Interview by Martin Erhardt
I have recently answered a few questions from fellow recorder player and improviser Martin Erhardt for the newsletter of the German Institute for Improvisation. Here’s the full text, published with their kind permission.
Martin Erhardt: How long have you been involved in historical improvisation? Did it start with a decisive experience or did your interest in spontaneity and creativity grow slowly?
Vicente Parrilla: It’s hard to say. I started playing the recorder when I was 7 years old, and just a year or two later I was asked to join a recorder ensemble of about 12 young players (they were all just a little older than me) who performed mostly as three separate quartets. For almost ten years, we rehearsed every weekday in the summer and every weekend during the rest of the year. It was quite an intense experience that led to many concert appearances during that time, and our director, Alonso Salas, always favored Renaissance music in our programmes and rehearsals. I especially remember being introduced to the music of Antonio de Cabezón at a very early age, which also meant an early exposure to ornamentation — and I have been attracted to it ever since.
Later, as a conservatory student, I also remember bringing a lot of diminutions repertoire to my classes in Seville, The Hague, and Amsterdam. As an early member of The Royal Wind Music, a double sextet of Renaissance recorders founded by Paul Leenhouts, I have memories of playing extempore diminutions on the (apparently discreet) c bass recorder whenever I felt like it, without Paul complaining: thanks, Paul!
Finally, in 2001, I remember having to choose a topic for a final paper I had to write as a final assignment for one of my subjects in Amsterdam. I couldn’t know it at the time, but the title seems revealing to me now: From the eye to the ear: an attempt to raise our eyes from the score. So, I can say that my interest in improvisation grew slowly and naturally over time, but somehow it was always there: I can see now that I’ve had an affinity for it from an early age.
ME: Did you have teachers who taught you improvisation in particular?
VP: No, I’m self-taught. My first fully improvised concert was in 2005 with my ensemble More Hispano. This experience became for me a path without turning back, and since then I haven’t stopped focusing on improvisation in my concerts and recordings since that moment. The work of those years culminated in the CD recording Yr a oydo (2010).
ME: Recently you published this article about your improvisation on La Spagna: What is it about La Spagna that fascinates you so much that you have chosen it as the basis for your improvisations for such a long time? What other basse danse melodies do you also like to improvise on?
VP: Well, I like the melody a lot, but that’s not why I’ve been coming back to it for a few years now. I’ve done the same with every other piece in my improvisation repertoire. The reason is that I feel it’s necessary to have enough chances to explore the pieces in enough depth and to develop myself as an improviser. Think about jazz players: they keep a lot of songs in their repertoire throughout their lives.
La Spagna was the first cantus firmus I improvised on, and it was a new challenge for me because, except for a few Renaissance polyphonic pieces, I have mostly worked so far with relatively short repeated (ostinato) bass patterns. I also started improvising on the Ave Maris Stella cantus firmus: it’s a lot of work!
ME: In your improvisations, one hears a lot of uneven rhythmic proportions, like 5 or 7 notes against 1. I would be curious to hear your personal estimate of how common these proportions were in the 16th century. Perhaps much more in non-written music than in written music?
VP: Probably yes, who knows. There’s quite a lot of evidence of their use in written music, too, but mainly in the fifteenth century, both in compositions and counterpoint treatises, which often show an enormous volume of rhythmic proportions. As is well known, Ganassi’s examples in Fontegara (1535) document an enormous number of patterns in quintuple, sextuple, and septuple proportions, although I tend to see them as remnants of an older tradition. It’s thought that in the sixty or so years since Tinctoris’s Proportionale musices (1472–3) had appeared, the use of complicated proportions had waned.
But Morley (“if his rhythmic intelligence be sufficiently developed to enable him to enjoy a triplet, there seems no reason why it should not, after a little further training, be able to appreciate more extended inequalities”) and Ornithoparcus also mention them. Hernando de Cabezón used quintuplets in his embellished version of Susanne un jour. And the pieces collected in the Baldwin ms. (by Giles, Tye, Preston, Bedyngham, and Baldwin himself), many of which date from the last decade of the sixteenth-century, contain some of the most complex uses of proportions I’ve ever seen. Correa de Arauxo published a tiento in 1626 that includes a section in 7/8, and, back in time, there is a wealth of irregular rhythms in the Cantigas de Santa María of Alfonso X ‘the Wise’.
I’ve gone so far as to use ×12, ×15 or ×18 in my improvisations on La Spagna, just as an effort to explore my limits in using proportions while searching for their musical possibilities.
ME: How can it work in an ensemble, where several musicians are making diminutions at the same time? For example, if one is playing 6 against 1, and another one decides at the same moment to play 7 against 1: Have you experienced if this can work?
VP: Yes, of course there are many chances to produce unexpected dissonances and all kinds of contrapuntal problems this way, but on a rhythmic level it’s quite possible — although polyrhythms are not the easiest thing to deal with. I documented this in the second of the six versions of my improvisations on La Spagna (see the second video in my article and Table 2). There are also examples in written music, such as the English compositions mentioned above, where three different proportions are often used at the same time, and of course in the ‘Ars subtilior’ repertoire.
ME: What treatises and compositions do you personally recommend to our readers that can inspire our improvisations?
VP: I’m particularly fond of the counterpoint treatises and repertoire of the late fifteenth century and would recommend the writings of little-known Spanish authors such as Domingo Marcos Durán, Guillermo de Podio, Diego del Puerto, Alfonso Spañón, Francisco Tovar or Martínez de Bizcargui: many of them deal with improvised counterpoint. I think that historical improvisation is finally getting the recognition it deserves, and am very enthusiastic about the work of musicologists such as Julie E. Cumming, Peter Schubert, Philippe Canguilhem, Massimiliano Guido, Santiago Galán and Giuseppe Fiorentino, among others. But players should realize that improvisation-related musicological writings alone, as crucial as they are, will hardly guarantee them the ability to improvise even after rigorous scrutiny. Performers still need to do a lot of practice-based hard (and fun) work!