After our pre-instrument warm-up of my previous video (see https://youtu.be/zPyTCu0mXZA), it's now time to structure our daily practice with instrument-specific warming up and cooling down! I also give you tips on how to work on a new piece.

Tailored to your level! - four Sundays in August (Aug. 7-14-21-28)

Interactive online intensive course held every Sunday in August. Three different classes for three different levels: Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced/Professional (Classes in Spanish will take place on Aug. 6-13-20-27).

Here's how we'll do it!

In each class we will focus on a specific topic, with direct application to the repertoire and your specific needs as an active student. In this way you will progress in your chosen repertoire, working on different aspects of the same piece while attending to your particular technical-musical needs. You’ll be part of the special Facebook group for the Lobke Online Summer 2022 course and you’ll be able to share your doubts AND also your certainties!

Our main topics will be:

August 7: POSTURE

August 14: AIR

August 21: ARTICULATION

August 28: COORDINATION

European time (On the American continent, these classes will be in the morning or early afternoon):

CEST (UTC +2) 6pm: Beginners

CEST (UTC +2) 7.15pm: Intermediates

CEST (UTC +2) 8.30pm: Advanced

Don't forget to check your local time at the following link: https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/converter.html   

This way, you won't miss a minute of your Lobke Sprenkeling Summer Course 2022!

How to register:

1. Send an email to lobke.world@gmail.com with your name, surname, location, the repertoire you would like to work on and some information about your background and current instrumental level, and finally your preferred method of payment (bank card or bank transfer). A video or audio recording will be useful to evaluate you and give you the best personalized feedback. You can also write me if you have any questions or doubts. There will be a maximum of 10 students per class.

2. Once you receive a confirmation of your attendance and your assigned class, you’ll be able to make your purchase through my website or by bank transfer. I will send you a link for your preferred method of payment.

3. Once you have made your purchase, you will receive a PDF that includes the Zoom link to the four classes of your level, as well as the other classes, which you can attend as a listener.

Your Lobke Sprenkeling Summer Course 2022 costs 100 euros* if you are an Active Student.

This includes:

A) Receiving didactic material in pdf specially designed for your Lobke Sprenkeling Summer Course 2022.

B) Active, live participation in 4 classes of 1 hr each, according to your level.

C) Access as a listener to the other classes that are not of your assigned level.

D) Personalized homework as an active student.

E) Unlimited access to the special Facebook group for Lobke Sprenkeling Summer Course 2022.

F) Personal feedback to all your doubts by email.

If you decide to attend as a Listener, your Lobke Sprenkeling Summer Course 2022 costs only 50 euros**.

This entitles you to the following:

A) Receiving didactic material in pdf specially designed for your Lobke Sprenkeling Summer Course 2022.

B) Access, as a listener, to all academic sessions of the course.

C) Learning about different levels of development that will inspire your own goals.

See you in class!

Note for Active Students: *If you make your purchase before Sunday, July 31, 2022, you get a 20% discount, and you will pay only 80 euros for your Lobke Sprenkeling Summer Course 2022.

Note for Listeners: **If you make your purchase before Sunday July 31, 2022, you get a 20% discount, and you will pay only 40 euros for your Lobke Sprenkeling Summer Course 2022.

This is a great warm-up guide for instrumentalists before playing!

This is a video from our concert in Madrid last April 7th, centred around English music from the 16th and 17th centuries, by Musickes Delight and invited musicians. "The First Witches' Dance" is an Antimasque Dance from around 1600, a type of dance that illustrated the bizarre, grotesque, dark and crazy, as you'll hear in our interpretation of the piece...

These dances anticipated and contrasted the main Masque songs and dances, which were the image of all that was considered right by the nobles themselves.

This English 17th century dance, Cuperaree or Gray's Inn, the Second, is a Masque Dance. Masques were multidisciplinary spectacles for the noble courts, with both song and dance. These songs and dances were popular enough to become a part of instrumental and vocal collections for domestic use, which is how most of these dances have survived until now.

This Courante comes from the same suite as the Ayre. After the reign of Charles I and during the Restoration in 1660, Locke was one of the main composers of England, because most others composers had either retired or had died in the years between the reign of Charles I (until 1649) and his son Charles II (from 1660 on).

Locke mostly wrote consort music, either for equal instruments or "broken consort", instruments of different kinds. He probably mostly wrote them in the years between the two reigns, the Interregnum, when domestic chamber and consort music was most popular, although he revised them in later years.

This wonderful variation or division piece by John Dowland is based on an English popular tune from the Renaissance: "My Robin is to the greenwood gone" or "Bonny Sweet Robin". Dowland takes it much further and creates beautiful virtuosic variations. While his settings of other songs exist in several parts, his variations on Robin only exist in lute tablature, from which our ensemble Musickes Delight arranged it for three instruments.

This is an English 17th century dance, Cuperaree or Gray's Inn, the First, referring in the latter case to one of the courts outside of the Royal Court. Being a Masque Dance, it was part of a multidisciplinary spectacle. These dances were popular enough to become a part of instrumental - and vocal - collections, which is how most of these dances have survived until now.

MUSICKES DELIGHT

Lobke Sprenkeling / Óscar Gallego / Pedro Jesús Gómez

Here I present you the Minus One of "Ce jour de l'an" by Guillaume Dufay (1397-1474), as well as the entire piece with a modern edition I made for the occasion. A facsimile Minus One of this piece already exists below, but can be hard to begin with. So this is an excellent first step to get to know this wonderful piece and play it with the other voices!

Towards the end of Paradise (Paradise 28.118), beyond the planets, Dante hears the "Hosanna" in his journey of the Divina Commedia. It is a chant he has heard earlier, in Purgatory 29.51, sung by the Heavenly Procession at the end of Purgatory. Now, rings of souls, angels and saints sing in the Heavens. In Paradise, the bodily transforms to metaphysicality, to come to a place of pure energy.

This is the "Sanctus", another chant that Dante hears in Paradise of his Divina Commedia.

Throughout the Divine Comedy, the Sanctus appears in different places and manners. In Paradise 7 (Mercury) an alternative version is sung by Justinian. In Paradise 8 (Venus) all the souls sing the word Hosanna - which could be a Hosanna or the last part of the Sanctus. The Sanctus returns in Paradise 26.69, where all sing "Santo, santo, santo!" at Dante's regained eyesight. It has thus been included in the Paradise of my soloperformance "Incipit", representing both Mercury and Venus.

This is the "Te Deum", a chant that Dante hears in Paradise of his Divina Commedia. The music is a 13th-century plainchant melody + two voices I added according to the rules of improvised organum around 1300. What you hear could open a window to what it really may have sounded like in Dante's mind: a historically informed performance. Organum would normally be improvised with one added voice; in Dante's imaginary Paradise, music is something beyond the human imperfect ear. Since he becomes more "perfect" in his own journey through the Afterlife, in the Commedia he is actually able to hear the chants.

My soloperformance "Incipit" was the result of my PhD about Dante Alighieri's "Divina Commedia" and its soundscape. It's a historically informed performance, mixed with contemporary theatrical performance.

The PhD is located here: https://www.academia.edu/28226500/INCIPIT_The_search_for_a_new_multidisciplinary_language_at_the_crossroads_of_Antiquity_and_Contemporaneity_PdD_Thesis_2016_Sprenkeling

My eBook "The Sonorous World Of Dante's Commedia: A Study Of All Musical References in Inferno, Purgatory and Paradise" is here: https://www.amazon.com/Sonorous-World-Dantes-Commedia-References-ebook/dp/B01LI6EMHQ

👉🏻 Remember my Ockeghem Minus One / Playalong video with facsimile? Now we’ve got the modern score! 🎶

This is a great way of playing this wonderful music and taking that first step toward playing with the facsimile! Just decide which voice you want to play and go to the chapter mark of that voice.

Don’t want to play, just listen? The entire work with the score sounds at the beginning 😊

This Renaissance chanson by Thomas Crecquillon has quite the innocent-but-not text.

Seemingly it was well-known and appreciated, since later diminutions (ornamented versions) were created on it, as the one by Riccardo Rognioni in my previous video.

Riccardo Rognoni (or Richardo Rognioni / Rogniono), the father of Francesco Rognoni Taeggio, showed how talent runs in the family. His fantastic diminutions on this French renaissance chanson are playful, just like the original, virtuosic and beautiful.

From our live concert in the cathedral of Palencia on August 17, 2021.

These mesmerising diminutions by Bovicelli, an ornamented version of the intimate secular motet by Palestrina, are a fantastic example of the change in style we see around 1600: dotted rhythms and expressive figures rather than continuous passaggi. From our live concert in the beautiful historical cathedral of Palencia on August 17, 2021:

Tenor ganassi recorder - Lobke Sprenkeling

Organ - Jorge López-Escribano

Today I have a wonderful, soothing excursion into your own calmness for you! I teach you how to meditate in silence (but before that on my own meditative bass recorder music), which is not "thinking about nothing", but rather travelling into an ocean of peace and quiet, where your thoughts will be bubbling up as part of the journey. It's the way of your body to release stress. Observe your thoughts, be curious but just watch them (you are more than just your mind!). Then come back to the ocean of peace and quiet. You will see how relaxed you will become!

I already made another video, which is a guided mindfulness practice. Both these types are great for us musicians, as well as anybody. It's a way of connecting again with our bodies, with the Earth, and we learn to listen. Listening is very difficult in today's chaotic world, so it's great to take a break every day and meditate, or even just take some breaths and listen to yourself without any judgement.

Doing meditation and mindfulness practice helps against anxiety and clears the mind as well! It helps us getting to a place of creativity and productivity, with plenty of energy. It's great to do in the morning, really gets us grounded; and also as a break in the middle of the day.

At night I recommend another kind of meditation, like the 6 Phase Meditation by Vishen Lakhiani (Mindvalley), or journalling (writing a page of anything to get it all out of your head for the night).

I recorded this while still being stuck in Costa Rica, when they closed the borders and didn't open them for months. This was in June last year, but where the first video took a lot of time and effort, this one even took more. But here it is!!

Composition/performance of music on bass recorder: Lobke Sprenkeling

In this video I give an overview of the role of vibrato in Baroque music: its function as an ornament vs a continuous sound quality, what historical treatises for string instruments and wind instruments say, the conclusions of some books and articles by specialized experts. To vibrate or not to vibrate? In this video I give some indications.

One day a parking lot changed into a labyrinth, a metaphor of how the pandemic makes us feel sometimes that we're trapped and there doesn't seem to be an exit... or is there?

The musical composition includes both synthetic sounds and my own recorder playing on tenor and alto recorders. Oh, and the eery moment in the elevator :)

Film and composition: Lobke Sprenkeling

Today English and Spanish - ¡hoy en inglés y español simultáneamente!

I tell you a bit about my composition process and improvise on my tenor recorder on top of composed material.

Link to crowdfunding: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/cocito#/

This video first plays the entire piece "Ce jour de l'an" by Guillaume Dufay (1397-1474), while a short overview of mensural notation is given, including the dots of division. Then, for each voice are offered two versions: one Play Along (all voices are sounding, including the part you're reading) and one Minus One (the voice of the part you're reading has been left out, so you're on your own)! You can go directly to the chapter mark of your choice!