Paul at the excellent BibliOdyssey blog, has a post with a series of fascinating prints depicting Bologna’s annual Festa della Porchetta – the Festival of the Suckling Pig, celebrated by the Bolognese for five centuries until the arrival of Napolean’s army in 1796. The tradition has apparently been revived in the last decade – including a shared roasted pig – to help spread peace in the city.
Monteverdi’s Vespers of 1610 was only the most elaborate of hundreds of collections of music for Vespers published at the turn of the 17th Century. What motivated this remarkable repertoire? Magnificat will perform Monteverdi’s 1610 Vespers on the weekend of April 23-25 and will also participate, along with Artek, AVE, The Marion Verbruggen Trio, Music’s Recreation, Sacabuche!, and Archetti, in a concert celebrating a century of Venetian vespers music from Monteverdi to Vivaldi as part of the Berkeley Early Music Festival and Exhibition on June 13.
Matteo Ricci was the first Westerner to be invited into the Forbidden City in Beijing. During his years in China, Ricci wrote extensively and maintained an unprecedented dialogue with the Chinese intelligentia.
The Cozzolani Project’s latest release is the five-voice dialogue for St Catherine of Alexandria, O cæli cives (1650). As in a few other pieces, the ’singing angels’ to whom musical nuns were often compared, form one side of this dialogue, while two low voices represent the faithful on earth.
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Forty years ago, virtually nothing was known about polyphonic music for the Office except for the 1610 Vespers of Claudio Monteverdi, which had been receiving significant scholarly attention since shortly after World War II. Today, not only have a number of critical editions of Vesper publications from Italy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries been issued in various series, but a variety of scholars have researched the relationship between published and manuscript liturgical music and the monastic institutions and their friars and nuns that produced and performed this music.
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On his remarkable Galileo 1610 website, Mark Thompson writes about the role of music Gilileo's scientific work: “Thus the effect of the fifth is to produce a tickling of the eardrum such that its softness is modified with sprightliness, giving at the same moment the impression of gentle kiss and of a bite.” Music played not only a unique, but an essential role in leading Galileo to his new physics. Because it is an art demanding precise measurement and exact divisions, music reflected the spirit of Galileo’s science. One of Galileo’s most important discoveries, the law of falling bodies, can actually be traced to his early musical experiments with his father, Vincenzo Galilei, a musicologist and lute virtuoso. Together, they discovered the motions of pendulums while measuring with weights, the tensions of lute strings. Galileo was an outstanding lutenist himself, whose “charm of style and delicacy of touch” surpassed even that of his father. ...
According to author Leo Rosten in his The Joys of Yiddish, the first printed mention of the word bagel is in the 1610 Community Regulations for the city of Krakow, Poland. The regulations state that "bagels would be given as a gift to any woman in childbirth." The ring shape may have been seen as a symbol of life. It was also in 1610 that Europe got its first taste of tea, a beverage that had been popular for centuries in China and Japan, as Amsterdam received its first shipment of the intoxicating leaves. The Dutch East India Company initially marketed tea as an exotic medicinal drink, but it was so expensive that only the very wealthy could afford it and it only became available to the general public later in the century. In 1610, Cornelius Drebbel, best known perhaps for his invention of the submarine, applied the principles he had used ...
via Telegraph.co.uk The mannerist painter Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio died on July 18 1610 at the age of 39 and the circumstances of his death have been controversial ever since. It has been suggested that he contracted syphilis or even that he was assassinated but anthropologists from the universities of Pisa, Ravenna and Bologna are studying other theories – that he contracted malaria while traveling in Italy or that he suffered from lead poisoning. The anthropologists hope to prove their theory by carrying out DNA tests on bones which they believe are the remains of the Renaissance artist. Renowned for his hot temper, heavy drinking and violent temperament Caravaggio was forced to go on the run in 1606 after killing a man in a tavern brawl, a crime for which he ...
In January 1610 Galileo Galilei first observed the four moons of Jupiter now known, appropriately, as "The Galilean Moons". The largest of the many moons of Jupiter, Galileo initially named his discovery the Cosmica Sidera ("Cosimo's stars") but they are now known by the names given by Simon Marius in his 1614 Mundus Jovialis: Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto - the lovers of Zeus. Galileo first noticed Saturn's peculiar shape later in 1610, well after the publication of his landmark book Sidereus Nuncius. The story of how he initially revealed the new discovery to his fellow astronomers by means of an anagram is told in a 1974 article by Albert van Helden of Rice University. Galileo's discovery of celestial bodies orbiting something other than the Earth dealt a serious blow to the Ptolemaic, or the geocentric, cosmology in which the universe orbits around the Earth. The possibility of viewing ...
The sheer variety and magnificence of Monteverdi's 1610 collection is breathtaking, and in 1613, music from the Vespers may have served as part of Monteverdi's successful audition for the position of maestro di capella at the ducal church of St. Mark's in Venice, the most important church job in all of northern Italy. In this 1610 print, which also includes a conservative, even archaic, six-voice polyphonic mass, Monteverdi gathered the most diverse examples of modern musical style imaginable for his Vespers. Introducing the Vesper service is the solo plainchant versicle (Deus in adiutorium) followed by its massive, fanfare-like response with the full choir supported by a large instrumental ensemble of strings and brass. This response was reconstituted out of the fanfare introduction to Monteverdi's own first opera of 1607, Orfeo. Following the opening of the service, virtuoso solo and few-voiced motets sit side-by-side with the psalms featuring ...
Few musicians of the seventeenth century enjoyed the exalted status bestowed on Arcangelo Corelli (February 17, 1653- January 19, 1713). He was called the ‘new Orpheus of Our Times’ and the ‘divine Arc Angelo’, a clever pun on his Christian name and the Italian word for a bow (arco). The Englishman musician and writer Roger North described Corelli’s music as ‘transcendant’, ‘immortal’ and ‘the bread of life’ to musicians. Renowned as a virtuoso performer, an influential composer, and sought-after teacher, Corelli commanded respect and praise throughout Europe at the turn of the 18th century. The fifth child born to a prosperous family of landowners in Fusignano; Corelli’s first musical study was probably with the local clergy, then in nearby Lugo and Faenza, and finally in Bologna, where he went in 1666. In Bologna he studied with Giovanni Benvenuti and Leonardo Brugnoli, the former representing the disciplined style of the Accademia filarmonica ...
Claudio Monteverdi’s very earliest, youthful publications were sacred, devotional music: a set of Sacrae Cantiunculae published in 1582 when he was only fifteen, and a collection of Madrigali spirituali, issued in 1583. But once he became employed at the ducal court of Vincenzo Gonzaga in Mantua, probably in late 1590 or early 1591, his published works until 1610 consisted entirely of secular music: madrigals, scherzi musicali, and the opera Orfeo. On September 1, 1610, however, he published a very large and elaborate collection of sacred music comprising a six-voice Missa in illo tempore in a conservative contrapuntal style and the brilliant and variegated Vespro della Beata Vergine employing every modern compositional technique imaginable in the early 17th century. The Mantuan secular works, including the unpublished but famous opera Arianna, were all connected to particular events and entertainments at court. However, we know from letters and other documents that the Missa in ...
The primary focus of our concerts this weekend is the music of Alessandro Grandi, including the modern premieres of the first cantatas from his 1620 collection Cantade et Arie a voce sola. We will also be playing instrumental music by several composers associated with Venice during Grandi’s tenure at St. Mark’s. It turned out to be a wonderful opportunity to re-visit some old "friends" like Cavalli's extraordinary Canzon a 3 from Musiche sacrae, and some music that's "new" to Magnificat. Though musicologists have speculated that Dario Castello probably worked at St. Mark's and probably played violin and/or cornetto, in fact nothing is known about him beyond his music, which was all published in Venice. The numerous reprints of his sonatas and canzoni as late as 1650 attest to his popularity and influence. We will perform the first of his two part sonatas "in stil moderno" published in 1629. More is known about ...
The three works in Grandi’s Cantade et Arie a voce sola of 1620 that bear the designation of “cantata” are all constructed using the technique that musicologists now categorize as “strophic bass” cantatas. In its classic form as represented in these pieces, the same bass line is used for each stanza of a strophic poem with varying melodies in the vocal part.
Click to continue reading “Grandi’s Cantatas – A Link with Improvisational Practice?”
San Francisco Classical Voice posted the following excellent preview by Steven Winn of Magnificat's upcoming concerts featuring the music of Alessandro Grandi. The original post is here. For anyone who cares about 17th-century music, 2010 is without question a Claudio Monteverdi year. The 400th anniversary of the composer’s ground-breaking and magisterial Vespro della Beata Vergine (Vespers for the Blessed Virgin) of 1610 is a ripe occasion to program the sacred masterpiece of an artist deemed “the creator of modern music” by scholar Leo Schrade. It’s an opportunity that Magnificat Baroque wasn’t about to miss. The Bay Area ensemble concludes its 18th season with an April 23-25 slate of Vespers concerts. But before they get there, the troupe is embarked on an unusual and revealing side-trip through Monteverdi territory, with the composer’s lesser-known Venetian contemporary Alessandro Grandi as the destination. To make this journey even more enticing, Magnificat is offering a striking historical contrast ...
To mark Women’s History Month, Public Radio Exchange (PRX) has posted an hour long program celebrating some of the remarkable women in music from the Baroque, including Magnificat’s recording of Dixit Dominus by Chiara Margarita Cozzolani.
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In 1620 Alessandro Grandi, published a second edition of his ground-breaking Cantade et Arie a voce sola. The first edition has long been lost. The importance of this collection of secular pieces lies in the very first use of the word “cantata” in a music publication. The multi-sectional structure of these solo pieces lays the groundwork for the sectional organization of the later solo cantata.
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Like most I suspect, when I think of Venice I imagine a sun-baked Piazza of San Marco, but of course winter visits Venice each year and it seems that before the advent of modern heating, the experience was particularly brutal. In his engaging journals recounting his three years in Venice during the 1860s, W.D. Powell describes the attitude of the locals to winter: "The Venetians pretend that many of the late winters have been much severer than those of former years, but I think this pretense has less support in fact than in the custom of mankind everywhere to claim that such weather as the present, whatever it happens to be, was never seen before." In common with other places (like California) where the weather is generally agreeable, houses are built with a view to coolness in summer and one can only imagine that the experience of a Christmas or Epiphany feast ...
Last Sunday, I attended Artek’s performance of Monteverdi’s Vespro della Beata Vergine at the National Gallery in Washington DC. It was lovely to hear a fine performance of this masterpiece (a piece I’m thinking about alot these days) in one of my favorite buildings in the world.
Magnificat will perform the modern premieres of the first cantatas from a newly discovered print from 1620. Three cantatas and two settings of sonnets by Alessandro Grandi will be sung by soprano Laura Heimes February 12-14, 2010.
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