Militaria xx

The long-awaited new album by Jamie xx In Waves is the next chapter in the career of one of the most in demand producers of his generation. With In Waves, Jamie replicates the emotional crescendos and thrilling volatility of an almost mystical night out– one where you return home in the cigarette ash dawn, the specifics of the last eight hours already blurring, but aware that these feelings will remain a crystalline memory.

Jenkins was relatively unknown, having spent most of his life quietly in the employ of wealthy landowners in Cambridgeshire and Norfolk up to the Restoration, when he took up a court appointment as a lutenist. His pupil-patrons Sir Nicholas and Roger L'Estrange and Roger North were, however, much quoted figures of the period.

English composer and violinist William Brade was a significant transitional figure in instrumental music between the Renaissance and Baroque periods. Brade is credited with transplanting English musical practices most readily associated with William Byrd, Peter Philips, and John Dowland to North German and Scandinavian soil, and in aiding the transformation from the Renaissance notion of the English consort to the more continental Baroque idea of a string orchestra.

The Cancionero de Medinaceli or Cancionero Musical de Medinaceli (CMM) is a manuscript containing Spanish music of the Renaissance. It was copied during the second half of the 16th century and kept at the library of the Duke of Medinaceli's house, hence its name. Is it probably the most important compilation of Spanish secular polyphony of the Renaissance after the Cancionero de Palacio.

There is a certain attraction to music of the viola da gamba, but usually, a few tunes are enough. Not that the gamba is not a beautiful instrument: round and rich-toned, supremely sensitive to the touch, and sublimely evocative of the human voice, the gamba is arguably one of the most soulful instruments ever devised. But the repertoire for the gamba makes extended listening emotionally fatiguing. The French music veers from the sentimental to the suicidal, the German repertoire ranges from the dour to the dismal, and the English repertoire is so fatalistic as to hardly exist in this world. Thus, getting through a whole disc of the gamba is like playing Russian roulette: the more you play, the more likely it is that you'll come to grief. But not on this disc by Jordi Savall.

In the monastic life of the Cistercian order, as in the case of the female monastery of Santa María la Real de Las Huelgas (Burgos), a royal pantheon, the seat of coronations and the epicentre of a very intense musical life in which singing played an extremely important part, the nuns were called upon to live a life of simplicity, silence, prayer and contemplation. Flavit auster, which is part of the Las Huelgas Codex, is a Marian text inspired in the Song of Songs in which the most powerful symbols of femininity appear, such as the honeycomb, milk and honey, and protectiveness described as “mother of mercy, port of hope for the shipwrecked and virgin mother purified.”