In Italy during the late cinquecento, printed music could be found not only in the homes of the wealthy or the music professional, but also in lay homes, courts, and academies. No longer confined to the salons of the elite, music took on the role of social play and recreation. Paul Schleuse examines these new musical forms through a study of the music books of Italian priest, poet, and composer, Orazio Vecchi. Composed for minor patrons and the wider music-buying public, Vecchi's madrigals took as their subjects game-playing, drinking, hunting, battles, and the life of the street. Schleuse looks at how music and game-playing allowed singers and performers to play the roles of exemplary pastoral characters and also comic, foreign, and "rustic" others in ways that defined and ultimately reinforced social norms of the times. His findings reposition Orazio Vecchi as one of the most innovative composers of the late 16th century.
In Italy during the late cinquecento, printed music could be found not only in the homes of the wealthy or the music professional, but also in lay homes, courts, and academies. No longer confined to the salons of the elite, music took on the role of social play and recreation. Paul Schleuse examines these new musical forms through a study of the music books of Italian priest, poet, and composer, Orazio Vecchi. Composed for minor patrons and the wider music-buying public, Vecchi's madrigals took as their subjects game-playing, drinking, hunting, battles, and the life of the street. Schleuse looks at how music and game-playing allowed singers and performers to play the roles of exemplary pastoral characters and also comic, foreign, and "rustic" others in ways that defined and ultimately reinforced social norms of the times. His findings reposition Orazio Vecchi as one of the most innovative composers of the late 16th century.
Singing Games in Early Modern Italy: The Music Books of Orazio Vecchi
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Overview
In Italy during the late cinquecento, printed music could be found not only in the homes of the wealthy or the music professional, but also in lay homes, courts, and academies. No longer confined to the salons of the elite, music took on the role of social play and recreation. Paul Schleuse examines these new musical forms through a study of the music books of Italian priest, poet, and composer, Orazio Vecchi. Composed for minor patrons and the wider music-buying public, Vecchi's madrigals took as their subjects game-playing, drinking, hunting, battles, and the life of the street. Schleuse looks at how music and game-playing allowed singers and performers to play the roles of exemplary pastoral characters and also comic, foreign, and "rustic" others in ways that defined and ultimately reinforced social norms of the times. His findings reposition Orazio Vecchi as one of the most innovative composers of the late 16th century.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253015044 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 12/22/2021 |
| Series: | Music and the Early Modern Imagination |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 552 |
| File size: | 27 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Paul Schleuse is Associate Professor of Music at Binghamton University, State University of New York.
Read an Excerpt
Singing Games in Early Modern Italy
The Music Books of Orazio Vecchi
By Paul Schleuse
Indiana University Press
Copyright © 2015 Paul SchleuseAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-01504-4
Contents
Acknowledgments, ix,Introduction, 1,
1 The Four-Voice Canzonetta as (and in) Recreational Polyphony, 10,
2 Intertextuality in Vecchi's Canzonettas and Madrigals, 1583–1590, 43,
3 Forest and Feast: The Music Book as Metaphor, 90,
4 L'Amfiparnaso: Picturing Theater and the Problem of the "Madrigal Comedy", 132,
5 Competition and Conversation: Games as Music, 176,
6 Representation and Identity in Musical Performance, 245,
Appendix: Vecchi, "L'hore di recreatione," from Madrigali a sei (1583), 295,
Notes, 329,
Works Cited, 355,
Index, 365,
CHAPTER 1
The Four-Voice Canzonetta as (and in) Recreational Polyphony
I will set down familiarly several thoughts that occur to me upon this subject, based upon the little experience I have acquired while I was conversing in houses where there was no game-playing [esercizio del gioco] but rather delightful occupations, particularly music, performed without assistance of paid performers by divers gentlemen who took pleasure and delight in it through natural inclination.
—Vincenzo Giustiniani, Discorso sopra la musica
Vincenzo Giustiniani's Discorso sopra la musica is well known to musicologists as an important account of stylistic change in music of the last quarter of the cinquecento, in particular the rise of professionalized solo singing. Written, as Angelo Solerti first demonstrated, in 1628, the Discorso not only remembers events at a half-century's remove but also places them in a context still meaningful in its own time. Far from describing the mere replacement of vocal polyphony with solo singing, however, Giustiniani recalls a musical culture in which enthusiastic amateurs enjoyed polyphony, and singing "per inclinazione naturale" was in fact considered superior to performances by "persone mercenarie."
In his account of Italian musical styles, Giustiniani describes—not always with great clarity—a shifting focus between solo and polyphonic practices, portraying the latter as drawing on recent developments in the former. This interaction can tell us much about Orazio Vecchi's canzonettas of the 1570s and 1580s, a period when the courts of Ferrara, Mantua, and elsewhere increasingly cultivated professionalized solo singing while amateur consumers like Giustiniani continued to support a market for recreational polyphony in up-to-date styles.
Giustiniani was born in 1564 to the Genoese governor of Chios, but his family moved to Rome two years later and became prosperous bankers. He recalls that in his childhood the best-regarded composers were the key mid-century madrigalists—Orlando di Lasso, Alessandro Striggio, Cipriano de Rore, Philippe de Monte, and the earlier but perennially popular Jacques Arcadelt—adding that accompanied solo singing was practiced more in the realm of the villanella. This opposition constitutes a background against which a more flexible performance practice emerged in the secular compositions of composers associated with Rome: "In a short space of time musical taste [il gusto della musica] changed and the compositions of Luca Marenzio and Ruggiero Giovannelli appeared with delightful new inventions, either that of singing with several voices or with one voice alone accompanied by some instrument, the excellence of which consisted in a melody new and grateful to the ear, with some easy fugues without extraordinary artifices." This passage has been read as referring to Marenzio's and Giovannelli's madrigals published in the 1580s and also to Marenzio's three-voice villanellas from the same period. In terms of these pieces' appeal to the changing tastes of amateur singers, their flexibility for use as polyphonic or accompanied solo works is crucial: the "new and grateful" aria, or melodic style, is especially suitable for the latter practice, while the "easy fugues" are appropriate for the former.
Although Giustiniani initially claims that his account is chronological, the changes he describes are not strictly ordered but relate also to different aspects of musical life. While the new canzonetta-related styles described above arose, Giustiniani tells us, in response to the changing tastes of listeners, concurrent developments reflected the innovations of virtuosic singers. Nevertheless, Giustiniani still emphasizes the constant influence of solo and polyphonic styles on each other, referring in particular to the music of Orazio Vecchi:
In the Holy Year 1575, or shortly thereafter, a style of singing appeared which was very different from that preceding. It continued for some years, chiefly in the manner of one voice singing with accompaniment, and was exemplified by Giovanni Andrea napoletano, Signor Giulio Cesare Brancaccio, and Alessandro Merlo, romano.... They inspired composers to write similar works for several voices in the manner of a single one accompanied by some instrument, in imitation of the above-mentioned and of a certain woman called Femia. But they [i.e., these composers] achieved greater invention and artifice, resulting in some Villanellas which were a mixture of Madrigals in florid style and Villanellas. Many books of these by the aforementioned authors and by Orazio Vecchi and others are seen today. But as the Villanellas acquired greater perfection through artful composition, so also every composer, in order that his compositions should satisfy the general taste, took care to advance in the style of composition for several voices, particularly Giaches Wert in Mantua and Luzzasco in Ferrara.
Anthony Newcomb reads this passage as describing "the invasion of the polyphonic madrigal by the new style of vocal diminution, an evolution in which Ferrarese music played a crucial role." Giustiniani makes a clear distinction, however, between virtuoso solo singing as practiced in Italian courts and polyphonic music intended to "satisfy the general taste" (riuscissero di gusto in generale) through its wider circulation in print.
The influence of the Ferrarese concerto (and its imitators) is less apparent in Vecchi's music from this period, which is neither highly ornamented in the luxuriant style nor particularly connected with Ferrara, his ties to the Este family having been firmly established only after the 1598 removal to Modena. Although Giustiniani identifies professionalized courtly singing as an important influence on composed polyphony, he also describes the new genres as hybridizing the villanella and the madrigal and as circulating widely in printed books, specifically those by Vecchi. This description can only refer to Vecchi's books of four-voice canzonettas, which first appeared around 1580 and were still being reprinted in Italy as late as the second decade of the seventeenth century.
Vecchi's canzonettas were undoubtedly susceptible to adaptation for one or more voices with instrumental accompaniment—indeed, the three printed in Selva di varia ricreatione (1590) were provided with lute tablature—and such a performance could have accommodated the elaborate diminutions that were the specialty of professional singers. However, Giustiniani's account of his own experience as an amateur musician in Rome implies that recreational singing in polyphony was one important (and possibly the most important) use he saw for Vecchi's canzonettas and similar music. In the mid-1580s Vecchi himself appears to have participated in a recreational musical ridotto, or salon, in Modena hosted by Mesin Forno, a canon at the cathedral. In this chapter I show how selected four-voice canzonettas from Vecchi's first two books in the genre (ca. 1579 and 1580) particularly address themselves to recreational use in polyphonic singing. I then examine Vecchi's own depiction of this performance practice in the seven-voice work, "L'hore di recreatione," that concludes his book of six-voice madrigals (1583). This remarkable piece partakes of several of the strands we shall observe in the canzonettas: songs about singing, imitations of comic characters, and a depiction of courtly recreation in an (imperfectly) idealized pastoral setting.
The Origins of Vecchi's Canzonetta Style
As Giustiniani points out, the stylistic antecedents of Vecchi's canzonettas were the madrigal and the villanella, and the repetitive forms and strophic texts of the latter genre form the basic template for almost all of Vecchi's canzonettas. By the 1570s the most important formal markers of the villanella were a three- or four-stanza poem with a refrain (usually varied in the final stanza), a free mixture of settenari and endecasillabi, and a musical form of : A: B : C: , in which the refrain may occupy either the B and C sections or only the C section of the music. Vecchi uses some variation of this musical form in sixteen of the twenty-two pieces in Book I, either with or (in four cases) without a refrain. The remaining six canzonettas employ a simple binary form ( : A: : B: ), three of them including refrains. Although binary forms were not entirely unknown in villanellas of the 1570s (including one whose text Vecchi set in Book I), they may represent a slightly later range of compositional dates than Vecchi's pieces in the older form, since binary forms come to dominate the rest of his canzonetta books. Internal evidence from the binary-form canzonettas of Book I support this possibility. No. 1, "Canzonette d'amore," is in binary form and was likely written at a late date as an introductory piece for the book.
The origins of Vecchi's four-voice canzonetta style in the three-voice villanella are perhaps clearest in the vocal ranges and dispositions Vecchi employs. From its earliest printed examples in the 1540s, the canzone villanesca alla napolitane was characterized by a high-voice trio texture with a total range rarely exceeding two octaves. Donna G. Cardamone proposes that the origin of this style lies in the closely spaced harmonies of Neapolitan popular songs from an unnotated tradition. Four-voice arrangements of villanescas began appearing in the 1540s by Adriano Willaert and in the 1550s by Lasso (some of which he printed only much later, in 1581). The general method for these arrangements was to place the original canto line in the tenor an octave lower, often moving the tenor to the canto as well, while retaining the bass and adding a new alto. The ranges of these pieces conform to the conventional four-voice texture of roughly two and a half octaves, with each voice encompassing a distinct range of about an octave (bass ranges are often a bit wider), separated from the next-higher voice by a fourth or fifth. This alternation of ranges in relation to the final provided a framework for categorizing pieces by mode, with the canto and tenor range determining the authentic or plagal quality of the mode.
Vecchi's four-voice canzonettas stand apart from this practice. Instead, they usually retain the narrow two-octave total ambitus of the three-voice villanesca, with the top two voices (or, more rarely, the middle two) sharing essentially the same range, and the bass lying only an octave below the canto. The narrow total range of each piece could facilitate singing in homosocial settings, either among women singing at something like modern pitch or by men transposing them downward by anywhere from a fifth to an octave. By the fourth book of 1590, however, mixed-gender groups of three women with one man had become emblematic of the genre: in the opening piece, "Udit', udite Amanti," the singers describe themselves as "tre leggiadre Ninfe / con un Pastore" (three graceful nymphs with a shepherd; see chapter 2), and the ambitus of most of the pieces is accordingly larger. In Book I, the few examples that encompass a wider total range do so not by distributing the voices according to the "usual" four-voice plan but by widening the individual range of the bass or another voice (nos. 7, 13, 18, 20, 21) or by separating adjacent voices by roughly an octave, leaving an apparent "gap" in the regular alternation of authentic and plagal octave ranges (nos. 9, 19, 22) (table 1.1).
Vecchi's retention of the paired higher voices from the older villanesca forges a link with the more forward-looking style of the so-called villanella alla romana, introduced by Luca Marenzio in the 1580s. These three-voice pieces joined a similar high-voiced pair with a lower voice, but with an increasing sense of a harmonically determinative bass suitable for genres associated with accompanied solo singing. The contrapuntally distinct function of a harmonic bass appears sporadically in Vecchi's canzonettas but generally becomes more prevalent in the third and fourth books, suggesting that the influence of the accompanied styles described by Giustiniani was making itself felt in Vecchi's later contributions to the genre—though flexibility of performance options seems to have remained central to the canzonetta's identity and popularity.
The First Book of Four-Voice Canzonettas: Inventing a Genre
The first book is dedicated to Mario Bevilacqua, a member and patron of the Accademia Filarmonica in Verona whom Vecchi must have met during his travels in the late 1570s. We do not know the extent of the composer's involvement with the Filarmonica or with the more informal ridotti he encountered, but these settings "in casa" (to use Giustiniani's term) must have been among the original contexts for singing Vecchi's canzonettas. Close readings of some of the pieces suggest the special appeal they had for amateur singers in private settings. The first edition of Book I does not survive, but it must have been published in 1578 or 1579 if we assume the dedication was written after Vecchi had the opportunity to visit Verona. The book's success was immediate, and demand for it was lasting: the Gardano firm issued reprints in 1580, 1581, 1585, 1591, and 1613 (this last by the successor firm of Magni). A Milanese edition was published in 1586, and Vecchi's canzonettas were ubiquitous in northern "omnibus" monographs and anthologies well into the 1620s.
Although Vecchi is rightly credited with popularizing the four-voice canzonetta as a distinct genre—he was the first composer to use the term in a book title—his style appears to have evolved over the course of some years prior to his publishing his Canzonette ... libro primo a quattro voci in 1578 or 1579. In the dedication Vecchi explains that most of the compositions had been in wide manuscript circulation throughout Italy in corrupt and misattributed forms: "Most of the present canzonettas of mine being dispersed around many parts of Italy under the names of various authors, it seemed to me appropriate to let the world know by means of the press that they are mine, as in fact they are. Therefore I have recalled them to their first origins, cleaned them up, and republished them as being the first." This language must have had special resonance for Bevilacqua, who as patron of the Accademia Filarmonica would have been familiar with the sometimes haphazard transmission of music in manuscript.
More than merely claiming credit for corrected versions of the canzonettas, however, Vecchi describes the advantages of presenting them unified in print in a way that goes beyond mere authorial pride: "Now to make them seem happier and better in every part, all together: not torn apart and faulty, as they were up until now, but returned to their native appearance, and decorated with the most beautiful ornaments of the press." This personification of the songs as "happier" when gathered together in a single book continues in the first piece, which addresses the canzonettas as subjects:
Canzonette d'amore
Canzonettas of love
Che m'uscite del core, that issue from my heart,
Contate i miei dolori, tell of my pains,
Le man baciando alla mia bella Clori. kissing my lovely Cloris on the hands.
The poet-composer addresses not the beloved Cloris but rather the songs contained in the new book themselves. Although such self-referential poems are part of the Petrarchan tradition (as in that poet's "Ite, rime dolenti"), the trope has special meaning in a printed musical setting. The songs are asked to kiss Cloris's hands, a conventional phrase in the context of a dedication but one with more significant meaning here, since songs—in their notated form—routinely touch and are touched by singers' hands, "kissing" them in a manner even more literal than that of an epistolary dedication. Cloris is cast not as one who merely listens to the song but as one who participates in singing it from the book.
The singers of such music are therefore in a position to imagine themselves both as the speaking voice of the poem and as the addressee, Cloris. This double subjectivity is defined in relation to the object held in the singers' hands, sent from the poet (Vecchi, but also one part of a singer's imagined persona) to its audience (recreational singers, both as real people and as the imagined Cloris). In the second stanza, the book's materiality is reemphasized through its location in Cloris's hands:
Ivi liete e vezzose, There, happy and pretty,
Coronate di rose, crowned with roses,
Contate i miei dolori, tell of my pains,
Le man baciando alla mia bella Clori kissing my lovely Cloris on the hands.
"Liete e vezzose" recalls Vecchi's description of the songs in the dedication as happy and decorated with printed ornaments. Now, however, the songs are also "crowned with roses," referring to Cloris's lips, as the printed notes are transformed into sounding music to speak of the poet's pain. The formal repetition of the last half of the stanza, with its return to the description of hand kissing, is dictated by the poetic form of the villanella; this form admits changes to the refrain text only in the final stanza, and Vecchi closes with an image that completes the penetration of Cloris's body with song:
Poi mirando il bel seno
Then, looking at her lovely breast
E'l suo viso sereno, and her serene face,
Contate i miei dolori tell of my pains,
In sen vivendo alla mia bella Clori. living in my lovely Cloris's breast.
The gaze (fancifully ascribed to the songs on the page) that shifts from the breast to the face traces the flow of breath in the act of singing, but the song's final destination returns to Cloris's breast as the metaphorical location of the song's emotional effect. Cloris's hoped-for pity on the unhappy lover is felt in her heart but is expressed through her lungs and larynx; thus Vecchi uses not core but seno to describe the canzonetta's embodied home.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Singing Games in Early Modern Italy by Paul Schleuse. Copyright © 2015 Paul Schleuse. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
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Table of Contents
Introduction
1. The Four-Voice Canzonetta as (and in) Recreational Polyphony
2. Intertextuality in Vecchi's Canzonettas and Madrigals, 1583-1590
3. Forest and Feast: The Music Book as Metaphor
4. L'Amfiparnaso: Picturing Theatre&The Problem of the "Madrigal Comedy"
5. Competition and Conversation: Games as Music
6. Representation and Identity in Musical Performance
Appendix: Vecchi, L'hore di recreatione from Madrigali a sei (1583).
Notes
Works Cited
Index
What People are Saying About This
This book makes a substantial contribution to the scholarship of late-Renaissance music and culture, and particularly to our understanding of Vecchi's work and its relationship to the music, literature, and society of his time.