Adam Ileborgh

Biography

German composer Adam Ileborgh is known only by one manuscript source, a seven-page tablature book dating to 1448 that was once located at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia; it since has passed into private hands. The only clues to who Ileborgh was are contained in the title of the manuscript; he may have been a Franciscan monk and schoolteacher in the Saxon town of Stendal and presumably an organist in one of the churches there. Ileborgh's manuscript contains six organ preludes and three mensurial elaborations of a popular German song, "Frowe al myn hoffen an dyr lyed." The preludes, very short pieces meant to establish a mode for singing psalm tunes or some other purpose, are regarded in some circles as the oldest organ preludes known; certainly Ileborgh's manuscript is the earliest extant organ music that contains a pedal part.

The first study on the Ileborgh manuscript was written by Willi Apel and published in 1934; Apel also edited the tablature for its initial publication in 1963 in the first volume of Corpus of Early Keyboard Music (CEKM). Apel made some claims on behalf of both the music and its composer that seem unsupportable now, and scholar Christoph Wolff, citing the manuscript's faulty notation and its humble style, has opined that the value of Ileborgh's contribution is overstated. Wolff has called Ileborgh "an average, peripheral figure"; however, the music has a powerfully primitive and very medieval-sounding manner that may be found in little other extant early keyboard music. Most scholars will agree, however, that Ileborgh's tablature is so vague and variable that a "final" and accurate transcription of the music might be impossible to achieve. ~ Uncle Dave Lewis , Rovi