2018_10_09_ICS_chantria

The Institute for Culture and Society (ICS) of the University of Navarra and the Music Chapel of the Cathedral of Pamplona have presented the book collection 'Chantria'. This initiative seeks to update the historical-musical heritage of the Chapter, through its transcription, revision and edition to make it available to society.

The first book includes works by Italian masters and is already available at available. The second, which includes anonymous motets, will be on sale before Christmas. They have been edited by Aurelio Sagaseta, director of the Capilla de Música, and coordinated by Rafael Zafra, researcher of the project 'Creativity and Cultural Heritage' of the ICS.

"It means bringing to light the jewels of the relevant heritage that the Cathedral holds in order to make them alive and that they can be interpreted anywhere in the world," said Rafael Zafra. At the same time, he commented that they intend to serve "to encourage creativity in the future" and that "it will be a stimulus to recover the mass genre, which has practically disappeared".

For his part, Aurelio Sagaseta said that the project gives continuity to initiatives developed by the Music Chapel in previous years, such as the digitization of the Cathedral's musical collections (75,000 pages, most of them unpublished) and the publication of the Catalogue of the file de Música. He emphasized that they count on the partnership of the prestigious copyist Ángel Briz and a committee advisor composed by prominent musicologists of the country.

According to Sagaseta, the publication of the musical works seeks to "recover them for their original function" and for that reason some of them will be presented in public concerts. Thus, he announced that some of those included in the first two volumes can be heard in the Cathedral of Pamplona during a solemn mass-concert to be held on October 13, at 8:00 pm.

A unique version of Mozart's Requiem

On the other hand, he explained that during this course a unique version of the Requiem by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, adapted in the first half of the nineteenth century for its interpretation in the Pamplona Cathedral, is being recovered. He announced that it will be released in autumn 2019.

Esperanza Melero, editor of Eunsa, stressed that the collection has been founded jointly with publishing house German Edition Reichenberger with the purpose to give channel and international visibility to similar projects around the music of European cathedrals. He added that it inaugurates a new line of publications in Eunsa, which "reaffirms the presence of music in the university environment".

The collection is part of the project 'Chantria Pampilonense', the result of a agreement between the ICS - the research center in Humanities and social sciences of the University of Navarra - and the Music Chapel. It is part of the project of research DeMusica, one of the lines of 'Creativity and Cultural Heritage' of the ICS.