Juan Aranés
Juan Arañés wrote Spanish baroque tonos humanos and villancicos, issued in Rome in 1624 with guitar accompaniment. His four-voice chaconne A la vida bona is the piece still most often heard.
The surviving Libro Segundo holds twelve works for one to three voices, closing with that chaconne for four. The writing belongs to the light Spanish secular style of the early seventeenth century, close to dance and court song, and notated with Italian guitar tablature that keeps the pulse clear. The Chacona often surfaces today as a bright, rhythmic close in mixed early-music and folk programmes.
Compositions by Juan Aranés appear on
Lady Sings the Viol
The concept behind Lady Sings the Viol was a CD of “covers”: five singers, alone and together, take songs from 1300 to the present, from Piaf and Schubert to John Paul Jones and Elena Kats-Chernin.
Sit Down Beside Me
In its inimitable style, Pastance again brings together music from the folk traditions and the early music world.