Can Heteroclito Giancarli change the world? (original) (raw)
Less familiar to contemporary musicologists than Benjamin Button, Heteroclito Giancarli might be poised to do more for music than Benjamin Button did for the science of ageing. A Venetian patrician, amateur singer and author of a collection of Compositione musicali published in 1602, Heteroclito Giancarli might be just the man to unsettle one of the pivotal foundation stones of Western musical culture concerning the genesis of opera. He is the tip of an iceberg that offers an alternate history to the modern myth starring Florentine nobleman Giovanni Bardi and his Camerata of monody co-conspirators, Girolamo Mei, Vincenzo Galilei and Jacopo Peri. Instead, the Giancarli story tells of a hundred years of singing to the lute, of a much more realistic and subtle development and reshaping of existing practices, and of Baroque styles that grew from renaissance traditions rather than as reaction against them. It therefore questions whether it was really the Bardi Laboratories that killed off polyphony in order to reinvent monody, and that acted to enable the Ancient World to triumph over Modernity. My research suggests a less theatrical scenario that recognises the presence of singer-songwriters throughout the sixteenth century, musicians usually omitted from general histories of sixteenth-century music, and suggests a series of continuities that link Giulio Caccini and other early baroque monodists to the lutenist songsters who flourished throughout the sixteenth century.
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This paper examines the musical chapters in the Hebdomades (1589), an encyclopedic commentary by the humanist Fabio Paolini on a single line of Vergil (Aeneid VI.646: ‘Obloquitur numeris septem discrimina vocum’). This book, originally given as a series of lectures before the Accademia degli Uranici in Venice, shows that Paolini, though not a professional musician, had read a variety of musical writers, such as Boethius, Vanneo, Vicentino, and his friend Zarlino, as well as the philosopher Marsilio Ficino, whose works also include discussions of musical matters. As a professional Hellenist, Paolini was better acquainted with the surviving Greek musical writings than most music theorists, and he gives valuable information about Greek manuscripts owned by Zarlino. However, the Hebdomades also show that Paolini’s practical understanding of music theory was a little shaky. Furthermore, his comments betray a distinct humanist disdain for the music of his own time. Paolini’s work thus gives a good indication of the enthusiasm for music (or at least the ideal of ancient music) amongst non-musicians in Italian academies in the bloom of late humanism, but also the limits of non-professional speculation. The essay also examines the reception of Paolini’s work (especially by Martín del Río SJ), and includes an annotated edition of the relevant chapter of the Hebdomades.
The music of the Italian Renaissance as a national myth
In the Italian musical historiography of the nineteenth century the concept of Renaissance passed through several elaborative steps. This slow process was deeply influenced by the ideological positions connected to the developing political conditions of the country and by changing attitudes in history writing. The historians concerned with civil life, the figurative arts, and literature described the Renaissance as a typical Italian phenomenon that began in the early fourteenth century and lasted 200 years, but the historians of music were unable to detect a correspondence in music during that period, mainly because of the preeminence that Flemish music and musicians were given in Italy. This led to the recognition of the characteristics of the Renaissance in the later music of Palestrina, particularly in the Missa Papae Marcelli. That composition was thought responsible for introducing the modern tonal system, which discarded medieval counterpoint, and for stating a genuine national aesthetic principle—that of the melody, which is better realized in singing. This vision was delivered by Girolamo Alessandro Biaggi, who benefitted from Giuseppe Baini's famous study on Palestrina's life and works. This vision is exclusively concerned with sacred music, as every secular genre—the madrigal, for instance—was considered the result of the Flemish occupation. In the second half of the nineteenth century Oscar Chilesotti contributed to a more extended definition of the Italian musical Renaissance. Many of his studies are devoted to the so-called melodia popolare, which in his opinion was the spontaneous manifestation of the Italian folk emerging mainly from the practice of solo singing with the lute. The melodia popolare enabled Chilesotti to antedate the beginning of the musical Renaissance and to define it as an event pertaining the secular realm of music. In the late fifteenth century the melodia popolare merged with the Flemish compositional technique and originated the typical Italian genres of the frottola and villanella, which through the madrigal developed into seventeenth century opera. By the end of the century the more up-to-date image of the Renaissance was offered by Alfredo Untersteiner, an amateur musicologist who was conscious of the contemporary musicological literature, especially in German. His Renaissance had a first start in the Italian ars nova, a short artistic experience that deeply influenced the Flemish composers from Dufay and underwent a continuous technical refinement until Willaert, who gave up the artifices of the Flemish school and adopted the typical Italian style.
Today’s concert takes its point of departure from Tasso’s epic La Gerusalemme liberata: from its tales of Erminia amongst the shepherds, and her tears over what she believes to be the body of Tancredi; the pagan warrior Clorinda, who saves the Christians Sofronia and Olindo, about to be burnt at the stake; the maga Armida, who came upon the sleeping knight Rinaldo in her enchanted garden, and becomes enamoured of him, but is abandoned soon after their idyll. Composers have drawn on Tassos’ epic for their inspiration from even before the work was published in its authorized form. Since the late 16th century the epic has been an inexhaustible source of texts and themes for madrigals, monodies, chamber cantatas and operas - for works composed until even as late as our own time. But in today's concert we will focus on the music which was composed in Italy within the first five decades subsequent to its publication, from the first composer known to have set its ottave - the Flemish Giaches de Wert, employed at the court of Mantua, who had personal contact with Tasso - to the great masters of the Italian Baroque, Monteverdi, Marini and Mazzocchi, who have left us works of outstanding beauty and interest. One need only think of Monteverdi’s innovative Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda, or Marini’s enchanting La Bella Erminia, with its echo lament, to perceive the importance of this repertoire. That there is a particular focus on the Roman composers of the early Baroque period in today’s concert is by no means a coincidence, for it is intended as a personal, affectionate and grateful homage to the director of Villa I Tatti, Joseph Connors, whose passion for music of the Renaissance and Baroque periods has led him to establish the series of biennial concerts that present early music in the limonaia, to the great joy of our Florentine and international public. Music has never flowered at I Tatti so rigorously as in these last eight years.
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Orgoglio nazionale e modernità nei trattati d’orchestrazione italiani del primo Novecento
Music, Individuals and Contexts. Dialectical Interaction, edited by Nadia Amendola, Alessandro Cosentino, Giacomo Sciommeri, Università degli Studi di Roma “Tor Vergata”, 27-28 aprile 2017, Roma, UniversItalia, 2019, pp. 309-318. , 2019