Divining the Oracle: Monteverdi's Seconda Prattica (review)

Although the topic of this book, Monteverdi's "second practice," may sound all too familiar to music historians, its content is compellingly new. The basic facts are known. In 1600 Giovanni Maria Artusi published L'Artusi, ovvero delle imperfettioni della moderna musica, in which he criticized some madrigals by an unnamed composer (Monteverdi) that he had had the opportunity to hear in November of 1598. The event precipitated a controversy between the Bolognese theorist and the composer that lasted about ten years and that forced Monteverdi to develop an aesthetic theory that could justify the "errors" of his music, now publicly condemned as emblematic of the errors of modern music. The main issues raised by Artusi were the incorrect treatment of dissonances and the ambiguous use of modality. Monteverdi replied first in the preface to his fifth book of madrigals (1605), and then more systematically (through his brother Giulio Cesare) in the preface to the Scherzi musicali (1607). Violations of the traditional rules of counterpoint, Giulio Cesare argued, were justified by the expressive demands of the text. Thus he captured the essence of the new music in a famous slogan according to which "music is the servant of the text, and the text is the mistress." And this was what distinguished Monteverdi's "second practice" from the "first practice" adopted by the masters of the sixteenth century and codified in the contrapuntal theory of Zarlino.

The Artusi-Monteverdi controversy has been traditionally viewed as a momentous event in the development of Western music, at once reflecting and instigating the emergence of rapidly changing aesthetic paradigms and musical practices. Massimo Ossi does not challenge the historical importance of this confrontation. Rather, distancing himself from the dominant reading of the 1605 and 1607 texts as aesthetic manifestos in which the principles of the nascent baroque music found their first verbal expression, he draws attention to how little Giulio Cesare's slogan seems to explain of the manner in which Monteverdi's music actually developed in the ensuing years. "In truth," he writes in the prologue, "Giulio Cesare may have done his brother more a disservice than a favor with his famous encapsulation of the aims of the seconda prattica, because the notion of music being the servant of the text could not be further from the aesthetic ideal that Monteverdi was trying to achieve. In fact, one would be hard put to find much music by Monteverdi, especially from the fifth book on, in which Giulio Cesare's words can be said actually to hold true" (21).

Ossi is referring to Monteverdi's growing interest, starting with the fifth book of madrigals, in musical procedures independent of the text, in terms of both large-scale schematic organizations (the use of ritornellos, strophic variations, rhythmic and melodic modules of the canzonetta, etc.) and of musical gestures whose meaning crystallized itself in specific affective typologies (the descending tetrachord in its function of musical icon of the lament, for example). What was then the "aesthetic ideal that Monteverdi was trying to achieve?" In a way, Monteverdi himself offered an answer in a series of private letters sent to Anton Francesco Doni in the early 1630s and in the preface to the Madrigali guerrieri et amorosi (1638), which Ossi regards as Monteverdi's most mature statement (albeit not immune from rather superficial inconsistencies) on the second practice. Taking his cue from Monteverdi's own account of the development of his style, the author eloquently clarifies how the issue of imitation (in the sense of a realistic musical imitation of human emotions) rapidly replaced in the composer's mind the contrapuntal technicalities contested by Artusi as the true goal of the new music. But on a deeper musical level, the meaning of the seconda prattica lay in a paradox: "that in order for music to truly serve the text, it first had to become independent of it" (249). This is the...