Programme Notes

To those at the centre of the musical renaissance in 16th century Italy words were more important than music, and song, therefore, a greater art form than instrumental music. Composers who resisted the lure of contrapuntal artifice were highly prized—and those who, like Cipriano da Rore, observed the natural speech rhythms of Italian, avoided the simultaneous declamation of two or more lines of text, and employed similar note values in all voices of their madrigals, were afforded the highest accolades. Count Giovanni de Bardi, at the centre of the Florentine Camerata, articulated the new rules by which it was hoped to recreate in the sixteenth century the fabled power of music in Classical times. In his discourse of c. 1580 (Discorso mandato a Giulio Caccini) he is expressing the views of fellow Camerata members such as Vincenzo Galilei: words are to music as the soul is to the body; counterpoint is proper only to instrumental music; and particular scorn is reserved for that style of composition in which Soprano flits around the terrace of the Palace of Music clad in crotchets and quavers, while Signor Bass plods along in the basement, measuring his step in breves and semibreves!

Given these strictures, it may seem perverse to present a recital of highly decorated vocal music in instrumental performance. To include works based on those same neo-classicists (Willaert and da Rore) so much admired by Bardi might seem like flying in the face of the Camerata. However, contradictory though it appears, the twin strands of minimalist purity and virtuosic show did coexist, and both drew their inspiration from the same classical ideals, and the same composers.

In 1535 in Venice, Sylvestro Ganassi, a ‘sonator’ (instrumentalist) at the Ducal court, published his first work La Fontegara. A treatise on the ‘true art of recorder playing’, it contains instructions on ornamentation applicable to ‘wind and string players, as well as those who take delight in singing’. In the course of what remains (500 years on) one of the most demanding and detailed wind instrument methods ever written, Ganassi constantly refers to the human voice as the ideal instrument. He does this not in the almost casual ‘nod to convention’ of his successors, but in a detailed and specific way. The extremes of dynamic and expressive variety which he ascribes to singers, and which derive from the texts which they are singing, must all be imitated by recorder ‘for this it is able to do’.

Some of the singers’ effects (dynamic range, articulation and tonal variety) are to be imitated naturalistically, and Ganassi gives instructions on how to do this by means of different fingerings, breath pressures and varied tonguings. However, where a change of mood or a particular word cannot be directly imitated, its effect may be conveyed by other means. Trills, for example, are an ornament of mood rather than modality: a semitone or less for sweetness; a trill of a third or more for lively emotions; and, where no specific colour is required, a trill of a tone. ‘Passaggi’—divisions—are given according to four rules (the semibreve being divided into five, six, or seven crotchets as well as the usual four) giving extraordinaril free rhythms to suit a wide variety of emotions.

La Fontegara is in many ways a remarkable work. But, despite the formidable technical and musical demands that he makes, Ganassi nowhere refers to a repertoire of instrumental music—everything is couched in terms of playing vocal works. And despite the frontispiece (one of the most recognisable icons of renaissance ensemble music making even today) he only makes one passing reference to consort playing. This is a treatise on composing and playing instrumental solo music. Unlike later writers (Diego Ortiz, [track 4]; Girolamo della Casa 1584 [track 16]; Giovanni Bassano, 1591 [track 5, 12] etc), Ganassi does not present the reader with finished works, showing how the given divisions can be put together to transform a madrigal or chanson into a virtuosic instrumental solo.

In later treatises the didactic material becomes shorter and more perfunctory, whilst more emphasis is put on entire decorated works, in effect new compositions. There is a case for considering the publication of these solos in the form of a treatise as little more than a conventional device. There had been no tradition of publishing solo repertoire for instruments other than lute or keyboard, and, as musical literacy began to eat away at the supremacy of improvisation, a new generation of composer/performers found that an acceptable way to publish their compositions was to present them as examples for emulation.

Despite the lack of a ‘completed’ example in La Fontegara Ganassi is explicit in his directions, both artistic and technical. That the application of his treatise to a madrigal such as Willaert’s ‘Cantai or Piango’ [track 10] produces results quite different from works by dalla Casa or Bassano should not surprise us. It is true that dalla Casa, for example, is much more extravagant in his completed examples than in his somewhat dry didactic material. But even so, his musical language is less varied if more elegant than Ganassi’s. Almost half a century separates the two publications. Ganassi is rooted in the tradition of late medieval rhythmic exuberance (compare the Ebreu ‘La Spagna’ [track 2]) combined with the overtly expressive vocal style of the early renaissance. 

Ganassi was also a viol and lute player, and his second book Regola Rubertina (1542) deals with these instruments. He refers the reader to La Fontegara for the study of ornamentation, and deals mostly with the practical aspects of stringing, tuning and playing. A less detailed work than La Fontegara it deals nonetheless with performance practise—tonal variety achieved by playing close to the bridge or the fingerboard, vibrato (with the left hand or the bow!), and even the expressive potential of the face, the neck and even the hair of the player—these last not being easily transferable to CD! As we have seen, his first treatise deals entirely with solo playing. In Rubertina, however, he treats the viol as much as a consort instrument as a soloist. Again the repertoire he describes is vocal, with particular emphasis on works by ‘the worthy musician’ Nicolas Gombert, and Adriano (Willaert), an ornament to Venice and bringer of the new Golden Age (Willaert’s madrigal ‘Cantai or Piango’ is played on six viols on track 9).

On solo playing, Ganassi describes (and gives examples of) the solo Ricercar, and also describes how to play a chordal accompaniment on the viol (what would later, in England, have been called Lyra fashion). But he does not describe ‘bastarda’ technique, which features largely in later collections and treatises. The ‘viola bastarda’ is not a specific instrument, but a style of supposedly improvised composition, whereby the player re-interprets the harmonic structure of an ensemble piece in a series of runs and leaps, exploiting the full range of the instrument. Bastarda music (whether for the viol or other instruments) is amongst the most florid and extreme solo music of the time. Yet it, too, adheres closely to the classical ideal, since it leaves intact the vocal original (whether performed by an ensemble or intabulated for lute or keyboard). The solo instrument meanwhile (whether bass viol [tracks 6, 8, 13, 17] or lute [track 15]) remains true to its nature, responding with virtuosity either to the words or to the more abstract devices of the composer’s melody and voice leading.

Clearly the extent of the embellishments, whether of the melody or in the form of a ‘bastarda’ part, has an effect on the tempo of the performance. Only the simpler divisions may work over what we might today consider a suitable speed for the unadorned ensemble performance of the original. Whether or not we have an historically correct view of what that tempo should be, it is impossible to imagine any one speed at which all versions of, say, ‘Ancor che col partire’ could be successfully performed. Bassano’s elegant ‘passaggi’ [track 5], Bovicelli’s expressionistic ‘affetti’ [track 7] and dalla Casa’s reflective ‘viola bastarda’ part [track 6] may each in their own way alter our understanding of de Rore’s masterpiece, but they are unlikely radically to effect our choice of tempo. Rogniono, on the other hand [track 8] is using the madrigal (and particularly its harmonic structure) as the inspiration for and the basis of something quite new. A slower and more flexible tempo is indicated by both technical and musical demands.

In this case the madrigal has become the musical equivalent of a 15th century tenor such as ‘La Spagna’, three treatments of which begin the present recital. The melody [track 1] is believed to have originated as a song ‘Il Re de Spagna’ and would almost certainly have been both rhythmic and quite fast. Over a period it was slowed down and its rhythm formalised to serve an entirely new purpose as the slow moving structural base of a composition in which the ear is drawn to the more florid lines which weave around it. The earliest setting on this disc (by the 15th century dancing master Ebreu) [track 2] probably comes closest to the improvisations of a dance band; but the fact that it is written down means that it has already left the dance floor. For the lutenist Vincenzo Capirola [track 3] and the violist Diego Ortiz [track 4] ‘La Spagna’ was already falling out of use as a dance, and they transform the almost obsolete tenor into high art music, only very slightly evoking the lively syncopations of 15th century bands.

The music on this disc spans two centuries, during which the borrowing and reworking of the music of earlier composers was regarded as creative, original and even as an act of respect or homage. ‘Petit Jacquet’ [track 15] is a lute ‘bastarda’ version by Giovanni Antonio Terzi of a setting by Correggio based on a chanson by Jean Courtois. The divisions on ‘Susanne ung jour’ [tracks 12, 13, 14] are all based on what is probably Orlando de Lassus’ most famous chanson. But they are preceded not by that chanson, but by the earlier four-part work by Didier Lupi, which may be the inspiration for Lassus’ five voice work. By the time Bartolomeo de Selma y Salaverde produced his version of ‘Vestiva i colli’ in 1638, the florid clichés of the solo instrumentalists no longer needed an existing work: so redolent is Selma’s setting of 17th century Italian canzone and sonate that it takes an effort to realise that the organ part which accompanies the two soloists is not a continuo part, but an exact transcription of the first part of a five voice madrigal by Palestrina.