Issuu

The eternal city became home to the Christian faith slowly, but eventually the philosophical world of late classic Neoplatonism and the bureaucratic genius of the Romans was absorbed into a robust Catholic church that, unlike its eastern counterpart, survived the assaults of war, of the competing Islamic faith, and even the rebellion that began within by Martin Luther in the early sixteenth century. By the second golden age of the papal choir, led in its height by the (scandalously married!) Giovanni Perluigi da Palestrina, the international polyphonic style had settled into its recognizable character, with carefully controlled dissonance and a rhetorically sophisticated method of imitative writing. Nonetheless, the rise of harmony as a separate domain controlled by the new tool of a figured bass brought a new focus to chords and dissonance in the wake of Claudio Monteverdi's "errors" of unprepared dissonances and seventh chords. The Renaissance works you will hear tonight are all squarely within the controlled, rule-based style of the Papal circle. We begin with two simple, sincere hymns of the counter reformation. O bone Jesu was once thought to be composed by Palestrina but later discovered to be written by Monteverdi's teacher, the Venetian master Marc' Antonio Ingenieri. We have paired this hymn with O Crux Ave by Francesco Soriano, Palestrina's maestro di capella of several institutions including San Giovanni Laterano and the Capella Giulia, and in his youth a boy chorister at the former. Giovanni Piccioni's Ut re mi fa sol la - one of several settings from this era - is a beautiful example of the Christian Neoplatonic universe in metaphysical song. The six-note scale, or hexachord, of Guido d'Arezzo rises from the singers' voices from within our mortal sphere, creating what the ancient Roman theorist Boethius reconsidered instrumental music, or music created by performance; this song travels through each of the celestial spheres until the hexachord is inverted and the love of God comes back down and enters through the ear to tune human hearts with the ratios of divine consonance. This madrigal would have been well-suited to the scholarly academy Piccioni served as an example for speculative conversation! A highly productive composer, Piccioni was not a Roman, but his music in many ways echoes the Roman style of the late 16th century. Palestrina's Descendi in hortum nucum is a perfectly balanced, five-voice motet on a portion of the Song of Solomon, and the composer's mastery of harmony in 1:1 counterpoint contrasts subtly with his perfect control of the imitative arguments between voices. His polyphony marks the changes of the text through contrasting contours and cadences, especially in some of his most wonderfully evaded points of closure. Maurizio Cazzati was one of the great Bolognese composers of the seventeenth century, and the young violinist Archangelo Corelli (known as Corelli Bolognesi in his early Roman days) must surely have played his music during his formative years there. While he did compose and conduct vocal music and write solo cantatas such as his gorgeous Lodasi for two violins soprano, and continuo, Cazzati was known as an innovator of