Veneto 1440

All of the music on this CD comes from fragments in Munich and Vienna newly reunited in the facsimile edition “A Veneto Liber cantus (c. 1440)” (Wiesbaden, 2012), edited by Margaret Bent and Robert Klugseder, which results from Klugseder’s discovery of four new leaves in the Austrian National Library, Vienna (Fragm. 661) and Bent’s recognition that they belonged to the same original manuscript as an existing set of fragments in the Bavarian State Library, Munich (Mus. ms 3224), eight leaves from an Italian manuscript of the second quarter of the 15th century. We now had 12 leaves, 24 pages, of a manuscript originally containing at least 107 folios, probably more. Taken together, the leaves in Munich and Vienna are a significant addition to the three main Veneto sources of the first half of the century: the extensive manuscripts Bologna Q15 and Oxford Canon. misc. 213, and the somewhat smaller manuscript Bologna, University Library 2216. Composers are known for all but five of the compositions. Most are local to the Veneto, or, like the northerners Arnold de Lantins and Guillaume Du Fay, are known to have spent part of their careers in north-east Italy, like many young musicians from cities such as Liège and Cambrai. The Italian composers in the Veneto are Cristoforus de Feltro, Antonius de Civitate, Bartolomeo Bruollo, Johannes de Quadris; transalpine composers with Italian careers or associations are Arnold de Lantins, Beltrame Feragut and above all Guillaume Du Fay; in addition, the music of the northerner Johannes de Sarto and the Englishman John Dunstaple already circulated in the Veneto. These compositions were recorded for the present CD by the Franco-Netherlandish Ascoli Ensemble. The recordings were made in early September 2013 in the H.H. Jacobus- en Augustinuskerk (Den Haag).