Restoring Obrecht’s Missa Scaramella (Dr Fabrice Fitch, Royal Conservatoire of Scotland)

In this lecture I will present and discuss my reconstruction (or restoration) of the fragmentary Missa Scaramella by Jacob Obrecht (c.1457/8–1505). It survives uniquely in two of an original set of four part-books. Reconstructing the material of the two missing part-books (the top voice and the tenor)  poses very different  problems.  I  will  explore these challenges with reference to the finished edition (Jacob Obrecht: Missa Scaramella, edited and restored by Fabrice Fitch (with Philip Weller and Paul Kolb), Utrecht, 2024) which has also been recorded by the Binchois Consort (dir. Andrew Kirkman) for Hyperion.
 

FABRICE FITCH is a composer and musicologist specializing in Renaissance Polyphony. He has written Johannes Ockeghem: Masses and Models (Paris, 1997), the only full-length book in English on the composer, and most of Renaissance Polyphony (Cambridge, 2020) and co-edited Bon jour, bon mois et bonne estrenne: Essays on Renaissance Music in Honour of David Fallows (Woodbridge, 2011). He has published widely on composers active around 1500, notably Obrecht and Agricola. He is a member of the editorial boards of Early Music and the Journal of the Alamire Foundation and has been a reviewer with Gramophone for over 25 years. His compositions have been performed by leading soloists and chamber ensembles (including Richard Craig and Neil Heyde, the Diotima and Kreutzer String Quartets, Distractfold, Ensemble Exposé, Leones, Fretwork, Exaudi, and the Binchois Consort) and broadcast internationally. He is currently Senior Research Fellow at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland.