12.12.2021 ENS Collegium Musicum Program Notes

PROGRAM NOTES It’s been a long time since our Collegium could make music together in the same room! Having spent our time in quarantine working virtually and learning about improvisation and ornamentation among other topics, we are pleased to present a potpourri of works from the late medieval period to the early Baroque. Since we never can tell what our instrumentation is until just about the start of classes, it took some time to get the group organized into sub-groups, but we found several genres and styles that fit our collective instrumental gifts and timbres. We hope that students in the audience consider this a teaser plate of the breadth of our ensembles’ possibilities, which have included everything from Renaissance “broken consort”, viol consort, recorder band, vocal ensemble, to a medieval instrumental troupe. Students spend a semester getting acclimated to an instrument that is a nice cognate with something they already play – guitarists tend to work on lute, cittern or bandora, bowed string players on viols, etc.

Music history minors and majors can spend multiple semesters with us, and this has been a great experience both for me as a director and for the students, who improve technically and expand their musical horizons each semester with different repertoire – and sometimes different instruments. If you are intrigued, come see us at the end of the concert!

The earliest works on the program come from the Burgundian through Franco-flemish domination of European music, from the lovely chanson-style cantilena Virgo Rosa by Gilles Binchois to the satirical, martial buffoonery of Pierre de la Rue and Josquin des Pres, who send their clown Scaramella into battle just to lose for our laughs. Josquin is more straightforward, but de la Rue makes us sweat through the battle in elaborate syncopations at first, with a comic victory dance at the end resembling Josquin’s simpler setting. The two settings of Pange Lingua from two early organ sources, show how a chant cantus firmus was used as the basis of early instrumental music in the 15 th century.

Like the mass settings of chant paraphrases by Josquin or de la Rue, the composer-compilers of the St. Gall Tablature and Glogauer Song Book use the motives from various parts of the chant itself to create imitative voices around the tune, and, as was the intent in this generation of musical innovators, sometimes the setting outshines the jewel with in its originality.

The Ensemble Canzona is an Italianate genre that brought the polyphonic writing of the Franco-Flemish style into the instrumental domain, where the characteristic long-short-short marker heard at the beginning of its principle theme began to recede in favor of more original and sometimes virtuosic ideas, becoming, in the hands of later keyboardists like Frescobaldi, a dynamic vehicle for virtuosity. The composers who brought the canzona to its fruition were organists trained in polyphonic practice who served in multiple roles in cultural centers such as Rome, Venice, and Ferrara. These composers bridge the span between the linear perfection of Renaissance polyphony and the more individualistic, idiomatic style of the early continuo-based stylus phantasticus.

A composer and organist, born in Correggio to a Brescian mother, Claudio Merulo probably studied in Venice. After starting in Brescia, he became organist at San Marco in Venice in 1557, holding the post until his death. His Canzona 23 pits a descending, triadic fanfare against stepwise counterpoint, and he indulges in antique-sounding passages without the bass that use parallel harmonies reminiscent of the earlier practice of singing fauxbourdon.

Adriano Banchieri was a Bolognese organist-composer and theorist known for his many publications including his pedagogical dialogue Cartella Musicale (1601, 1614, Venice). He established the Bolognese Accademia de Floridi, and was organist at the church of Santa Maria in Regola. The canzona we will perform this evening was published in open score, a notation that probably indicates a keyboard work, but it could have also been played by separate instruments.

It retains the L-S-S signal and a mixture of imitative and homophonic music similar to the madrigal style he employed.

Giovanni Gabrieli was a Venetian composer and leader of the illustrious musical establishment at San Marco. His works are the epitome of the concerted style, often requiring many instrumentalists and singers in antiphonal groups singing in separate galleries alla cori sprezzati. Like his uncle Andrea, he apprenticed in Munich with the great Orlando di Lasso, who had already written polychoral masses and motets. Gabrieli took over the post of organist at San Marco that was vacated on the death of Merulo and was appointed permanently there in 1585. He was the preeminent composer of concerted music in his day and a signal influence on the future of vocal and instrumental music. His

debt to Germanic music, where he first cut his teeth, was repaid in his influence on his pupil Heinrich Schütz, whose works continue the concerted style and influenced the music of 17th c. German composers including Dietrich Buxtehude, Franz Tunder and the many composers of the Bach family. His style was adopted by the young Giovanni Battista Grillo, who, like Gabrieli, was also organist at the Scuolo Grande di San Rocco in Venice, a private church adorned by the colossal paintings of Tintoretto. In 1619 he succeded Gabrieli as organist at San Marco.

The great Girolamo Frescobaldi was a Ferrarese composer and quite possibly the most innovative virtuoso organist of his age. His early years were spent in Ferrara until he moved to Rome ca. 1607, where he assumed the post of organist at the Capella Giulia in 1608. Frescobaldi claimed to have studied keyboard with Luzzascho Luzzacschi, and he himself tutored many keyboardists throughout his lifetime. Like the young Mozart, he was taken from court to court to display his abilities. Visits to Brussels and Mantua with his patrons exposed him and to a wider musical world, and he was eventually poached by the Grand Duke of Florence and became the top wage-earning musician in the Medici court, returning to Rome for the end of an illustrious career at the Capella Giulia. He was an innovator in the solo and ensemble canzona and along with the German lutenist G. H. Kapsberger, brought the solo toccata to a higher level of expressivity. His canzona for soprano instrument and basso continuo resembles these later toccatas in its contrasting sections that vary widely in style from quasi-imitative counterpoint with the bass to dance-inspired rhythms and even the somber sounds of suspension-laden sacred music.

A contemporaneous example of festive Italian secular music is the short suite of dances (ballo) by the lutenist Lorenzo Allegri, consisting of two pavane-like movements and a single galliard (Gagliarda). Allegri was employed by the Medicis in Florence, and apparently the young Lully may have heard or performed these older works, as they have some similarities with his operatic dance music including an idiosyncratic use of dotted rhythms in slower duple meter.

To round off our program, we present English 17th century viol duets. The viol, or viola da gamba, survived well into the 17th century in England and was a popular consort instrument in the homes of wealthy families. One of Shakespeare’s actors left his viol along with stage fighting equipment and a lute to the company in his will, and viol playing shows up to bawdy and humorous affect in The Taming of the Shrew. Perhaps the most complex work on the program is the little duo by the composer Richard Mico: its expressive subjects and sophisticated contrapuntal structure make each reading into a new series of unexpected discoveries. Finally, the three short dances by John Jenkins provide a good example of French dance music written for educated recreation in the royal privy chamber or in the domestic music room: Jenkins was active in the musical establishments of Charles I and II, and in the interim of the Civil War and Commonwealth was active in the countryside as music tutor to Royalist families, for whom he wrote the bulk of his suites for consort playing.