FIRST HEARD about the Italian recorder player David Bellugi last March through an e-mail message sent out on the early music listserve, EARLYM-L, by Glenn Boreham who had just acquired David's two recent recordings, Landscapes -- Three Centuries of World Music and Orchestra del Chianti. (for details see Recorders on Disc, September 1996).

   Glenn praised David's use of multi-tracking to play up to eighteen parts, the "musical richness [and] also the recordings themselves, which place specific instruments in a kind of three-dimensional 'acoustic space'." He concluded by referring readers to David's home page on the World Wide Web (http://www.dada.it/musicbox/bellugi.htm) for information on these and other recordings as well as FRAME, the recording company.

   My curiosity piqued, I wrote to David Bellugi by e-mail to order the CDs, and as a result, we began corresponding. I told him what Scott Reiss was doing in this country with "crossover" music, mixing elements of classical music with popular and ethnic musics. By a happy coincidence, David's brother-in-law Berry Hayward, a musician in Paris, had received some tapes of Scott's performances and was now able to pass them on. His reaction: "Only an American musician could pull off that kind of versatility."

   It was obvious from David's fluent and idiomatic English that he had lived in the United States. The Piero Bellugi who conducts the Orchestra del Chianti (sponsored by a group of Chianti producers) is his father, who held conducting positions with orchestras in Oakland, California, and Portland, Oregon as well as various guest positions in this country in the 1950s and 60s. David was born in Rochester, NY in 1954. He bought his first recorder (a plastic Dolmetsch soprano) at Briggs & Briggs in Harvard Square (Cambridge, MA) along with the Trapp Family method when he was 11 -- "love at first sight!" David lived in the States for almost twenty years and received a BA at the University of California San Diego in Applied Musicology.

   David has been teaching at the Florence conservatory since 1979, at first in the conservatory's teacher-training division. Then "three years ago, when I had just about given up hope of it ever happening, a miracle: the recorder became an official course of study within the Italian conservatory system. I think the recorder is in about eight of the 52 conservatories in Italy now." Each instrumental class in Italy is limited to ten students.

   David's students, "are quite good -- after 20 years of teaching at every imaginable level it's a real pleasure to find myself with potentially professional musicians." [see AR, Number 5, November 1998]

   The two CDS arrived quickly and I responded entusiastically Landscapes sounded generally like a wild calliope, especially when you played fast and slurred. I was also very impressed with the same technique in the Vivaldi concerto, which I've never heard played QUITE so fast before, although it sounded like the perfect tempo." I then took Landscapes over to the apartment of my harpsichord-playing friend Linda Kent, whose eight-year-old daughter Emily went crazy about the CD and played it over and over, doing appropriate dance movements to each piece while standing on a pile of cushions arranged to suit the mood of each piece. It was almost Emily's birthday, so I decided to give her the CD. When I told David he was so delighted with my description of Emily's dancing that he generously sent her the CD himself -- "sounds like a very worthy cause!" Soon I wrote back to David that "Hearing Landscapes repeatedly has given me a keener appreciation for its delights. You play with such abandon -- amazing considering that you had to play all those parts yourself. The cross-rhythms are especially wonderful, and very hard to predict, even upon repeated hearings. I've even grown to like Brouwer's minimalist piece (not my favorite genre)." David commented: "I'm not a fan of minimalist music, either, but Brouwer's piece has that extra something that makes it a lot of fun to play and listen to. It is by far and large the piece that most people comment on."

ICCARDO LUCIANI is a close friend and colleague of David's at the Florence conservatory. David finds his Concerto di Anacrò the most expressive concert written in the 20th century for the recorder: "It has lyricism, structure, melody, harmony, and it fits the recorder beautifully." David told me that he was "musically incorporated" into the concerto. I guessed it was based on the motto "D-B," but it went further than that. The opening theme of the Allegro is based on the notes DADEBEG (DAviDE BElluGi, "Davide" being the Tuscan pronunciation and spelling of David).

   I asked David more about his approach to the Vivaldi sopranino concerto, because I found that his fleet fingers and slurs transformed what can seem like so many scales and arpeggios. He told me that if I listened to "Craitele" played by the Romanian fluier player Dumitru Zamfira on the CD Les flûtes roumaines, I would hear his influence. He dubbed that CD, "a magnificent collection of some of the most lively and expressive playing I've ever heard. Zamfir and Stanciu, the two greatest panpipe players alive, are on it, but so are some lesser-known geniuses (outside of Rumania, that is) like Zamfira, Jon Vaduva, Ion Laceanu, Ion Ionescu, Marin Chisar and Dumitru Farcas, who all play their instruments in a way that in terms of sheer technique, tonguing, and ornamentation make all of us in the early-music world pale in comparison." He went on to tell me about many other ethnic influences, including the Indian flutist Panalaal Ghosh, the Persian ney player Hassan Kassaï, the shakuhachi player Kohachira Miyata, the Klezmer clarinettist Giora Feidman, the flutists of Rajasthan, a Georgian salmouri player, and the tioudiouk player Maral Gueledir. He called Feidman "perhaps the greatest clarinettist alive: he can laugh, cry, whisper, sing, and cackle with his instrument -- scarcely believable!" David considers such ethnic recordings "every bit as important to recorder players as Quantz's Versuch....." Not that he has neglected his Baroque performance practice. In fact he studied in Paris with Antoine Geoffroy-Dechaume, author of the book Les "secrets" de la musique ancienne and a direct pupil of early-music pioneer Arnold Dolmetsch.

   David stresses that on Landscapes he was not "sampling" the sound with a MIDI keyboard, but simply recording through a DAT machine to the computer, which acts as a storage medium. "The first voice that one records must contain all of the interpretative data (phrasing, rhythm, intonation, feel) of the final result. In pop music this is called a 'click track' because it's usually a somewhat glorified metronome -- for example, an electronic drum beat. But in 'Landscapes' I use a 'musical' click track. For example, in the Bartók I started by recording a musical synthesis of the whole score: what I called a musical 'mold.' After filling in the other voices, this 'mold' -- having served its purpose -- was discarded." The one part that David does not play himself is the percussion. "I am fascinated by the rhythmic complexity and virtuosity of the Persian musician Ali Tajbakhsh's playing on the zarb, daf and djembé which goes beautifully with Renaissance music." My brother-in-law Chris Hayward's role as percussionist in 'Landscapes' was also fundamental for me, since he knows the exact cultural reference to every note and rhythm I play." When I lamented that he could not perform Landscapes live, he told me he could: "I perform a solo part over a pre-recorded 'virtual' orchestra of recorders that I've mixed onto a CD or DAT."

AVID LEADS A BUSY LIFE of teaching and playing in Europe, the United States, "and with a little luck in Japan in 1999." He performs concertos with various Italian orchestras, Landscapes (sometimes with Tajbakhsh), and other concerts with a Florence-based early-music group Musica Ricercata, with a Venetian group I Musici della Serenissima, with the guitarist Domenico Del Giudice, and with his students. Landscapes just went into its second pressing, and he is working on a sequel. David spends a lot of time doing work for Frame, an independant recording and publishing company he formed with a group of friends (their Web site, complete with sound bytes is at "http://www.quadroframe.com/"). It is clear from David's correspondence that he also has a rich family life. His wife, Rebecca Hayward, is an American painter who grew up in Paris and they have two teenaged daughters, Sarah and Sonia, who both love to dance.

   David Bellugi is very much a recorder player of the late 20th century, at home in our multicultural and technological world: the Internet and the conservatory, the World Wide Web and the master class, the recording studio and the concert hall, Italian and English, family, friends and public. His playing and his e-mail messages have enriched my life this year.

David Lasocki, a music librarian at Indiana University, writes about woodwind instruments, their history, repertory, and performance practice. With Richard Griscom, he is the author of The Recorder: A Guide to Writings About the Instrument for Players and Researchers, published by Garland.

Table of Contents

Medieval music

O homo considera
Organ Estampie
Procurans Odium
Ductia

Renaissance music (with diminutions)

Pierre Bonnet
Juan del Encina
Claude Gervaise
Tielman Susato

Other Renaissance pieces

Orlando Di Lasso
Alfonso Ferrabosco II
Vincenzo Galilei
Johannes Ghiselin
Thomas Lupo
Thomas Morley
Juan Ponce
Thomas Ravenscroft

Baroque music

Johann Sebastian Bach
Georg Friedrich Handel
Henry Purcell

Music for (large) groups

Giovanni Gabrieli
Johann Heinrich Schmelzer

"Music Minus One" files

Antonio Vivaldi
Franz Joseph Haydn

Transcriptions of ethnic music

Roumanian dance
Bulgarian dance

Medieval music

O homo considera - Isorhythmic motet of early 14th century origin.
The full title is: O homo considera / O homo de pulvere / Contratenor /Filiae Jerusalem. This piece is in the Oxford Anthology of Medieval music. I have taken the liberty of changing two notes in the published edition that don't make any sense to me: measure 44, 3rd voice (Contratenor) original D, measure 67, 3rd voice (Contratenor) original quarter note D.

Organ Estampie "Retrouvé"
Procurans Odium
Ductia

Renaissance midi files with diminutions

Pierre Bonnet

Alors, que mon coeur

Juan del Encina (1468 - 1529)

Amor con fortuna
Triste España
Pues que ya
Ay, triste que vengo

[Midi versions of the 4 Encina pieces recorded on the CD Landscapes]

Claude Gervaise (XVI century)

Bransle 2
Bransle Gay II - from the CD Landscapes
Bransle Gay VII - from the CD Landscapes
Bransle X - from the CD Landscapes

Tielman Susato (XVI century)

Allemaigne
Nachtanz I & II

Other Renaissance midi files

Orlando Di Lasso (c.1532 - 1594)

O la, o che bon eccho!

The text is as follows: [where "/" = bar line]
O / la, / o / che bon / eccho / Pigliamo/ci / pia/cere / Ha, ha, ha, ha, / ha! / Ri/diamo / tutti. / O bon com/pagno, / Che / voi tu? / Vo/ria che tu can/tassi / una / can/zona. / Perche? / Perche / si? / Perche / no? / perche non / voglio / Per/che non voi? / perche / non mi piace / taci, di/co / Taci / tu! / O gran pol/tron! / Signor, / si! / Or/su no piu! / An/diamo! / A/dio, bon'ec/ccho! A/dio, bon'ec/cho! / Rest'in / pace! / Basta, / ba/sta, ba/sta, ba/sta! / basta, / basta! / ba//sta

Mais qui pourroit estre celuy

Alfonso Ferrabosco II (ca. 1575 - 1628)"

Fantasia (on a hexachord)
Pavana III ("Four Notes Pavan")

Vincenzo Galilei (ca. 1520 - 1591)

Ricercare del quarto tuono
Ricercare del ottavo tuono
Contrappunto

Johannes Ghiselin (ca. 1460 - ca. 1535)

La Alfonsina

Thomas Lupo

Fantasy a 3

Thomas Morley (1557 - 1604)

Il Lamento - from "The First Booke of Canzonets to Two Voyces", 1595

Juan Ponce (ca. 1480 - ca. 1530)

Ave Color Vini

This composition is structured like a religious hymn in obviously sarcastic contrast to the original Latin text. Here is a translation of the text:
All hail to thee, colour of clear wine; hail, taste without parallel. By your power you are worthy of inebriating us. O how happy is the person guided by the pure vine. May every table be made easy by your presence. How pleasing in hue, how fragrant a bouquet, how titillating to the palate, what a sweet slur to the tongue. How happy is the belly which you enter; happy the gullet that you numb; happy the mouth that you cause to stutter; O blessed lips! Therefore, let us all praise wine, let us exalt topers. Let us drinkers never be brought to confusion for ever and ever. Amen.

Thomas Ravenscroft (ca. 1582-ca.1635)

Tobacco fumes away

The text is as follows: [where "/" = bar line and "_" means a slurred syllable]
1. To-bac-co fumes a/-way all na-sty rheums, but / health a-way it / ne-ver_ lightly frets; / and nap-py ale makes mirth, make (as / April rain doth earth) / spring like the plea___-sant / Spring, where / ere it soak_ing / wets. But in_ that spring of / mirth such / mad-ness, mad-ness, mad-ness, mad-ness / mad-ness high dot_ grow. As fills a fool by birth, a / fool, a fool by birth with / crot-chets*, with crot-chets with / crot-chets, with ale and to-/bac-co, to-bac-co to-/bac-co, with ale and to-/bac-co, to-bac-co to-/bac-co, with ale and to-/bac-co.
*crotchets: whimsical fancies

2. One clears the brain, the / o-ther glads the heart, which / they re-tain by na-ture_ and by / art; / the first, the first by na-ture, / na-ture clears, by / art makes gid-dy will, / the last by na-ture / cheers, by / art makes heay-y / still. So we_ whose brains else / low, else low, swell / high, swell high, swell high, swell / high with crot-chet / rules. Feed / on these two, feed on these / two these two as fat as / head-y, as head-y, as / head-y, as head-y [and] / gid-dy, [and] gid-dy [and] / gid-dy, as head-y [and] / gid-dy, [and] gid-dy [and] / gid-dy, as head-y [and] / gid-dy fools.

Baroque music

Johann Sebastian Bach

Cantata BWV 106:

Actus Tragicus

This file is not really meant to be listened to. It contains ONLY the 2 recorder parts from Bach's Actus Tragicus. It has been placed here so that recorder players can save it to disk, open it with a music publishing program and print the parts after having done the necessary transpositions for performing at "modern" pitch. Curiously, in order to perform this piece at modern pitch, one must use "old pitch" instruments like a 392 alto (one step below 440) or a 415 voice flute (a recorder in D). In this case the instruments would be used as, respectively, an "E flat" and a "D flat" Alto.
For 392 alto(s) transpose this piece UP one step to F major
For 415 Voice flute(s) transpose this UP two steps to G major

Georg Friedrich Handel

Harp Concerto (Organ Concerto) in B flat major, Op IV, No. 6 for Harp (or Organ), 2 recorders and Strings

1st movement
2nd movement
3rd movement

Concerto in B flat major for Recorder, Bassoon, Strings and B.C.
[transcribed from the Harp Concerto, Opus IV, n. 6]

1st movement
2nd movement
3rd movement

Henry Purcell From his "Ode to St. Cecilia"

Here the Deities approve - for Alto voice, 2 vln, vla and b.c.

Music for (large) groups of Recorders (or other instruments)

Giovanni Gabrieli (ca. 1557 - 1612)

Canzona a 5
Canzon septimi et octavi toni a 12"

J. H. Schmelzer (1623-1680)

Sonata a 7

Music Minus One midi files for Recorder(s) and orchestra

Antonio Vivaldi

C minor concerto for Recorder

1st movement
2nd movement
3rd movement

Franz Joseph Haydn

Concerto in C (performable with 2 Recorders, 2 Fr. horns and strings). Edition Doblinger D. 9953

1st movement
2nd movement
3rd movement (1st of three sections)

Transcribed ethnic music

Roumanian dance

Craitele
transcribed from "Les Flutes Roumaines" (Arion CD: ARN 64004)
If you want to hear the actual sound file, write to me!

Bulgarian dance

Triti Puti
transcribed from "Village Music of Bulgaria" (Elektra/Nonesuch CD: 979 195-2).