In an age of increasingly self-conscious individualism, Renaissance composers often wrote music that paid homage to past masters of the art. This not only offered tribute to the worthy individual so honored, but was also good personal marketing; later composers could both place themselves within a venerable tradition and perhaps demonstrate their own subtle triumphs beyond earlier musicians. While complete, and even intricately detailed portraits can often be made of these musical relationships, sometimes evidence of the famous earlier musician may not be strong. Unfortunately, the latter is the case for one of the greatest Spanish musicians from the "Golden Age," Ludovico the harpist. Ludovico apparently served in the court of Ferdinand III, Duke of Aragon, but no music (or even examples of his instrument, the harpa) have survived. One mid-sixteenth century theorist, Fray Juan Bermudo, claims Ludovico had been a famous player on the instrument; it seems he thought all his readers would know of the man. Yet only one other concrete trace of Ludovico's artistry survives through the pages of time: a piece of music composed in his homage by Alonso de Mudarra.

Mudarra's own surviving musical compositions are clustered in his 1546 publication, Tres libros de musica en cifras para vihuela (Three books of music in tablature for the vihuela). Included are fully 27 pieces called Fantasia, of which the 10th also bears the subtitle "Que remeda el arpa de Ludovico" (which imitates the harp of Ludovico). And if Mudarra's homage is any guide, the harp of Ludovico must have been a mighty instrument. Though the fantasia begins in apparent simplicity, the composer quite rapidly transitions to a repetition of the opening music but in a surprisingly different tonal area rather than establishing a home: through chromatic inflection, he leaps fully two hexachords away. The second repeat of this motive and phrase returns not to the first key, but to its relative minor. Another bold chromatic excursion leads to an even more distant harmony, before slowly retracing its harmonic steps, though still without resolution. A second melodic motive is then introduced, one that not only uses unnerving cross-rhythms, but allows for faster progress through what by now is heard as a harmonic motive (related to the pattern known as "La Folia") in the lowest voice, to a yet more distant harmony. Only after an increasingly more complex series of sequences does he finally reach a traditional cadence.

© Timothy Dickey, Rovi