A Performer's Guide to Seventeenth-Century Music, Second Edition

4. Choral Music in Italy and the Germanic Lands

4 � Choral Music in Italy and the Germanic Lands gary towne Music was constantly changing in the seventeenth century. Yet even those who acknowledge this evolutionary condition often overlook the sources and inspirations for Baroque musical style. There is little that is unprecedented: practically every feature of the style evolved directly from some sixteenth-century musical practice. The stile antico did not expire operatically with the development of monody, continuo playing, and the highly figured Baroque style; rather, all lived on side by side, and composers of the seventeenth century, Claudio Monteverdi, Heinrich Schütz, and others, wrote music in both styles with equal fluency.1 The opposition of the two styles in larger works enriched the new aesthetic of contrasting affects, and these contrasts contributed further stylistic freedom to already well-defined national and regional styles. Baroque innovations particularly reinforced traditional bonds of musical influence between Italy and Germany. Geographical proximity, ancient political ties, and continuing intellectual exchange had always bestowed common features upon music in Italy and the German -speaking countries. In the seventeenth century, expanding cities, exhibitionistic churches, profligate nobility, and burgeoning numbers of middle-class amateurs supported a rich profusion of new musical styles in both sacred and secular music. The stabilization of Protestantism in the north added further diversity. These groups demanded a rich menu of vocal ensemble works to display their standing. Such works ranged from large-scale festival works for major churches and the ruling class to smaller works for private gatherings, school choirs, and the day-to-day celebrations of city churches throughout Italy and the north. The rich variety of genres and styles obliges a modern performer to investigate a work’s musical construction in its original context. The resolution of both stylistic and contextual issues addresses many questions: size and constitution of ensembles, vocal type and production, ornamentation and improvisation, tuning and pitch, tempos and rhythm, to name only the musical factors . Architectural venue, liturgical interactions, and dramatic or social contexts add 56 Vocal/Choral Issues further elements for consideration, which can only be alluded to here. Modern performance practice thus depends on the model emulated as much as on the type of music or the apparent size of the ensemble indicated in the score. We are most familiar with large and celebrated ensembles of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: the Sistine Chapel, the chapel of Saint Mark’s in Venice, Michael Praetorius’s ensemble specifications, the Cathedral of Salzburg, the Habsburg Court, and performances at Hamburg’s Gertrudenkapelle.2 But smaller ensembles were much more common, and the ubiquity of part singing meant that the music had to be very adaptable.3 Jerome Roche estimated that in the Po valley alone there were at least seventythree institutions employing a church composer as maestro di cappella, a significant indicator of the widespread use of polyphony.4 A city’s reputation rested partly on its church music, but these musical institutions were only the most visible ones in a culture well enriched by private music making and patronage among noble and wealthy citizens. The plethora of performing organizations explains the frenetic activity of Venetian (and other) music publishers required to supply them.5 Catholic areas of Germanic countries had similar social and ecclesiastical structures; and in Protestant areas, school music supplemented burgeoning civic, ecclesiastical, and private musical patronage. Considering all of these situations, we can postulate hundreds , perhaps thousands of singing organizations. The presence of so many models implies considerable variation in local practice and context within certain general parameters. One key general principle is concertato practice. This principle arose from two significant developments of the sixteenth century: the advent of monody in the Florentine Camerata, and the use of cori spezzati in Venice and other Italian cities.6 The monodic style enshrines a wide range of emotional contrast, while the works of Giovanni Gabrieli and other polychoral composers manifest contrasts of musical textures, timbres, dynamics, and spatial placement. Often, Gabrieli’s large works include choirs marked voce and cappella. The former were intended for a soloist on each line, the latter for a larger group of singers.7 A clear example of this practice, in which the two clearly labeled vocal choirs have dramatically different musical styles, is Gabrieli’s In ecclesiis. This principle of a choir of soloists (favoriti) versus a ripieno (full) choir became fundamental to seventeenth-century music throughout Italy and Germany, but it was influenced locally by the size of the available ensemble. At Saint Mark...