Ramon Ferranac
Ramon Ferranac
Genres: spanish, 18th century, 19th century, catalan, 17th century
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About Ramon Ferranac
Ramón Ferreñac (also seen as Ferrenac or Ferranac in some modern sources) was a Spanish organist and Classic-era composer, born in Zaragoza in 1763 and dying there on 8 December 1832. He was the son of Manuel Ferreñac, a bassoonist and entonador del órgano (in charge of bellows and practical work around the organ) at the Basílica del Pilar, so his musical formation was rooted from childhood in Zaragoza’s rich cathedral environment. He almost certainly studied in one or both of the colegios de infantes (choir schools) attached to the city’s cathedrals, where his father also taught. Ferreñac began his professional career as maestro de capilla and organist at Huesca Cathedral, gaining enough reputation that in 1785 the chapter of his native Zaragoza called him back to serve as assistant organist at El Pilar without requiring a competitive examination. In August 1786 he was promoted to first organist, succeeding Tomás (or Joaquín) Soriano, and he held that post at the Basílica del Pilar for the rest of his life, serving there for roughly forty-seven years. Among his pupils were important 19th-century organists such as Nicolás Ledesma and Valentín Metón, and later writers like Hilarión Eslava credited him with founding a prestigious Zaragoza organ school. As a composer, Ferreñac specialised in keyboard music and left one of the most substantial organ corpora of late 18th-century Aragon: a large manuscript volume of about 278 pages preserved in the Archivo de Música de las Catedrales de Zaragoza, along with other scattered sources. His works fall into two clear stylistic groups. One consists of pieces in a severe, imitative, “old” style—partidos, versos, pasos, llenos—that continue the Iberian Baroque tiento tradition; the other embraces a fully Classical idiom, including sonatas for organ a cuatro manos and works for two organs, often built on themes with a recognisably popular Aragonese flavour. These sonatas have been praised as unique in the Spanish organ repertoire of their time. Alongside the organ music, he composed some sacred vocal works with orchestra—such as a Misa pastorela, Alleluia Beatus vir and Miserere mei Deus—and wrote at least two important theoretical treatises, the best-known being the Método teórico-práctico para aprender a acompañar con el bajo numerado y sin numerar and the Llave de la modulación extraña, both cited by later Spanish theorists. Modern recordings have helped bring his name back into circulation: organists such as José Luis González Uriol have recorded pieces like the “Variaciones de Minué” and an organ Sonata I, often under the spellings Ramon Ferrenac or Ferranac, on anthologies of Aragonese and Zaragozan organ music. Taken together, his surviving music and pedagogy mark him as a key transitional figure between the late Baroque tiento tradition and a more symphonic, Classical approach to the Spanish organ.
Taken from Last.fm
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