Issuu

Notes on Tonight’s Performance The music we choose to perform in Collegium Musicum (soon to be renamed the Historical Music Consort) is largely meant for intimate, small-scale performances, rather than for musicians separated from their auditors by the distance of a stage or proscenium. We rarely use or need a conductor, and each member is responsible for interpreting the music based on very few cues from the composer. In the extreme case, those of us playing lute or harpsichord must make up our notes in an analogous fashion to a jazz pianist, sometimes with and sometimes without figures. But in general, our scores have little to no dynamic markings, no phrase markings, and only rarely do we see articulations or bowings. We must LISTEN and react, often interpreting on the fly. We make chamber music with one another, and thus presenting this music to a modern concert audience seated in a different part of the room inherently distorts how music was meant to be heard when it was written. Even the festive motets by Carissimi and Charpentier might have been heard in smaller chapels and private spaces; the Sainte Chapelle in Paris where Charpentier worked is far smaller than the massive cathedral of Notre Dame. Roman musicians like Carissimi often wrote music for resonant, smaller spaces in the private apartments or palaces of Bishops within the ecclesiastical courts. And printed sheet music, until not that long ago, was purchased mainly to be played at home by anyone with the skills to do so, and perhaps for no audience but the players themselves. It was the TV and Twitter of its day. The genesis of this program came from a couple of influences. Dean Christopher Hanning very generously gifted the Collegium with a new continuo instrument, a theorbo, with which I have begun to accompany our ensemble. The fact that we had two violins previously set up for playing in Baroque style and an oboist in the group with her own instrument led me, for only the second time since I’ve been directing the group, to devote the entire semester to Baroque repertoire. With the inexpensive purchase of a few Zen-on 415 alto recorders and with our collection of viols, built in imitation of Baroque, not Renaissance models, we suddenly had an instrumentarium that could handily tackle 17th and 18th-century music. Of utmost importance for the rise of what we call Baroque music today is the lure of a new Italian culture based on humanism. Its earliest practitioner was the fourteenth-century poet Petrarch, and the rediscovery of ancient manuscripts from Rome and Greece especially the works of Plato and Cicero - changed civic culture in Florence and Rome. Simultaneously, Italian musicians developed a vital style of expressive music in the early 17th century that revalued what it meant to deliver poetry in song. Their Northern European counterparts traveled to the south and imbibed this new art from the font of the southern