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<DIV>After a long absence from participating in this list (boring story as to
why), I was intrigued by the recent question of music for practice walks and
some of the responses to it. Rather than listening to pastiches written for the
pop tunes market, my preference would be to listen to some of the marching
(drinking etc.) songs medieval and early modern pilgrims heard enroute to
Santiago. Many of those songs have haunting melodies and walking rhythms as they
were sung as pilgrims marched. Not a few of them are devotional, often sung to
or in praise of Mary, but others are secular. A few are even a bit bawdy.
Nights in refugios then, as now, included many glasses of beer and wine!</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>There is a large and growing discography of such music, and many of the
recordings are excellent ones. Some keywords to find them are: 1) singers
and musicians including Anonymous 4, Jordi Savall and his groups Hesperion and
La Capella Reial de Catalunya, Montserrat Figueras, Alia Musica, and Discantus;
and 2) titles or descriptions including the terms "Codex las Huelgas," "Llibre
Vermell," and most particularly "Codex Calixtinus." Fairly inexpensive
recordings of pilgrim music are available from Naxos, although the best ones
tend to come from high-end European record companies like Harmonia Mundi, Jade,
and Astree-Auvidis.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>My current favorite is a disc I found last year by the French female
singing group Discantus "Compostelle: Le chant de l'etoile" (Paris: Jade).
With a crystalline sound, the performances of various laudes to St. James
and pilgrim songs on the disc are haunting indeed.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>E. O. Pederson</DIV></BODY></HTML>