Bicinia seu duarum vocum cantiones aliquot sacrae.

Asked to name an important Flemish musician of the second half of the sixteenth century, students of that era might well outline the career and musical production of Orlando di Lasso, Philippe de Monte, or Giaches de Wert. Few would even mention Jean de Castro, much less be able to say anything about his music, which musicologists have largely overlooked. Thanks to these recently published modern editions by the Leuven University Press and A-R Editions of selective music books by Castro, we will no longer have an excuse to remain so ignorant of this important composer's life and work. Castro, as the editors of these editions convincingly demonstrate, was fully conversant with the musical language of the late sixteenth century, as able a composer of madrigals and motets as he was of chansons. Indeed, according to an important set of journals kept by the great Antwerp printer and bookseller Christopher Plantin during the last decades of the sixteenth century, sales of Castro's partbooks were exceeded only by those of Lasso. Considered as a group, these four scholarly editions give us not only a good measure of the high quality of Castro's musical voice and his habits as an editor of his own work, but also a sense of the bourgeois audiences for whom he wrote.

The three volumes of the Castro Opera omnia prepared under the general supervision of Ignace Bossuyt are but the first in a projected series of nineteen such publications aimed at covering Castro's entire musical production, which amounts to some four hundred compositions that appeared in about thirty separate publications originally printed in Antwerp, Paris, Venice, Geneva, and Cologne. The set unfolds not in chronological or generic sequence, but instead according to vocal forces: volumes 1 and 2 for bicinia; volumes 3 through 11 for the three-voice compositions (a texture that was apparently a Castro specialty); and volumes 12 through 18 for the four-voice, five-voice, and mixed-ensemble collections. The final volume is reserved for works extant only in manuscript or instrumental intabulation. This plan might at first seem somewhat idiosyncratic, but in fact it follows Castro's editorial lead. Indeed, to judge from the first three volumes of the Opera omnia, the modern editors plan to devote as much attention to the processes by which the individual collections were produced and used as to the music and literary texts they contain. This attempt to contextualize the music books is a welcome departure from the customary (and often withering) bibliographical detail of critical reports that dominate the collected editions of Renaissance masters (although this set includes that information, too, along with useful notes and English translations of literary and liminary texts). Nevertheless, the abundant narratives of Castro's editorial labors and the discussion of his dedicatees at times tends to eclipse treatment of his musical style per se. Bossuyt and his colleagues apparently plan satellite publications concerning individual genres and other themes. Indeed, a team at Leuven has already produced a delightful "virtual exhibition" on the World Wide Web devoted to Castro (http:// onyx.arts.kuleuven.ac.be/DeCastro) - complete with facsimiles of original music books, images of the composer's patrons, and even excerpts from recordings of his music - that is well worth exploring.

Already the Opera omnia has brought to light a wealth of new information about Castro's life and works, tracing the path of his career as revealed in his record of publication: his early work in Antwerp as editor and composer (1569-76); his sojourn at Lyons in the wake of religious strife (ca. 1577-82); a brief period of service to an aristocratic household in Dusseldorf (1588-91); and finally, a move to the emerging commercial hub of Cologne (1591-99). The special focus of the first volume is on two books of French bicinia (Sonets, avec une chanson . . ., livre premier and Chansons, stanses, sonets, et epigrammes . . ., livre second) issued in 1592 by the Antwerp firm of Pierre Phalese Jr. and Jean Bellere. Castro enjoyed an enduring relationship with these printers (as he had in Leuven with Pierre Phalese Sr., who both published many of Castro's books and relied on him as a house editor; readers interested in Castro's work for the elder Phalese should consult Henri Vanhulst, Catalogue des editions de musique publiees a Louvain par Pierre Phalese et ses fils, 1545-1578 [Bruxelles: Palais des Academies, 1984].) It is in some ways a suitable emblem of Castro's multiple alliances and portable career that one of the very first books issued after his move from Dusseldorf to Cologne would be printed in Antwerp and directed to some of his mercantile sponsors there. According to the composer's dedicatory preface, the duos were evidently to be played and sung as a kind of domestic diversion by the three daughters of Gillis Hooftman, one of Antwerp's most influential merchants. Certainly there is nothing in the style of his musical writing that would have precluded either instrumental or vocal performance by reasonably skilled amateurs: these chansons - like Castro's other works - dwell largely within a declamatory style, but with tuneful melodic ornaments and a lightly syncopated manner that lends contrapuntal interest without being overly difficult. According to Bossuyt, Castro seems also to have selected the literary texts of the collection with the tastes of these young women in mind.

The second volume of the Opera omnia offers another set of duos (Bicinia seu duarum vocum cantiones aliquot sacrae . . .), originally published in 1593 shortly after Castro's move to Cologne - although in this case with a local dedicatee (Theodor van Wedich, an official in the church of St. Gereon) and printer (Gerhard Grevenbruch, who ran what was to become the leading musical press in late sixteenth-century Cologne). As it happens, the editorial board includes in the volume's introduction a report on the contents of some recently discovered autograph letters from Castro in the Museum Plantin Moretus in Antwerp that shed new light on the timing and circumstances of the composer's move from Dusseldorf to Cologne, which was apparently undertaken in an effort to exploit new commercial opportunities for the publication and performance of his music in Cologne. At any rate, these Latin duos are at times musically rather more complex (using both cantus-firmus technique and extended imitative writing) than the sort of didactic duos familiar to students of the musical Renaissance in German-speaking territories. To judge from the composer's own remarks on this publication, Castro purposefully selected the liturgical texts (and their plainsong melodies) for performance in private settings (rather than in church per se), presumably by pious Catholic audiences seeking an appropriate sort of spiritual music.

The third volume of the new project hearkens back to the very earliest years of Castro's record of publication with Il primo libro di madrigali, canzoni e motetti a tre voci, issued in Antwerp by Elizabeth Saen, the widow of the music printer Jean de Laet, in 1569. This collection of three-voice madrigals, motets, and chansons was the first edition of music devoted exclusively to the works of the young composer. Castro's interest in Italian texts doubtlessly owes something to the patron to whom the book was dedicated, Giovanni Giacomo Fiesco, a Genoese trader and nobleman who resided in Antwerp and was apparently one of Castro's acquaintances. We should recall that other composers, too, enjoyed the sponsorship of members of this community of expatriate merchants; Lasso's own first publication, the famous motet, chanson, and madrigal book issued by Tielman Susato in 1555 (Le quatoirsiesme livre a quatre parties), was dedicated to one of these entrepreneurs. The relationship of the madrigals to Castro's merchant-patron notwithstanding, in retrospect it is the chansons from the Primo libro that warrant the most careful consideration. Indeed, Bossuyt offers a useful sketch of the place occupied by these works in the history of the three-voice chanson during the sixteenth century, showing how many of Castro's chansons from the 1569 book (and from books printed in 1574 [La fleur des chansons a trois] and 1575 [Livre de chansons]) were reductions of four- and five-part chansons by his rival Lasso. (Since the appearance of this third volume of the Opera omnia in 1993, Bossuyt has published a more extensive study of the musical interrelationships between the chansons of Castro and Lasso: "Jean de Castro and His Three-Part Chansons Modelled on Four- and Five-Part Chansons by Orlando di Lasso: A Comparison," in Orlando di Lasso in der Musikgeschichte: Bericht uber das Symposium der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Munchen, 4-6. Juli 1994, ed. Bernhold Schmid [Munich: Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1996], 25-67.)

Jeanice Brooks's recent edition of Castro's 1576 Chansons, odes, et sonetz de Pierre Ronsard (printed in Leuven and Antwerp by Phalese and Bellere and dedicated to yet another of the composer's local sponsors, Francois le Fort, a French merchant who had set up shop in Antwerp) shares with the Castro project in Leuven a concern for exploring Castro's music in the context of the literary choices, intended audiences, and editorial policies of his individual publications. Brooks's choice of prints is well made: the wide vogue for Ronsard's poetry among musicians during the 1570s and 1580s helps to put Castro's treatment of these texts in a strongly comparative light while also revealing his great skill as a composer of multivoice chansons (the 1576 book is scored for four-, five-, and eight-voice ensembles). As Brooks convincingly demonstrates, Castro shared with Lasso a tendency to set Ronsard's lyrics rather differently than the poet penned them, composing music for isolated strophes of the odes and sections of the sonnets. In this respect the two men depart from the conventional French models of musical composition (as practiced by Guillaume Boni and Anthoine de Bertrand, and the composers of the air de cour), which stressed a schematic approach that preserved the formal structure of such verse and prized melodic clarity above contrapuntal elaboration. In addition to a discussion of the circumstances of publication and the selection of literary texts, Brooks gives ample space to Castro's compositional voice. Given his tendency for idiosyncratic division of texts or the juxtaposition of isolated fragments of verse, she notes that it is perhaps not so surprising that the composer relies very heavily on word repetition, and at times on the musical representation of semantic elements in the poems - a feature doubtless derived from Castro's own interest in the madrigal and the similar treatment of French texts encountered in Lasso's works. (A fine 1994 recording by the Ensemble Clement Janequin, Chansons sur des poemes de Ronsard [Harmonia Mundi France HMC 901491], offers a revealing sample of Castro's approach to Ronsard in the context of Boni, Monte, and other composers.) Castro's sense of tonal structures is also particularly subtle, Brooks argues, showing some of the ways in which the composer employed varied cadential positions and types to express verbal ideas and support syntactic articulations. As evidence of Castro's habits as a musical editor, Brooks also outlines his tendency (also encountered in some of his work on Phalese's anthologies) to group pieces together by tonal type (but not by any of the conventional sequences of the eight or twelve musical modes).

In all, these new editions, the products of careful thought and physical presentations of the highest quality, offer a significant body of Castro's music and considerable musical insight into this much-neglected composer. From these publications, musicians and musicologists will learn much about the history of the chanson (and the three-voice variety in particular) during the later years of the sixteenth century. And because of these editions and those soon to come, Castro's music books will once again circulate, this time not just as a form of amateur entertainment or edification, but as points of entry into the cosmopolitan world created by the great mercantile centers of Northern Europe.

RICHARD FREEDMAN Haverford College