Large Repertories

This is one of those posts that does not fit comfortably into any particular category, so I should start with a definition. By a large repertory I mean a large collection of works by a single composer in a specific genre. The locus classicus might be the five hundred and fifty-five single movement sonatas for harpsichord by Domenico Scarlatti. Another prominent example is the one hundred and four symphonies by Joseph Haydn. A lesser-known collection would be the three hundred and seventy-one symphonies by the Finnish composer and conductor Leif Segerstam.

Of course we would want to include the three hundred some cantatas by J. S. Bach. And there are some smaller collections that are also well worth looking at such as the two hundred and thirty some pieces for harpsichord by François Couperin gathered into twenty-seven suites or Ordres. Another spectacular collection is that of the two hundred and fifty-two madrigals of Claudio Monteverdi, collected in nine books. Mind you, over the course of the composition, Monteverdi made radical changes in the very nature of the genre and from Book 7 on there is a wide variety of versions of the form using different kinds of  poetic texts, different vocal combinations and especially different instrumental combinations to the extent that some of the longer examples are like miniature operas--a long way from our basic conception of the madrigal.

What fascinates me about these large repertoires is the astonishing creativity involved. Imagine sitting down year after year and composing over and over again short sonatas for harpsichord, overwhelmingly in binary form and each time coming up with something new and fresh. Or doing the same with the symphonic form, though there you have instrumental variety as well as contrasting movements to work with.

What is required for these repertories to flourish is not only the creative genius of the composer, but also the availability of musicians to play the works and a venue and sponsorship to support performances. Of course Scarlatti could count on the patronage of Philip V, the King of Spain and Haydn that of the wealthy Esterhazy family. Bach was employed by the city fathers of Leipzig and Monteverdi by the Gonzagas and the Serene Republic of Venice. So what you really need is decades long support of some wealthy patrons, something we don't really have these days.

How could I possibly introduce these repertories in the context of a blog? Not very easily, I'm afraid. The topic is not only too big for a blog, it is also too big for a series of hefty books. Because of the extensive nature of these repertories, many of them have not even been examined in a thorough way in monographs. And when they have, as in the massive three-volume book on the Italian Madrigal by Alfred Einstein, they are often many decades old. So, basically, it can't be done! So what can I do? Well, I can certainly give little tastes of them, call it a "repertory sampler" which might encourage you to explore this music. I think it is really worth your time because here we tend to have pure creativity unaffected by commercial or ideological considerations--and wouldn't that be a relief!

So I'm going to pick up on a post I put up not long ago and delve into the Monteverdi madrigals to start with. I'm going to pick one madrigal from Book 3, one from Book 5 and one from Book 7 that I hope will enable me to illustrate the shift from Renaissance style to Baroque style in one composer in just a few years.

The Marvelous Mr. Monteverdi

Was there a fabulously talented musician in late 16th century Italy akin to today's Taylor Swift? Discounting the cultural, social and economic differences (no-one in 16th century Italy could make a billion dollars touring), there sure was: Claudio Monteverdi, born in 1567. He published his first book of madrigals at age twenty in 1587. But this was not his first publication, no, three years earlier, at age seventeen, he published a volume of Canzonette. Here is a a sample from that book:

Yes, pretty simple stuff, but on the other hand, early Taylor Swift is pretty simple stuff too--and this has a bit of counterpoint. Now let's hear something from his first book of madrigals:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wBTnGyAtzhc

Featuring expressive shifts to capture the emotion of the text, this shows the influence of Luca Marenzio and Luzzasco Luzzaschi. But Monteverdi's second book of madrigals from 1590 contains his first masterpieces, skillful development of musical gestures reflecting the rhetorical elements of the texts as well as unusual rhythmic stratification--something not available in poetic forms.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nsr9CH1CI9M&list=RDNsr9CH1CI9M&start_radio=1

By 1592, when Monteverdi's third book of madrigals appeared, he had matured considerably. He had left his birthplace of Cremona and was now in the service of the Duke Vincenzo Gonzaga of Mantua. The amorous triflings of book two are now the more heroic passions influenced by fellow Mantuan composer Giaches de Wert.

I'll stop here for now and continue this another day. One final remarkable thing about Monteverdi is that after perfecting the madrigal he went ahead and invented opera--not singlehandedly, but his L'Orfeo of 1607 is the earliest opera to be a part of the operatic canon today.

Today's Listening

L'Arpeggiata with the Vespro della Beata Vergine 1610 of Monteverdi where you get to see someone conduct while wearing a theorbo.

Today's Listening

 

I just noticed that this recording is twenty years old! I got the CD a couple of months ago and am finally listening to the whole disc. The texts delight in love and the beauties of nature. Mind you, if I were still in musicology I would have to find a way of nuancing that. But as it is, we can just enjoy

Dolcissimi legami

di parole amorose

Here is track 3 from the album: Bevea Fillide mia

Monteverdi: Zefiro torna e di soavi accenti

I have been very tardy getting back to my series on Monteverdi, I realize, and I did get side-tracked a bit with Stravinsky! But I am waiting for some research materials to be delivered on Stravinsky, so that gives me a chance to pick up the thread on Monteverdi. He was probably the greatest composer of the 17th century, though there was certainly a lot of competition.

Monteverdi's career started very early--his first published compositions, a set of sacred motets for three voices, appeared when he was only fifteen and were followed by a book of Madrigali spirituali a year later. His first two books of secular madrigals were published when he was twenty and twenty-three years old, respectively. This gives us an indicator of the powerful role music played in Italian society in the 17th century. Musical amateurs eagerly snapped up new works by the newest composers. Later on in his career Monteverdi was employed by the Duke Vincenzo of Mantua and his heir Francesco, who commissioned L'Orfeo. State banquets were accompanied by specially commissioned music and Monteverdi even accompanied Vincenzo on his military campaigns in Hungary. Music was integrated into social life at all levels and was a necessary accompaniment to worship, dining, affairs of state and nearly every social occasion. Today only mere vestiges of this survive as in the appearance of musicians at Presidential Inaugurations. For most purposes, we use pre-recorded music but that, of course, was not an option in the 17th century. At the highest levels of society, performers and composers were constantly employed.

Monteverdi published two books of Scherzi musicali or Musical jests in 1607 (the year of L'Orfeo) and 1632. As was common at the time, both of these and most of Monteverdi's works, saw numerous reprints, just like popular novels of today. In the Archive of Seventeenth-Century Italian Madrigals and Arias edition of the Scherzi musicali they mention:

The title-page of the Scherzi advertises ‘Arie’, ‘Madrigali’ and a ‘Ciaccona’. The last of these is a setting for two voices of Ottavio Rinuccini’s reworking of Zefiro torna, e ’l bel tempo rimena’, which Monteverdi set in Book VI. The result is one of Monteverdi’s happiest inventions, a setting over the so-called ‘chaconne’ ostinato bass that takes full advantages of the opportunities for word-painting afforded by the text.

This is the first known example of a vocal duet that uses a ciaccona accompaniment. The chaconne form (the more common French spelling) became hugely popular later on and the Wikipedia article is worth a look. Like the passacaglia, it is a repeating harmonic pattern, in the case of the chaconne, probably originating in Latin America. The earliest printed versions were for guitar. The pinnacle of the form is the chaconne that makes up the last movement of the Partita in D minor for violin by J. S. Bach.

Getting back to Monteverdi, here is the English translation of the text to Zefiro torna:

Here is the repeating pattern as it appears in the continuo:

Click to enlarge

It looks like four measures, but it is really only two--that dotted whole note doesn't come back so it is just the second pair of measures that repeat. You will notice that this edition is notated in 3/1 meter or three whole notes to the measure. The clip I will put below is notated in 6/4, which comes to much the same thing. What is interesting is how the rhythm is syncopated: normally in quick triple meter there is a long note on the beat followed by a short note. ONE (two) THREE. Here the short note is on the downbeat which gives the meter a kind of lilt: ONE TWO (three). The whole piece, until we get to the tempo and meter changes in the second half, is these two measures over and over again, with the two tenors spinning out variations over top. It was the 17th century composers that first discovered the power of an endlessly repeating harmonic pattern which seems to spiral on and on. You might almost think of it as a precursor to the minimalist music of the 1970s as the aesthetic effect is somewhat similar. Of course, the latter music lacks the kind of variation technique we find in the Baroque.

Let's listen to a fine performance of the piece, which has the score so you can see both the Italian text and what is going on musically. The performers are Mark Padmore and Jean-Paul Fouchécourt with Les Arts Florissants directed by William Christie:

Monteverdi and the Opera

The composer more responsible for the creation of the genre of the opera than any other is Claudio Monteverdi who wrote operas over a forty year period from L'Orfeo of 1607 to L'incoronazione di Poppea of 1643. We only have a partial picture of the early development of the opera because we are missing all the operas written during a thirty year span in the middle! Seven out of Monteverdi's ten operas (two incomplete) are lost with only fragments surviving. The most famous fragment is the Lamento d'Arianna, an extended recitative from the opera L'Arianna relating the classical story of Theseus' abandonment of Ariadna on the island of Naxos. This lament, surviving in three different versions, the original solo song, a five-voice madrigal and a sacred hymn, was the model for operatic laments for a hundred years and more. Let's have a listen. The singer is Anna Caterina Antonacci:

The full-fledged opera grew out of a host of musical theatre pieces of different kinds that were created for the amusement of the noble courts of northern Italy in the late 16th century. The first actual opera was not by Monteverdi, but by Jacopo Peri in 1597. This was Dafne, written for a circle of humanists in Florence, but first performed in Venice in 1598. The libretto was by Ottavio Rinuccini who also wrote the libretto for Monteverdi's Arianna. Indeed, one recurring theme in all these vocal works is the tight and interactive relationship between the text and the music that we see not only here, but in the madrigals we were looking at. Unquestionably, the most important poetic text for the development of this relationship was Il pastor fido, the tragicomic pastoral by Giovanni Battista Guarini published in 1590 and the source of the texts for a host of madrigals.

The first opera that we have complete that is regularly performed today is L'Orfeo by Monteverdi on a libretto by Alessandro Striggio, but it was very much inspired by the second opera by Peri, Euridice, on a libretto by Rinuccini, first performed in 1600. Euridice was, of course, the wife of Orfeo, whom he attempted to rescue from Hades. This is rather as if another playwright had written a play titled "Juliet" which Shakespeare emulated by writing one titled "Romeo"! It is remarkable what a close circle of creative poets, composers, musicians and noble patrons were responsible for the birth and flourishing of opera.

We are going to spend at least one post on the remarkable opera, L'Orfeo, by Monteverdi, but that will be for next time. For now, let's listen to a performance that attempts to recreate what the original might have sounded like. This rather magnificent performance was directed by Jordi Savall:

Monteverdi's Colleagues and Competitors

One of the things musicologists do is to examine the context surrounding composers and their work. In the popular media this is largely restricted to biographical information, the more scurrilous the better, but a more interesting approach is to look at the musical context, which means looking at the musical environment, a large part of which is other composers, performers, patrons and so on. Late 16th century northern Italy was an extremely musically active place with each regional court supporting its own artists, writers and musicians. The madrigal (and other related forms like the villanella and canzonetta) was a creative union of poetry and music that was perhaps the most salient musical high art of the time and place. Different madrigal styles were developed in Mantua, Ferrara and Florence in particular.

Though born in Cremona, where he also studied at the University of Cremona, Monteverdi spent most of his career at the court of Vincenzo I of Gonzaga in Mantua. Along with Monteverdi, Vincenzo also employed the painter Peter Paul Rubens.

We learn from Tomlinson's monograph on Monteverdi that "The Mantuan style of 1595 - 1600 is above all a homophonic language of flexible, text-inspired declamatory rhythms ... Imitative textures are infrequent..." Also: "The Ferrarese style, in contrast favors mercurial, single-subject imitation at quick rhythmic intervals." He goes on to point out the differences in harmonic structure: the Ferrarese style is more undirected and has a wayward sound to modern ears. In the Mantuan style the bassline is more distinct and freer to support a harmonic foundation.

The very unusual composer Carlo Gesualdo was himself a nobleman, born in Venosa, then part of the Kingdom of Naples. On the death of his father he became Prince of Venosa. He was dedicated to music his whole life and took up residence in Ferrara because of its role as a center of musical activity. After a few years he returned to his castle at Gesualdo bringing with him a number of musicians and singers from Ferrara. Gesualdo was known for a style using extreme chromaticism and some of his madrigals seem to have influenced Monteverdi who knew his work.

Let's listen to a couple of pieces from Gesualdo's Fourth Book of Madrigals. First, "Sparge la morte" performed by the Ensemble "Basiliensis":

Next, "Ecco morirò dunque" performed by the Monteverdi Choir conducted by John Eliot Gardiner:

Working alongside Monterverdi in Mantua was Benedetto Pallavicino, here are the Ensemble Basilensis with his "Deh, dolce anima mia":

Another Mantuan violinist and composer was Salamone Rossi, one of the first Jewish composers we know of. This is his Sonata Duodecima (sopra La Bergamesca):

So I hope that gives you a bit of musical context of late 16th century northern Italy, a place that was the birthplace of a great deal of great music.

Monteverdi Madrigal Techniques

One somewhat unwarranted slur against the madrigal is the use of the term "madrigalism" for what today we would call "Mickey Mousing." I talked about this in this post. Sadly, "link-rot" has caused all my embedded clips to disappear, but I think the text will give you some idea. Mickey Mousing is the musical effect, often used in cartoons, of having the music directly imitate in some way what is happening onscreen. But the constant effort to set the texts of madrigals also sometimes resulted in some direct imitation of things like waves or wind or perhaps weeping or sexual tensions as I discuss in the earlier post.

Monteverdi, however, makes use of many techniques that are much more sophisticated and reflect the wit and brevity of the texts. Tomlinson calls this Monteverdi's "epigrammatic" style. Sometimes the bifurcate relationship between the poet and nature is reflected in the alternation of lively textures and slow-moving affective passages. An example is "La giovinetta pianta" from Book 3:

Monteverdi also makes use of "struck" dissonances, i.e. ones not prepared through suspension. Here is an example on "ch'io" from "Occhi, un tempo mia vita" also from Book 3:

In the second measure of the example, the alto voice leaps to a minor seventh dissonance, the kind of thing much-criticized at the time. The E flat makes the chord a minor minor seventh one, making it sound just a tiny bit jazzy to our modern ears.

Monteverdi finds musical analogues of rhetorical devices such as the "isocolon," where parts of the sentence are composed of grammatically identical phrases. The most terse example is Julius Caesar's "veni, vidi, vici." Monteverdi might set a text using isocolon by using the same bass line, transposed, in parallel sections.

Another interesting technique is that of the "evaporated cadence" where a four voice texture is slimmed down to two or even one as the cadence is reached:

Click to enlarge

Here, as we get to the G tonic, the four voice texture thins to three, then two and finally the two voices merge into one. The purpose of this is to lessen the finality of the cadence--the bass doesn't reach its G until the beginning of the next phrase. A lot of Monteverdi's skill is in calibrating most finely his musical techniques to the text.

In Book 4, he sought out more epigrammatic texts to suit his epigrammatic style. Here is an example:

And here is a performance:

How beautifully and succinctly the music reflects the two parts of the text: the opening exposition followed by the witty paradox: Oh, deadly beauty!

Monteverdi and Tradition

In my last post on Monteverdi I focused on the contrasts he developed in his style and compared that to the smooth consistency of the ars perfecta style. But as the great historiographer R. G. Collingwood pointed out, you can view history from either the point of view of change or from the point of view of continuity. In other words, there are always new things happening and there are always other things remaining the same. This is as true of Monteverdi as anyone. Alongside the extreme harmonic juxtapositions and expressive dissonances we have the use of some age-old harmonic and melodic structures such as the Romanesca:

Click to enlarge

The pattern is C major, G major, A minor, E major, repeated with a tiny rhythmic flourish. Wikipedia says that this was a formula popular from the mid-16th century, but it was printed in vihuela books from the first half of the century. Luys de Narváez' book from 1538 contains both the Romanesca pattern and the Passamezzo antico one. And if they were printed in 1538 you can bet your paycheck that they were in use for decades before. As Tomlinson notes, these patterns "were associated by 1550 not only with the dance but also with oral traditions of semi-improvised poetic recitation. [Tomlinson, Monteverdi, p. 60] In using these formulas, Monteverdi was following the example of Giaches de Wert, his most important influence around the time of the Third Book of Madrigals of 1592. You can find clips of Wert on YouTube. This is "Giunto alla tromba":

And here is the score of the beginning:

As you can seem exactly the same chords are used, just in a different order. Instead of C G Am E, Wert opens with Am E (Am) C G. We don't have to look very far to find a similar harmonic pattern in Monteverdi. Here is the opening of "Sovra tenere herbette" from Book 3:

Click to enlarge

The harmonies at the beginning are E major, A minor, G major, C major. Both Wert and Monteverdi made good use of this limited set of triads. As Tomlinson says, "A restricted harmonic vocabulary is not necessarily an ineffective one."

Let's finish up by listening to the whole piece, "Sovra tenere herbette" from Madrigali, Book 3:

UPDATED to correct a typo regarding the Romanesca example, and thanks to a commentator.

Contrast and Consistency

Whenever I dig into the work of a particular composer, I tend to find instances of general principles--maybe I just like to look for stuff like that! In the case of Monteverdi, his career seems to illustrate the idea that in music history there is an oscillation between the desire for consistency and the desire for contrast. Of course, these two things are found in most individual pieces, but we can also see them in long historic waves as well. What the heck am I talking about?

I think that, in the beginning of a new phase in music history, aesthetic choices are driven by strong contrasts. This might be because it is strong stresses in general that tend to cause a new phase in the arts. For example, Monteverdi lived at a time in which there were stark philosophical, theological and intellectual oppositions. Gary Tomlinson reviews these in the beginning of his book on Monteverdi, Monteverdi and the End of the Renaissance:

One way of describing these oppositions is with the terms "scholasticism" and "humanism." These two ways of viewing the world were not new, but the opposition between them became especially keen in the later 16th century. Scholasticism, a characteristically Medieval world view, relied on authority and faith and absolute truth arrived at through deductive logic. Apart from the Scriptures and writings of the fathers of the church, the main authorities were people like Aristotle (who largely invented deductive reasoning in six treatises dating from the 4th century BC) and his 13th century AD follower, St. Thomas Aquinas.

The humanists, on the other hand, driven by monumental changes in the world such as the voyages of discovery of Columbus and others that opened up entire new hemispheres, emphasized things like moral and political philosophy that dealt with the pragmatic realities of the real world. This involved the growing importance of rhetorical persuasion. In the words of Petrarch, an early humanist, "It is safer to strive for a good and pious will than for a capable and clear intellect." The need for society to respond quickly to rapidly changing circumstances depended on swaying and channeling the passions to result in right action.

Now let's relate this to music. The world that Monteverdi was born into was the world of the ars perfecta as I mentioned before in this post. The style of ars perfecta emphasizes smooth consistency over contrast. There were a series of rules governing how melodies moved and how dissonances were introduced and resolved the whole point of which was to create a kind of contrapuntal perfection. The pinnacle of this style can be found in the work of Palestrina. Here is brief Psalm setting as an example:

This is what we would often characterize as "beautiful", that is, it is consonant, smooth, flowing and so on. But, of course, this is only one kind of beauty and the stresses and oppositions in the later 16th century led to a very different kind of beauty, one based on contrast and expressive intensity. Monteverdi was one of those who developed this new kind of writing to a high level.

One example of the kinds of contrasts that Monteverdi created can be found in his madrigal "A un giro sol" from the Fourth Book. The text of the madrigal is based on a contrast between the pleasantness and charm of the exterior world and the inner misery of the poet. This made it ideal for the creation of corresponding musical contrasts. There are many rhythmic contrasts between flowing representations of the waves and the winds and the more chordal sections, but the biggest contrast is a harmonic one, at around 58 seconds in this clip, where the poet breaks in to say "I alone" am in despair. From G major, the harmony instantly changes to E major (dominant of A minor), a huge contrast at this point in music history! These kinds of contrasts were simply out of bounds in the older style. Let's listen to the Monteverdi madrigal:

And listen to all those lovely minor second dissonances in the last part! Beauty, you see, can be heightened through the skillful use of dissonance and contrast.

The Invention of Monody and "Le nuove musiche"

In my last post on Monteverdi, I sketched some of the historical context surrounding him, but I find I need to fill in a lot more of the picture. The truth is that neither Monteverdi nor any other great composer springs, à la Athena, fully-armed from the forehead of Zeus. Rather, they build on the work of many others, improving and fulfilling ideas that may have been in the air. And so it is with Monteverdi and the new kind of music that emerged around 1600. It actually began decades earlier and only emerged in the light of day when it began to appear in print--another big innovation!

Spurred by the idea of "representation" in music, which really came down to the expression of impassioned human speech, musicians had been experimenting with the idea of replacing the intricate counterpoint of the ars perfecta with a different kind of structure entirely. The idea was to focus on the single voice, hence the word "monody" which just refers to a single melodic line. This line was heightened with the use of chordal accompaniment. The same basic idea is what informs a lot of 20th century "folk music". Bob Dylan's earlier songs were formed in just this way: a single voice singing an expressive text with strummed guitar accompaniment. What the Italian monodists did was take expressive texts and sing them in a kind of reciting style accompanied by a bass instrument and a chordal instrument. One of the best composers of this was Giulio Caccini in his Le nuove musiche of 1601:

Click to enlarge

This is "Amarilli mia bella" taken, like so many other texts, from the very popular play Il pastor fido by Giambattista Guarini. There are two lines shown: the top one is, of course, for the solo singer and sets the text. The lower line is for a bass instrument and a chordal instrument such as a lute. But where is the lute part? If you look very very closely you will see tiny numbers over some of the notes. These indicate, in a kind of musical shorthand, the chords to be played. The number "6", for example, indicates that in addition to the standard note a third above the bass, another note a sixth above should be played. The very second note, for example, is an F# and the "6" indicates that in addition to an "A", a "D" should also be played (the note a sixth above F#). This gives us what we would now call a D major chord in first inversion, but the notion of inversions will have to wait for the harmony text of Rameau, over a century in the future. So what the performers would do is elaborate a bit on this simple musical text. The singer will add certain ornaments (discussed by Caccini in the publication) and the lute player will play the indicated chords in various ways, solid or arpeggiated as might best accompany the voice. The bass instrument player (viola da gamba or other low instrument) pretty much plays what is there.

There are a lot of ways you could perform this. Here it is with counter-tenor, theorbo (lute with a lot of bass strings) and spinet (a kind of harpsichord):

You could also do it with just theorbo (also called archlute):

But I find that understates the bass line. It is often performed with piano. I had to go five pages deep in YouTube to find the instrumentation that I think is called for: voice, lute and gamba:

Signor Claudio Monteverdi and the Historical Context

Last month I promised a series of posts on Claudio Monteverdi (1567 - 1643) who was so creative and so long-lived that he spans two different eras of music history. I've been reviewing what Richard Taruskin says about him in the Oxford History of Western Music (a hefty set of five large volumes that I heartily recommend) and the first thing I am reminded of is that Taruskin is not much in favor of even using the terms "Renaissance" and "Baroque" which is why he breaks with tradition by titling his volumes after the century and not after a supposed musical style.

But that does not detract from the importance of Monteverdi, nor from his emergence from the earlier style and role in the creation of the newer style (called at the time the prima pratica and seconda pratica). My links to the Wikipedia articles are not meant to acknowledge their credibility, by the way. Whoever wrote them is rather confused about the whole thing! The prima pratica refers to the older style of the ars perfecta with its smooth lines and highly controlled dissonance. The newer style was not thought of as "Baroque" of course, that term came along very much later as a critique of Rameau. The exemplar of the ars perfecta is Palestrina, very much a 16th century figure writing in what we traditionally called "Renaissance" style. As Taruskin writes:

...the central irony of the "Renaissance," as the term is applied to music, is the way in which the Greek revivalism that motivated the "rebirth" of philosophy and the other arts actually undermined the dominant "Renaissance" musical style, if we take that style to be the ars perfecta. [op. cit. vol. I, p. 797]

 Instead of the term "Baroque" which Taruskin insists we don't need as it does little more than mislead, he proposes several others that point towards the developments in science and philosophy. If we need a musical term we might note that the era is typified by the emergence of musical theatre, one of the characteristics of the 17th century and one in which Monteverdi was very much in the forefront. If we want to refer to something even more characteristically musical, we could refer to it as the age of the basso continuo, the nearly obligatory new element of a bass line and its realization in harmony. It emerged early in the 17th century and died out in the late 18th century as the Classical style became central.

Getting back to the irony Taruskin refers to, the traditional cliché is that the rediscovery of the learning of Classical Greece prompted the Renaissance, but in music that is not the case. It was the researches of Girolamo Mei, associated with the Accademia Fiorentina, that explored the intricacies of Greek music theory and prompted the new, more expressive style (which we are carefully not calling "Baroque"). What his erudite treatise did not reveal was what Greek music actually sounded like, which was actually a benefit because it meant that composers were not tempted to imitate an ancient model. Mei was pretty sure that Greek music did not contain things like the complex counterpoint of the ars perfecta but was instead monophonic and exerted expressive and moral influence through the use of different modes. The new style in music should be representational, that is, it should imitate in sound the intonations, pitch, tone and other expressive elements of impassioned human speech. These ideas were coming from one Vincenzo Galilei, the father of Galileo Galilei the scientist and were part of a new intellectual movement that we can term "radical humanism." Instead of the traditional persuasion through pure logic and reference to authority, the new persuasion is based on rhetoric and persuasive expression. You can see the appeal to musicians!

This was the environment into which Monteverdi entered as a composer. His early madrigals are in the style of the ars perfecta, but more and more they tend towards increased intensity of expression, which in the context of the style, meant more dissonance and less deference toward the strict control of the older style. An example that Taruskin offers is "Cruda Amarilli" from the fifth madrigal book of 1605 where the soprano enters with a dissonance (not permitted in the older style) and, instead of immediately resolving as it should, moves to yet another dissonance!

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The box indicates the section: the soprano enters with a typical expostulation ("ahi lasso!" "ah, weary me" from which comes our word "alas") on the dissonant A (over a G major harmony) which moves to an F which is still a dissonance! In the next measure it resolves to an E, the third of a C chord.

Cruda Amarilli (Cruel Amarilli) is the first piece in the Fifth Book of Madrigals. This performance is unattributed, but we have the score:

This performance, with ad libitum lute accompaniment, is by R. Alessandrini & Concerto Italiano:

Why Monteverdi?

I proposed doing a whole series of posts on Claudio Monteverdi the other day on the notion that he, along with Joseph Haydn, is one of the great creative geniuses of Western Music. A few years ago I devoted a great number of posts to Joseph Haydn, another underestimated composer, and the justification there was that Haydn was at the very origins of Classical style, mentor and teacher to both Mozart and Beethoven, and largely responsible for the crafting of those harmonic, melodic and structural elements that have been the foundation for most classical music well into the 20th century.

Haydn more or less invented sonata form, which is the structural principle behind not only piano sonatas, but also string quartets and symphonies.

What did Monteverdi do that in any way puts him into this same category? Well, he did pretty much invent opera. There were a couple of people that preceded him, but their efforts have been largely forgotten. The first real opera in European history is Monteverdi's L'Orfeo written in 1607. It is fairly clear that Monteverdi was one of the key creators of the Baroque in music. There is a very good argument that can be made for the honor being shared equally with Arcangelo Corelli who laid much of the groundwork for the Baroque uses of functional harmony as well as sonata and concerto form. Monteverdi's work falls into the three categories of madrigals, church music and opera. So it is fair to say that Monteverdi laid the foundations for vocal music in the Baroque, while Corelli did the same for instrumental music.

But Monteverdi played a unique role in that he not only was a master of late Renaissance vocal music, especially in his earlier books of madrigals, but he enacted the transition to the Baroque in his own music which was, in the later books, truly Baroque in style. This is much rarer than you would think in music because it means that Monteverdi was a master of not one, but two quite different musical styles. The closest parallel I can think of is C. P. E. Bach who was a transition from the music of his father, J. S. Bach, and the early classical style of Haydn. But C. P. E. Bach was neither a great master of the Baroque, nor of the Classical styles but a somewhat eccentric, though interesting, sub-category in himself. Monteverdi however was very much in the mainstream in both the late Renaissance and the early Baroque.

Just to sample a bit the two styles, let's listen to the first madrigal from Bk I, "Ch'io ami la mia vita":

There is nothing there that really hints at Baroque style: it is clearly within the bounds of the late Renaissance. You will hear a few ornaments that the performers add, but this practice dates far back into the early days of the Renaissance (and probably earlier, but we don't have too much evidence). Here is the first page of the score:

Two stylistic features that are the foundation of Baroque style are the polarization of the texture between the treble and the bass and the use of a continuo, that is, a prominent bass line fleshed out with chordal instruments like the lute, harpsichord or organ. Neither element is present here. Just for comparison, let's have a look at the score to the first madrigal from Bk VIII, "Altri canti d'Amor":

And there it is: the basso continuo and a prominent treble voice. Of course, later on the other voices join in as well, but the basso continuo is throughout, indicating the huge increase in the importance of and compositional command of pure harmony as an expressive device. Let's have a listen to this piece:

It begins with a short sinfonia for the strings and continuo alone. I just quoted from where the voice enters.

I think you will agree that this madrigal occupies an entirely different musical realm from the first one!

Masterpieces of Music: Claudio Monteverdi

One of the fascinating things about looking at the history of music is that when you come to a really big transition, like the one from the Renaissance to the Baroque, you come to notice not only those aspects that are important in the new period, but you also become aware of aspects of the older period that had not stood out before. What I'm trying to say is that we see in early Baroque music the movement towards a strong delineation of the outer voices, the soprano and bass, with the middle being filled in with functional harmony. This seems quite normal to us now, but at the time it was an innovation. The Renaissance instead treated all the voices equally as you will hear if you go back and listen to the music of Orlande de Lassus or Josquin in my previous posts. So, in looking at the Baroque, we notice not only things about it that are new, but we also notice, in retrospect, things about the Renaissance.

The life of Claudio Monteverdi, born 1567, died 1643, spans the transition from Renaissance to Baroque. Here is the earliest portrait of him, painted in 1597, just when the Baroque was beginning in music. It is interesting that he is shown playing a bass instrument as it was with the bass line that the innovations of the Baroque were particularly important:

The beginning of the Baroque in music is attributed to the activity of a group known as the Florentine Camerata who were most active between 1577 and 1582. Since then we have had many instances of private associations like this, cultural or artistic collectives who are pursuing common aims, but they were the very first we know of. The Wikipedia article is worth reading. As they say, these thinkers were interested in reviving music by going back to the ideals and practices of the ancient Greeks. For example, as they understood Greek drama to have been sung, they wanted to revive this and to do so they decided that the complex polyphony of the Renaissance had to go. The text had to be sung in a more dramatic and easily understood fashion. So they created a new style of melody, half spoken, half sung, and invented recitativo and opera. Most interesting, from a composer's point of view, is that the search for drama in music, also seems to have led to the idea of functional harmony where the harmony is one of the driving forces in the musical 'narration'. The first really successful result of the ideas and experiments of the Camerata was Monteverdi's opera L'Orfeo, based on the Greek legend of Orpheus, who went to the Underworld to rescue his bride Eurydice. L'Orfeo was composed in 1606 and 07 and performed for the first time in February 1607. It was much performed and admired for the next fifty years or so, but then was forgotten until the late 19th century and was not performed again until 1904. The historical instruments and style necessary for a really accurate performance all had to be rediscovered and it wasn't until after WWII that performances were given that were an accurate reproduction of the original. Here is an excellent production that captures the feel of the work. This is part 1 of 12:

This is a whole new musical world and it feels so much closer to our own. A lot of what is going on here for the first time has stayed with us. A dramatic text, declaimed clearly, with largely chordal accompaniment? This is exactly what we hear in many operas from 1600 until now. In fact, it is also what we hear in Schubert lieder, Bob Dylan and even rap music. The big aria for Orfeo comes in Act 3 on the text "Possente spirto". Here is just that aria from a different production:

And here is the first page of the original printed score with the aria:

Click to enlarge

Apart from a few incidentals like odd-looking clefs and rests, this is a score that many contemporary musicians could simply read from. It looks rather bare, but all the sung melody is there and all the little runs in the violins. What is not on the page, but we hear, are the plucked chords in the various lutes and other harmony instruments. This is an entirely new concept of harmony: if you give the player the only really important note, the bass note, then he is free to strum and pluck chords with that as the root. This is new both in terms of performance and in terms of harmony.