“He wore the necks”

Next Wednesday's concert, in which many of you will participate (didn't you ask for it?), documents a fundamental turning point in the history of Western music, that is, in the history of music: the emancipation of instrumental music from vocal music.

Until the end of the sixteenth century, the canon of "high" music, but not only that, its expressive and aesthetic culmination, corresponded to polyphonic vocal music (with Palestrina, for simplicity, as the point of arrival of a path that was born at least three centuries earlier and which had unraveled throughout Europe following in broad terms the main source of inspiration for musicians, which is not Euterpe but money: therefore English, French, Flemish, Venetian, and finally Roman polyphony, following the alternating events of European politics, dictated now as then by financial interests).

Even some relatively "low" music (such as frottole or laudi ) was vocal (and polyphonic), and just to clarify, the "high" (cultured, aristocratic) or "low" (light, popular) character did not depend on the content." sacred" or "profane", but from the expressive research and therefore from the technical difficulty of the musical text. In the 16th century, "high" music was out of the reach of amateurs, if only for the difficulties in reading the mensural notation , and for the complexity of the interweaving of the parts (which was often programmatically pursued by creating real puzzles, such as the bizarre mensural canons ). On the other hand, the lauds, to which we have dedicated an album , are essentially advertising jingles (for a particularly demanding product: Our Lord).

Instrumental music was consequently polyphonic, and in some ways structurally subordinate to vocal music. In the Renaissance, and up until the end of the sixteenth century, monodic instruments (those that can play one note at a time, so to speak) were conceived in "choirs" or consorts : for each type of instrument (flute, viola, cromorno, dulciana, trombone , cornetto, etc.) there were soprano, contralto, tenor and bass (as well as, in some cases, the sopranino or double bass), and instrumental music was polyphonic, written for "choirs" of instruments.

An example makes it easier to understand:

and naturally if a choir (consort) of flutes could do it, a choir (consort) of violas could also do it:

but also a polyphonic instrument on its own:

These are three credible performances, because instrumental writing, until the end of the sixteenth century, was still not idiomatic, that is, it did not speak the language of a particular instrument, it did not exploit its characteristics, but was substantially fungible.

The protagonist of today's concert will be the bass of the violin "choir", but the neo-Bourbon cellist dear to historical readers of the blog will talk to you about this.

In fact, at the time any soprano (or alto, or tenor or bass) instrument could play a soprano (or, respectively, alto, tenor, or bass) part in an instrumental "choir", so much so that the musicians rather than in instruments, they specialized in registers (that is: the soprano player knew how to play all soprano instruments) and even keyboard music was written in a four-voice score, as if it were choral music, and as Bach, two centuries later, wanted do in his supreme aesthetic manifesto:

A deliberate claim to be out of date, as evidenced by the fact that (just like two centuries earlier) the same piece could be credibly entrusted to a polyphonic instrument:

and that this operation was carried out by those who had pushed the idiomatic characteristics of the available instruments to the extreme (for the time). For example, imagine doing this prelude with a choir of flutes:

I'm not saying it's impossible, but making it believable would be very, very difficult. Bach's writing, therefore, was idiomatic for the harpsichord, but when he wanted it. The total emancipation of instrumental language from vocal language would come with Romanticism. This:

it makes sense only and exclusively on the piano, like this:

it only makes sense on the violin, and it is difficult to imagine entrusting this or other romantic instrumental music to a choir, despite the fact that every now and then someone has fun with it:

But, in fact, it is (relatively) fun, and not particularly credible, also because, you will notice, a key element is missing from the vocal music: the text.

Incidentally, I note that romanticism, seen and felt as a time of total freedom, of emancipation of the individual, musically is a time of total obligations: you can play a certain piece only with that instrument, the author tells you the time, some even with the metronome indication, all expressive intentions are noted, etc. etc. The interpretative margins for the performer remain, but they become much, much narrower.

In Wednesday's concert (which would be today), focusing on the 1630s, we document the transition from the "vocal" paradigm, proposing instrumental pieces that rework vocal material (such as madrigals or Gregorian hymns), or in any case are entitled " canzona ", to the "instrumental" paradigm, with songs entitled " toccata " (a title that testifies to the paradigm shift from singing a melody to touching the keys of an instrument), or fantasia , a particularly long-lived genre (from the Renaissance to romanticism and beyond) , characterized by the lack of a literary underlying, of a text, and therefore innately instrumental (every rule admits exceptions ).

The bulk of the program is taken from two books published in Venice (the city where in 1501 Ottaviano Petrucci had invented musical printing with movable type, a decisive technological progress for the democratization – or bourgeoisisation – of musical practice): the First book of songs by Frescobaldi (printed in Rome in 1628 and republished in Venice in 1634) and the First book of songs, fantasies and currents by Selma y Salaverde (published in Venice in 1638).

To place this stuff in time, we are in the midst of the Thirty Years' War (like today, after all), the decade had begun with the plague of Milan (that of the Betrothed), more precisely in the Swedish phase , Louis XIII reigned in France , in Spain Philip IV, in England Charles I (the first to be beheaded, moreover), in Germany there were too many, because Germany then was as we who love it so much would like today (there were many), the pope was Urban VIII (quod non fairunt barbari…), Guercino refused Louis XIII's invitation and went to work in Bologna, where Guido Reni also worked (Caravaggio had died 24 years earlier…), literature brought us it gave decidedly less satisfaction (Shakespeare, but also Góngora, but also Marino, were dead, and Molière was just twelve years old).

We will perform these songs:

Bartolomé de Selma y Salaverde (c. 1595, Cuenca – after 1638), "Dressed the Hills Walked", for bass and organ.

Girolamo Frescobaldi (Ferrara, 13 September 1583 – Rome, 1 March 1643), "Canzona quinta known as the Tromboncina", for bass and organ.

Girolamo Frescobaldi (Ferrara, 13 September 1583 – Rome, 1 March 1643), Toccata Seconda from the "Second book of toccatas, canzone, verses d'hinni, Magnificat, gagliarde, Corrente et altrepartita d'tavolatura di harpsichord and organ" (Rome , 1627).

Bartolomé de Selma y Salaverde (c. 1595, Cuenca – after 1638), Fantasy fifth for bass solo.

Girolamo Frescobaldi (Ferrara, 13 September 1583 – Rome, 1 March 1643), "Canzona sixth called l'Altera", for bass and organ.

Giovanni Battista Vitali (Bologna, 18 February 1632 – Modena, 12 October 1692), Capritio sopra eight figures, Capritio sopra li cinque tempi, Passa Galli per la Letter E, from the "Partites sopra le diverse sonatas for the violone".

As you may have noticed, there is an intruder, Giovanni Battista Vitali, included because he is a virtuoso of the instrumental protagonist of this program, the violin bass (i.e., precisely, the bass of the violin choir, which would later become the cello, as well as the contralto of the violin choir would have become the viola, which in fact in Europe they call "alto", as Europeans will know – but not pro-Europeans). Vitali was born more or less when the two books I was talking about were published, and is therefore the protagonist of a phase of more advanced emancipation of instrumental language.

"Vestiva i colli" is a madrigal by Palestrina published in the collection "Spoglia amorosa" (Venice, 1592), on a text by an anonymous Petrarchian (another hard-to-die paradigm):

It dressed the hills and surrounding countryside

The spring of new loves

And breathed sweet Arab odors,

surrounded by grasses and adorned with flowers.

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This is a machine translation of a post (in Italian) written by Alberto Bagnai and published on Goofynomics at the URL https://goofynomics.blogspot.com/2024/08/vestiva-i-colli.html on Wed, 28 Aug 2024 08:33:00 +0000. Some rights reserved under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license.