Micrologus; Music of Monteverdi's Venice

82-05 MUSIC OF MONTEVERDI’S VENICE

Today's Micrologus is entitled "Music of Monteverdi’s Venice,” but before you get too excited about hearing some of your favorite Monteverdi works, I should say that there is not a note of Monteverdi to be heard in the next half-hour. Rather you will be hearing selections composed by his Venetian contemporaries, most of whom are virtually unknown today.

Venice, at the beginning of the 17th century, was in the forefront of European cities, with an active and innovative musical establishment, and this was largely due to the fact that it was the most important center in Europe for the printing of music. Just about everybody's madrigals, airs, sonatas, even operas, were funneled through the Venetian printing houses. So performers and listeners there had access to works of even the most obscure composers and were thus, no doubt, completely aware of the latest trends and innovations in compositional techniques.

Anonymity, at least, was not and has not recently been the problem of Giovanni Gabrieli. For almost 30 years (from 1585 until his death in 1612), Gabrieli held a prominent musical post at the great church of San Marco in Venice. His compositional output for that establishment consisted largely of motets, instrumental canzonas, and sonatas; and perhaps his best known work today is the "Sonata pian’ e forte." It is not true that before Gabrieli there were no dynamics in music; it is just that, up to that time composers left the choice of the gradations of loudness and softness entirely up to the performers. So Gabrieli's innovative use in this piece of the now-familiar piano and forte markings were an indication of an increasing desire on the part of composers to exert control over more parameters of the performance of the music (that is, not just pitch and rhythm). There is another aspect to the control of parameters in this piece as well, because Gabrieli specified the instruments he wanted: cornetto, three sackbuts, and organ in one instrumental choir; violin, three sackbuts and organ in the other. So while the "Sonata pian’ e forte" (published in Venice just before l600) is firmly Renaissance compositional practice, it showed the way to the dramatic and coloristic effects essential in the early operas such as Monteverdi's Orfeo, composed just 10 years later.

[MUSIC: Giovanni Gabrieli's "Sonata pian’ e forte" performed by the London Cornett and Sackbut Ensemble]

It is curious that although Gabrieli took the trouble to specify the instrumentation we rarely hear it performed today with that instrumental combination.

Gabrieli's position at San Marco was as organist, and while he was no doubt involved in the performance of works such as this, the person who was most responsible for the performance was the maestro de’ concerti. He looked after the preparation of the instrumental ensemble while the maestro di cappella was responsible for the whole operation, including organs and choirs as well. Giovanni Bassano was maestro de’ concerti from 1601 until his death in 1617. He thus overlaps the tenure of Gabrieli as organist, and of Monteverdi as maestro di cappella. Bassano was a virtuoso, and his writing illustrates very well the rise of a virtuoso style in Italy at this time. The following is one of his unaccompanied ricercata, performed on recorder by Scott-Martin Kosofsky.

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I mentioned that Bassano was a virtuoso—in fact a virtuoso cornetto player—so it is most likely that pieces such as that ricercata were intended for performance on cornetto. Unfortunately, the world has not produced an abundance of virtuoso cornetto players in the last few hundred years, so much of that instrument's finest repertoire has remained obscure, except (as in the case with the last piece) for performance on other instruments.

Enter a young American performer by the name of Bruce Dickey. For the first time, probably, since the 17th century we can hear a cornetto perform music written especially for it in a manner which justifies the esteem it commanded in early 17th century Italy. Critics at that time held its agility and subtlety to be exceeded only by that of the human voice (I might add: the virtuoso human voice). We are going to listen to a Sonata Concertata by Dario Castello performed by Bruce Dickey and his cohorts from an ensemble known as Concerto Castello. Very little is known about this composer beyond the fact that he was active as a performer in Venice from c. 1620 to c. 1650. His surviving works published in the 1620s were popular enough in an age of changing musical taste to be reprinted for almost 40 years.

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In spite of the virtuosity of cornetto players in Venice in the early 17th century, it must be said that the use of the violin was on the rise. (This was, after all, the age of the great maker Nicolò Amati.) It is symptomatic of this trend that when Giovanni Bassano died in 1617, he was replaced as maestro de’ concerti by a violinist, a man by the name of Francesco Bonfante. The gradual replacement of brass by strings received an unexpected boost through a natural calamity: the Great Plague of 1630. The plague decimated the musicians of San Marco and those brass players who had died were succeeded by string players. Among the young generation of performer/composers for the violin was Biagio Marini. He actually began his professional career under Bassano and Monteverdi at St. Mark’s. Of him, it was said that "In playing the violin, he was singularly and rarely successful. He would play with such excellence that he rendered his listener little short of ecstatic.” From a collection published in Venice in 1629 we are going to listen to a Sonata by Marini for violin, cornetto, cello, and organ, performed by Dana Maiben, Bruce Dickey, Alice Robbins, and Frances Fitch, of Concerto Castello.

[MUSIC]

One of the things which has been said about Monteverdi is that he was responsible for an increasing secularization of sacred music. Certainly, that is a claim that could not be made about his own early Venetian sacred masterwork, the Vespers of 1610; but it is true that church composers found irresistible the texture of his later continuo-madrigals and made use of it in chamber-style sacred works. We are going to listen to a piece which uses not only Monteverdi's continuo-madrigal texture, but also his operatic technique of combining sections in recitative style with sections in a more dance-like style. "Surrexit pastor bonus" (the good Shepherd is risen) from a 1640 collection by Cherubino Busatti, here performed by tenor Martyn Hill with the Early Music Consort of London, directed by David Munrow

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It is interesting to note that the disc from which that piece is taken. The Music of Monteverdi's Contemporaries, was the last record made by David Munrow before his death in 1976.