Monteverdi, the 1610 Vespers and the Beginnings of the Modern Musical Work (original) (raw)
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Early music recording as mythography – Monteverdi and the 'other' Vespers
Muzyka, 2020
This article discusses the concept of ‘Monteverdi’s Vespers’ as represented in contemporary record releases of the composer’s works. This concept refers both to Monteverdi’s Vespro della Beata Vergine, published in 1610, and to various modern compilations of his works which musicians, musicologists and producers refer to as ‘Vespers’. The great wealth of Vespers-related pieces held in libraries and archives still considerably outweighs the number of performances and recordings of those works. Monteverdi’s Vespers, on the other hand, make up the majority of existing recordings of seventeenth-century polyphonic Vespers and thus constitute a key point of reference. I analyse around 500 albums (not only with Vespers music) released between 1952 and 2019, focussing on their iconographic and typographic content, as well as their graphic designs, in an attempt to show how the modern vision of this repertoire came to be formed and what persons and places are associated with this current in the history of early music recording.
Recenti indagini sul repertorio musicale in uso presso la cappella ducale di Venezia hanno permesso di identificare un numero significativo di composizioni polifoniche divenute parti integranti e insostituibili del cerimoniale liturgico marciano. Si tratta di un fenomeno che si accentua in maniera considerevole soprattutto nel corso del Seicento, da mettere in correlazione al sensibile aumento dell’attività ordinaria della cappella ducale. Assai diverse sono le modalità grazie alle quali una partitura può legarsi al cerimoniale divenendone parte insostituibile (e quindi perpetuata grazie alla ciclicità del calendario liturgico). Scopo di questo intervento è da un lato quello considerare alcuni aspetti di questo processo; dall’altro, di riflettere sulle sue implicazioni funzionali ed estetiche legate a questo fenomeno. L’impiego di simili repertori costringe infatti a interrogarsi sugli effetti da essi generati. La scelta di dare vita a nuove partiture a cappella va considerata alla luce del quotidiano confronto con un repertorio che ogni maestro di cappella è chiamato a conoscere e a dirigere secondo precise modalità imposte dal cerimoniale. In questo senso vanno considerati alcuni significativi esempi di contraffazione, sintomatici della volontà di reimpiegare il repertorio ‘proprio’ della cappella. Fino a che punto simili processi abbiano caratterizzato la produzione musicale della cappella marciana in epoca moderna e quali siano le possibili implicazioni all’interno della complessa dialettica che caratterizza la fenomenologia musicale veneziana del tempo, sono questioni a cui si cercherà di dare risposta, interrogandosi su possibili future strategie di indagine.
Plainsong and Medieval Music, 2005
'Exactitude' is the title of a well-known Art Deco poster made for the French national railway company in 1929 by Pierre Fix-Masseau. A geometrically elegant black tube of a locomotive charges full tilt at the viewer, speeding into the present and on to the future with confident power. No lines are soft or sinuous, no ambiguities are evident, all is precision, simplicity and clarity. If words can ever be adequately contained in images, 'exactitude' has found its visual correlative in this picture. It was a perfect conceptual fit, so much so that the same locomotive appears in a series of posters advertising half a dozen different routes for the company. 'Sameness' and 'exactitude' are concepts that haunt many of the essays in Leo Treitler's new collection. The volume begins with a number of essays focusing on problems involved with the concept of 'improvisation', which, as Treitler so well brings out, immediately engages its High Modern value-opposite, 'stability'. It was this radical debate in Treitler's first chapters which brought to mind the Masseau posters, because the simple characteristics of the engine image and its stable repetition through a variant series of compositions captures so well the Modernist values of the Jazz Age which Treitler engages when he self-consciously problematizes the opposition of improvisation to stability as an analytical method. As Treitler comments: in the pejorative reading of 'improvisation' that we find in the literature on chant. .. there is the intimation. .. that improvised music is characterized by variation; the rendering of an improvised item is different from one time to the next: intentionally, if this is regarded as a value, inevitably when it is the opposite, usually called 'stability', that is valued. It is the latter conception that prevails in the literature on chant history, and that is why the possibility of improvisation in the establishment of the chant tradition has been thought to be ruled out by the homogeneity of the written transmission in the earliest notated books. (p. 6) Treitler has focused on this and similar problems for much of his career. His work has an enviable coherence, made even more apparent by his reflections on the previously published essays of this new collection. All of the chapters contain earlier
Monteverdi and Seconda Pratica: Music Should be at the Ser-vice of the Word
Socratic Lectures 7, 2022
This article provides insight into the music of the late Renaissance and early Baroque in Italy. Composer Claudio Monteverdi was one of the most important figures in the music of the early Italian Baroque. We consider the events that led to the creation of the new early Baroque style-Seconda pratica-(second practice) and describe the significant changes in vocal music that took place with the aim to depart from strict counterpoint at the turn of the 16th century.