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From the BBC: "The great 16th-Century black composer erased from history" by Holly Williams (June 15, 2022):

For hundreds of years, the remarkable Vicente Lusitano has been forgotten. But now, finally, both his music and his story are being heard once more, writes Holly Williams.

The Western classical music canon is notoriously white and male so you might assume that a black Renaissance composer would be a figure of significant interest, much-performed and studied. In fact, the story of the first known published black composer Vicente Lusitano is only now being heard, alongside a revival of interest in his long-neglected choral music.

Lusitano was born around 1520, in Portugal. In a 17th-Century source, he is described as "pardo" a commonly used term in Portugal at the time meaning mixed race. It is most likely that Lusitano had a black African mother and a white Portuguese father; Portugal had a significant population of people of African descent, due to its involvement in the slave trade.

[img] Caption: Among other things Lusitano was an expert music theorist this is a page from his composition manual Introduttione Facilissima (Credit: IMSLP/Public Domain) [omg talk about burying the lede! His composition manual is on IMSLP?!]

Comparatively little is known about Lusitano's life a fact which has certainly not helped his historical legacy although what we do know is dotted with juicily intriguing details. "Theres a lot of things you could say about how cool he is as a person, and how exceptional he is as a figure," promises composer, conductor and early music specialist Joseph McHardy, a recent Lusitano champion.

What we do know is that Lusitano became a Catholic priest, composer, and music theorist, and in 1551 left Portugal for Rome a multicultural musical capital of Europe at the time most likely following a rich patron, the Portuguese ambassador. Lusitano appears to have done very well for himself there, publishing a collection of motets: sacred, polyphonic choral compositions (where voices sing several layers of independent melodies simultaneously). Then, Lusitano became embroiled in a high-profile public debate around the rules of composition and the use and juxtapositions of different tuning systems or keys, with a rival composer, Nicola Vicentino. Consider it a Twitter spat of the Renaissance age although with an official judging panel of eminent performers from the Sistine Chapel choir, no less.

In the final adjudication of their intellectual duel, Lusitano was unanimously judged the winner: an unlikely victory given that, as a foreign outsider, he was something of an underdog compared to the well-connected Vicentino. But, unwilling to let it go, Vicentino conducted a smear campaign against Lusitano, discrediting him and his ideas. In what would become a famous, printed 1555 treatise, Vicentino fabricated a misleading version of the debate so it looked like he had the better ideas, really and it was this document that endured and this version that was later repeated in many textbooks.

Sometime after 1553, Lusitano converts to Protestantism itself an unheard of development for an Iberian composer in the era. He also gets married, and moves to Germany; we know he receives payment for some music there in 1562, and applied for a job in Stuttgart.

But although his achievements in Rome suggests Lusitano won significant respect for his music in his lifetime, it wasnt as widely copied or performed as some of his contemporaries, and seems not to have spread across Europe; this has led to some musicologists in Portugal appreciating him, but a failure to cut through among non-Portuguese speaking scholars since. Occasional flashes of academic interest have never transformed into sustained attention, an accessible and readily shareable modern score, or performances of the thing that really matters: his music.

The new Lusitano champions

Until, that is, very recently. During the pandemic, two Renaissance music lovers separately discovered Lusitano, and are staging concerts and bringing out records of his work, while a new piece reimagining a Lusitano composition is currently on tour across the UK.

In what he describes as the "darkest days" of the first lockdown, Rory McCleery founder of British vocal ensemble The Marian Consort read an article about Lusitano by an academic, Garrett Schumann from the University of Michigan, in VAN Magazine. Keen to find out more, McCleery was delighted to discover that Liber primus epigramatum, Lusitano's 1551 collection of motets, had been digitised and put online.

"My proclivities have always been in finding Renaissance composers who have fallen between the cracks," he says. "It's always super exciting when you find a composer and start looking into their music and go, actually, this is very good. You want to evangelise about it music is there to be shared."grabby hands WANT

And share it, he did: The Marian Consort were including a Lusitano piece, Inviolata, integra et casta es, in concert programmes by December 2020 probably the first time it had ever been performed live in the UK. Last summer, they weaved it into a Prom celebrating a much more famous Renaissance composer, Josquin des Prez. It was apt, given that Lusitano's work is clearly in dialogue with Josquin in Inviolata, Lusitano riffed on a hugely technically accomplished five-part composition by Josquin, impressively expanding it further, for eight voices.

"Lusitano obviously liked to go, well this is all very clever you've done one Rubik's Cube, now I'm going to do four Rubik's Cubes at the same time" jokes McCleery. "But for me, what is so exciting is its a very beautiful piece of music, as well as a clever one." Oh, I feel you dude. Have you been spending too much time in the Ars Subtilior? Anyway, eliding the next bit about a modern abomination based on his works (Look I am still bitter about Britten). Then, emphasis mine:

McCleery was not the only one who had a fortuitous chance encounter with Lusitano in 2020. During Black Lives Matter protests, McHardy saw a picture on Twitter of someone holding a placard depicting black composers through history, reading 'teach these composers' including Lusitano, who he'd never heard of. McHardy googled him, also found Schumann's article, and got in touch.

Okay:

1) Never again tell me that protests don't work.

2) WHAT ELSE WAS ON THAT SIGN?!? I mean besides Ulysses Kay and William Grant Still and Le Chevalier de Saint-Georges? Link pls.

3) I get the feeling the person who made that sign and I would get on like a house on fire. I wonder who they are. I hope some day I get to buy them a beer. I hope they find out they sparked a little revolution in 16th century music scholarship by the sign they carried. "May I, composed like them// Of Eros and of dust [...] Show an affirming flame."

Since then, the pair have been working on the fairly mammoth task of turning Lusitano's part books all the separate, individual vocal parts for his motets into one unified score with modern notation, so they can be more easily understood and performed. A scholarly edition is planned, alongside a recording (likely out early next year), while there are three concerts of his work this week by black and ethnically-diverse vocal ensemble Chineke! Voices. You might expect some rivalry, from two early music specialists, both uncovering this forgotten figure simultaneously. But both, really, just seem delighted more people might hear Lusitano's music.

eye roll Okay, see, this is what happens when you let classical music reveiwers discuss early music.

"Lusitano's moment has come he's in the zeitgeist, which is fantastic because his music really does deserve to be better known," says McCleery. And both men are also staunch in insisting that this revival of interest is not just about the eye-catching fact that Lusitano was a composer of African descent it's that his music stands up.

The beauty of his music

"It's really difficult choosing the pieces [to include], because theyre all really good!" says McHardy, promising that Chineke!'s record, as with the concerts, will feature 90 minutes of "top level Renaissance polyphony". He also wanted to include a range of Lusitano's work: some of his "really complex eight-part masterworks" but also pieces that are significant to his story, such as his adventurously weird, chromatic motet Regina coeli, which is thought to have kicked off that feud with Vicentino.

What exactly appeals, then, about Lusitano's music? "Fundamentally, its just really beautiful," says McCleery. "There are very long arching phrases that seem to spin out into eternity. But also this interesting use of chromaticism: slightly spicy moments the musical equivalent of feeling metal on metal."

If you have ever encountered Lusitano, it's likely to be his most chromatic piece, Heu me domine, which has attracted some interest since the 1980s precisely for its experimental dissonance. In fact, this etude comes from within a theoretical treatise on counterpoint and improvisation that Lusitano wrote it was more intended to illustrate a point, than as a composition to be performed.

"Its a very cool piece. But it isnt super representative [of Lusitano's music]," says Schumann. Instead, Schumann also reaches for the word "beautiful" when trying to summarise Lusitanos richly layered polyphony: "It's just really, really gorgeous." "'Opulent' is a good word for it," chimes in McHardy.

The music is worth revisiting, then. But for contemporary audiences, Lusitano's identity and biography patchy as it is of course proves a source of enormous fascination, too. What do we know about how his race may have affected his career prospects in his own lifetime, and since? Much is speculation but it is likely that Lusitano faced some prejudice, and there are specific ways his identity certainly disadvantaged him. In Portugal, he would have been barred from getting a job in one of the big, major churches because of his race. "The papal bill that allowed African descended men to be ordained Priests specifically forbad them from holding benefices in the Portuguese church," explains McHardy.

One piece that McHardy is recording, Quid Montes, Musae?, UNGH, that title! "Which mountain, Muses?"

is a rare secular composition, based on a poem asking the muses to relocate to Italy with the Portuguese ambassador.

WANT

McHardy speculates that Lusitano may have written the words himself another cool and unusual thing for a composer at that time. And one that may provide a glimpse into how Lusitano felt about being pardo in Portugal

"It talks about Portugal in some derogatory language: ravening beasts and inhospitable rocks, everything is scary and everything promises death" explains McHardy. "On the surface, you go 'OK, this is a Renaissance person writing neo-classical stuff'. But if you put it in context that this comes from the pen, and may well have been sung in the mouth, of someone who was discriminated against [via] Portuguese legal and societal racism I think it has some more layers to it. It feels like his personal voice."There's more at the link.