Pay close attention to the cover of this CD: what with the large proclamation that it contains "the secular works" of Jacob Obrecht, and with the naming of the three separate ensembles that perform, you may miss the crucial piece of information, namely, "Lyrics: Gerrit Komrij." Komrij is a very famous contemporary Dutch poet (and translator of Shakespeare, among other writers). Obrecht's liedteksten, or little songs, attained pan-European fame around 1500. Dutch being as little understood then by foreigners as it is now, however, they were often performed instrumentally. Most of the texts have survived in fragments, if at all; only a few, including the famous T'meiskin was jonck (The maiden was young), have full texts (and that may not even be by Obrecht). The surviving materials are enough to indicate that the songs often had themes of revelry and ribaldry, and Komrij has completed them along these lines, working from skeletons fitted to Obrecht's music by lutenist Louis Peter Grijp. The original songs were, it seems, illustrations of religiously proscribed behaviors; they were musical cousins of the earthy spirit found in paintings by Brueghel and Bosch. In the Dutch texts and English translations in the booklet here, the original texts are in italic type, with the Komrij additions in roman.
The exercise is an interesting one. Imagine what would happen if modern English-language poets who were generally but not intimately familiar with Elizabethan literature were given the first lines of lesser-known madrigals and asked to finish them according to their own inclinations. How close would they come to the originals? The answer is: probably not very, and one suspects that the same is true here (there is, of course, no way to know for certain). It is not that the Komrij texts are cruder than those we know from Obrecht or other composers of songs from Germanic lands. One of them verges on pornography, but it is based on an existing quatrain that begins with the already very rude line, "Hey girl, is your c*nt raw?" More problematical is that they feel too involved; German songs in this vein by Isaac and other composers of the day seem simpler and more humorous.
The performances, too, are suspended between the raucous and the refined, not knowing quite which way to go. Holland's
Camerata Trajectina is confident when singing unaccompanied, but it doesn't mesh well with the accompanying group
La Caccia, composed here of three shawms, one sackbut, and one cornet; they aren't "brassy" enough in their singing, and the texts have a tendency to get lost. The recording as a whole, best understood as an experiment in cross-cultural understanding over large spans of time, will appeal most to listeners of a thoroughly speculative orientation.