In the 13th century, the Venetian merchant and explorer Marco Polo traveled the length of the Silk Road, from Italy to China. He encountered the peoples and cultures along the way, marveling at wonders in Constantinople, Samarkand, Singapore, Sumatra and Shangdu. He returned to Italy bearing rubies, emeralds, sapphires and diamonds.

Charles Bruffy and the Kansas City Chorale have also explored this legendary caravan route, discovering musical treasures which they offer on their new album The Mirage Calls.

This fascinating compilation features Asian folk songs and melodies arranged for choir by outstanding contemporary composers. These rare musical gems surround a crown jewel, the Missa ad te levavi by the Spanish Renaissance composer Bartolomé de Escobedo.

“Patrick Dittamo is a musicologist, and he had discovered in the Vatican archives a piece that hadn't been sung or seen actually for 500 years,” Bruffy, the conductor of the Kansas City Chorale, said. “So he rewrote parts that had either rotted away from water damage or been eaten by mice, and brought it to us and we programmed it in a concert.”

That was the first time the work was performed since its composition, and now is the first time it has ever been recorded.

Not much of his music survives, just six motets, one villancico and two masses, one of which is the Missa ad te levavi. Based on its introit, the mass was probably written for the first Sunday in Advent.

“The Missa ad te levavi wasn’t lost in the sense that it was misplaced and rediscovered,” Dittamo said. “Scholars knew where it was. Rather, it was obscured because Cappella Sistina 13, the Vatican manuscript which is the sole surviving source of the mass, suffers from severe ink corrosion.  The music was copied on paper instead of more durable parchment, and over the years the acidic iron gall ink has bled into the paper, and in some areas eaten through the page entirely.  Fortunately, the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana digitized it and made it available online, so we have a record of what it once looked like, even if it continues to degrade.”

To sharpen the digitized version, Dittamo used basic digital image software to alter the brightness, tint and contrast of the pages to bring out details that might otherwise have been missed.

“Fortunately, the scribe who copied the manuscript around 1540-1541, Johannes Parvus, had a very regular hand,” Dittamo said. “For example, his note stems are almost perfectly uniform in length, so if you can see the end of a stem, you can determine the pitch of the note, even if the notation is now a blotch there.”

Even though the other works on The Mirage Calls are in Chinese, Bruffy says the Escobedo was the most difficult work to sing.

“When music is simple, not that this Escobedo is simple in any way, but it's all unaccompanied, there is no hiding in simplicity,” he said. “It is several movements long, several mass parts long, and then tuning becomes an issue. Thank heavens we have great singers in the Chorale.”

The Kansas City Chorale is known for its world-class performances of many genres, from Russian Orthodox music to the German romanticism of Brahms and Rheinberger. On this album, they prove themselves as masters of Renaissance polyphony, on par with groups like The Tallis Scholars or The Sixteen.

In 2018, Dittamo was working on his master’s degree while his husband was singing in the Kansas City Chorale, helping research and suggest repertoire for the group. Dittamo suggested that there were plenty of works from the 16th century that had never been performed, and he set about finding one.

“I started by looking up the works lists of composers to see what hadn’t been edited before,” Dittamo said.  “While most major 16th-century composers, like Morales and de Victoria, have had their whole oeuvre published in modern editions, many of their less illustrious contemporaries – sometimes somewhat derogatively referred to as kleinmeisters, ‘little masters’ – have not.”

One of those little masters was none other than Escobedo. 

He was born in Zamora, Spain in 1515 but studied in Salamanca. In 1536, he moved to Rome to sing with the papal choir. While in Rome, Escobedo was noted for his short temper, and was even fined on two separate occasions for calling a singer an “ass” and a “fat pig.” For reasons lost to history, he was even excommunicated for a day.

The album also shows yet another side of the Chorale, an exquisite ability to perform the music of Asia. While the Escobedo captures the splendor of the Sistine Chapel, the other songs are gorgeous evocations of the Silk Road. Sung in Chinese and other Asian dialects, the pronunciations provided a major challenge for the Midwestern choir. Luckily they received assistance from composer Chen Yi, who is also a professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City’s Conservatory of Music and Dance.

“Chen Yi and the Chorale and I are all good friends, and she would come over and go through the diction and sing the melodies in a Chinese folk kind of way,” Bruffy said. “Then we would do our best to imitate that, if not make a respectful caricature of it, because it's got to be overdone or people don't get it. Another curious part is that there were three different dialects in these pieces. So Chen Yi was so very, very helpful.”

She contributed three arrangements of folk songs to the album, including Mo Li Hua, a lovely song about the jasmine flower. The melody was used by Puccini his opera Turandot and became associated with the 2011 Chinese pro-democracy protests. The authorities tried to ban the song, even from internet searches, but this proved futile because of its long association with Chinese culture.

Other songs on the album include Zikr, referring to a Sufi form of worship, by A.R. Rahman, The Four Seas by Dorven Dalai and Mirage on the Gobi Desert by the Mongolian composer Se Enkhbayar.

“It's kind of the title track from The Mirage Calls,” Bruffy said. “It’s about the Gobi Desert. If you close your eyes, you can almost visualize the mirage on the sand. It has a shimmering quality. Before we made the recording, I was thinking, oh my goodness, people are either going to like this album or they're not, but now that I've heard it, I think everybody's going to love it. I don't see how anybody could not. I mean, the unusual pieces on the CD. fall very easy on the ears. All the music is just beautiful to listen to.”

To purchase a CD or download of the album, visit www.kcchorale.org.