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Ritornello

Early Music Ensemble

Prague

Ritornello *) is a chamber-music ensemble which arranges and performs mainly sixteenth and seventeenth-century music. The players, specializing in certain kinds of music, alternate with one another, depending on the music.

The core of Ritornello comprises three or four musicians, each of whom often plays several instruments. The musicians conduct their own research into the music for the repertoire and also publish (including sheet music and works about hymns and organs).

Ritornello seeks to rescue certain compositions from the "serious music" category and return them to their proper place among the basic needs of men and women, as a universal language, by using small and even the smallest musical forms (the song, the dance) in their own elegance and rawness: a Baroque-Romantic "Return".

The ensemble uses period instruments or faithful copies of them (including the lute, theorbo, Baroque guitar, hurdy-gurdy, Renaissance bagpipes, Baroque Pan-pipes, positive, cornets, dulcian, Renaissance trombones, shawms, chalumeaux, flutes, fifes, violas da braccio and da gamba, Baroque violins, and drums), old tunings and temperatures, and original instrumental and vocal techniques. The individual repertoires draw from various historical music genres: music of the church, the home, dance music, music of the street, of towers (fanfares), and music for feasts.

Apart from concert performances Ritornello plays for church services, gallery openings, receptions, literary soirées, conferences, and film scores. With the repertoire and arrangements of its recordings, it seeks to fill the gap left after the disappearance of "everyday feast" music.

*) Ritornello (It. to return again, dim.) means "a little return", the repetition of a small part, a refrain, a simple interlude, to be played or sung. This simple formative device, which is typical of Early Baroque and Mannerist music, signals the mutual disconnection of vocal and instrumental music. Its advantages are that is concise, easy to remember, pleasing to the ear, so encourages repetition, it links parts together, and provides continuity. A word of many meanings, signifying "Return!"