiphon, which I performed and recorded with Ensemble Eborensis.
From Évora Cathedral there’s a manuscript choirbook containing motets for Lent by Diogo Dias Melgaz and several works by an Afonso Lobo (which I assumed is not the Spanish Alonso Lobo), beautiful music I am studying for my PhD thesis.
I must thank my friend Ana Raquel Machado, who visited the exhibition and sent me these photos, although not knowing that I was indirectly involved in the choice for these books. In the photos one can also see a beautiful (I guess, eighteenth-century) plainchant choirbook, which begins with the feast of the Immaculate Conception, whose provenance I do not know.
