Angeli, zingare & pastori
Renaissance music from Venice, Naples & Rome
The Royal Wind Music
L’huomo ben istituito non debe essere senza Musica
‘A well established man must not be without music’
(Gioseffo Zarlino, Istitutioni harmoniche, 1583)
Angeli, zingare & pastori (Angels, gypsies and shepherds) is a journey through the many characters of ensemble music in late 16th and early 17th century Italy. The title refers to three recurrent allegories found not only in music but also in literature and the visual arts. Angels are messengers and archetypical symbols of the divine and supernatural. Their voices shine through in the motets by Corfini, Agostini, Trombetti and Rossi. Arcadian shepherds represent the ideals of beauty and harmony, translated into music in the elegant dances by Alberti, Molinaro and Rossi and in the well-balanced instrumental pieces by Cavazzoni, Guami and Andrea Gabrieli. Finally, gypsies and other marginal figures show an increasing interest of the arts in aspects of human life that are often hidden or repressed. In the visual arts, these characters provided a perfect medium to challenge the traditional artistic laws – an element present in the music of composers like Ruffo, Frescobaldi or Trabaci.
The repertoire included in this recording proceeds from three prominent musical centers: Venice, Naples and Rome. Italy was not a unified country at the time, and the political and musical circumstances of these three cities were quite different. The Republic of Venice had been a city-state since the early Middle Ages, ruled by a Doge (chief magistrate) elected for life by the aristocracy. The strategic geographical situation of the city was crucial for the extraordinary development of its maritime trade during the Middle Ages. By 1500 this commerce was already in decline, unable to compete with the European routes to the New World, but other sorts of trade flourished. For example, the city came to dominate the music publishing business. In 1501 Ottaviano Petrucci published Harmonice musices odhecaton, the first collection of printed polyphonic music. By 1550 the Venetian printing houses, among them the workshops of the Scotto and Gardane families, were publishing the works of local and foreign composers and distributing them nationally and internationally. A quick glance at the playlist reveals that many of the pieces on this recording were printed in Venice, while their composers worked and lived in more or less distant North-Italian cities like Genoa (Molinaro), Bologna (Trombetti), Lucca (Guami, Corfini), Mantua (Rossi) or Cremona (Merula).
The Kingdom of Naples developed a very distinctive musi- cal style and practice after it became a viceroyalty of Spain in 1503. The Spanish viceroys maintained a Royal Chapel in the city of Naples, that became an important symbol of power and prosperity. In 1614, when Giovanni Maria Trabaci was appointed maestro di capella, the chapel consisted of 26 singers and 12 instrumentalists. The viceroys also promoted the integration of the arts and particularly music in the education of young noblemen throughout the Kingdom. Many aristocrats became highly skilled composers, some of them as revered as Prince Carlo Gesualdo da Venosa. Gesualdo’s music was highly experimental: his extreme chromaticism remains surprising, even for contemporary ears. It reveals a taste for experimentation characteristic of the Neapolitan school that is also present in Trabaci’s music, and, in a lighter manner, in the exciting rhythms of the canzone alla napoli- tana by Donato and Lodovico Agostini.
It is almost impossible to plan a musical journey through Italy without a brief stop in Rome. At the time, the city was the capital of the Papal States, which expanded over a large portion of central Italy. The most prominent musical institutions of the city were associated with the Papacy, but many other churches also had choirs, organists and instrumentalists at their service. The nobility and the high ranks of the church employed musicians or protected them through patronage. The many possibilities the city offered to professional musicians attracted figures like the Ferrarese composer Girolamo Frescobaldi, who spent many years in Rome enjoying the patronage of powerful families like cardinal Pietro Aldobrandini’s and participating in the musical life of the city through regular employment as an organist but also teaching privately, performing in aristocratic circles and taking up extra work at various churches in special occasions.
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