San Diego Spotlight : In 1492, What Was Chris Columbus Listening To?

For some scholars, next year’s celebration of the 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’ arrival in the Western Hemisphere has opened the proverbial can of worms. From the traditional European perspective, the daring navigator discovered the New World in 1492 and brought to it the blessings of European civilization. To peoples descended from the native tribes of North and South America, however, Columbus inaugurated an unprecedented political and cultural invasion, as an upcoming seven-part KPBS television series will portray. (The series begins at 8 p.m. Sunday on Channel 15.)

Marianne Richert Pfau, musicologist at the University of San Diego, discreetly sidestepped such sociological controversies when she assembled today’s concert to be given at 8 p.m. in USD’s Founders’ Chapel, a program titled “Music From the Age of Columbus.” Pfau has researched the popular and sacred music Columbus is likely to have heard and known. With the newly formed early-music ensemble Nota Bene, of which Pfau is music director, she will present the fruits of her musical sleuthing.

“Columbus lived for seven years in the court of Ferdinand and Isabella, so we know that he would have heard the music sung in the court chapel,” Pfau explained. Tracking down the music of composers Juan Ponce and Juan de Anchieta, both employed as musicians in Ferdinand and Isabella’s royal chapel, was an obvious place to begin. A portion of Nota Bene’s concert will present liturgical compositions by these composers.

According to Pfau, Columbus’ nautical interests were typical of the popular preoccupation that swept Europe in the 15th Century to map the entire globe and sail uncharted oceans. For the concert, Nota Bene will sing a late-15th-Century popular tune, “Ayo Visto lo Mappa Mundo” (“I Have Seen the Map of the World”), as well as a contemporaneous Mass movement based on that tune.

“The song reminds us that Columbus’ early occupation was that of a cartographer specializing in navigational charts,” Pfau said.

Another important source of music from this period is the Biblioteca Columbina, a vast library collected by Columbus’ illegitimate son Ferdinand, who accompanied the explorer on his fourth transatlantic voyage. This collection of about 20,000 volumes, long neglected by musical scholars, contains Columbus’ own library, including volumes with the navigator’s own marginal notations. To acquire and transcribe music for her concert, Pfau obtained numerous microfilms from the Biblioteca Columbina, which is now kept in Seville, Spain.

“We are just beginning to research the music stored in this collection,” she said. “We don’t know anything about most of its music. But we do know from Columbus’ diaries that he was acquainted with the music in his son’s library.”

Pfau also said that, judging by the ships’ logs that Columbus kept, his crews sang the liturgical chants of the Office Hours, the traditional morning and evening devotions of the Catholic Church.

“There is a reference in one of the logs to the men singing the ‘Magnificat,’ ” Pfau said. “Although it is not likely that they were able to sing a complex polyphonic setting of that liturgical song, we are going to perform a ‘Magnificat’ by Alexander Agricola. Agricola died the same year that Columbus did (1506), and both men spent their final days in Valladolid, Spain. It’s quite possible that the two men knew each other.”

Pfau is both a music researcher and a performer, playing a number of period wind instruments including the rankett, an oddly shaped double-reed instrument that sounds somewhat like a modern bassoon.

“The Germans call the instrument ‘sausage bassoon’ because, when you open it up and look at all the tubing on the inside, it looks like a can of sausages,” she said.

Besides Pfau, the ensemble includes tenor Stephen Sturk, a musician with whom Pfau performed when they were graduate students in New York, and countertenor Roger Pines. Lewis Peterman of the San Diego State University music faculty will play winds, viol and percussion, and Paula Peterman will play other Renaissance wind instruments.

Revelle dedication. The 1991-92 season of the San Diego Symphony will be dedicated to the memory of Roger Revelle, a major benefactor of the symphony.

Revelle, who died July 15, was director of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and one of the founders of UC San Diego. Revelle and his wife, Ellen, who sits on the symphony board of directors, were among the circle of benefactors whose generosity helped revive the local orchestra after its financial crises of the mid-1980s.

The symphony’s tribute parallels that of the La Jolla Playhouse, which has also dedicated its season to Revelle.

More Symphony notes. Dr. Warren Kessler, San Diego urologist and associate professor of urology at the UC San Diego School of Medicine, was reelected president of the San Diego Symphony Assn. last week at its annual meeting. This will mark Kessler’s third year in that role. He is also vice chairman of San Diego’s Commission for Arts and Culture. . . . The Symphony Preview Hour, hosted by executive director Wesley Brustad, resumes its regular slot on KFSD-FM (94.1) at 7 p.m. Wednesdays. The program airs weekly throughout the 1991-92 season, which ends in May.