Your Recorder Community

At the suggestion of Rebecca Arkenberg and the American Recorder Society, I have set the organization’s name to music as a soggetto cavato, using some of my favorite licks from the music of Heinrich Isaac and his contemporaries.

The phrase soggetto cavato delle vocale (“subject carved from the vowels”) describes a process of deriving a cantus firmus from solfège syllables relating to the vowels of a name or phrase. Applying for a job in Ferrara in 1502, Heinrich Isaac pulled a rabbit out of his hat by composing, in two days, a motet on the fantasia La mi la sol la sol la mi. These syllables have been suggested to be a musical representation of the words….a kind of soggeto cavato. (text continued in download)