Program Notes


	The era of the Renaissance madrigal was inaugurated in 1530
with the publication in Rome of a collection entitled Madrigali de
Diversi Musici.  The term "madrigal", originally applying to a type
of poetry with pastoral associations, came to be connected with a 
very distinct development in secular music, one which became a kind
of proving-ground for every new and experimental musical idea.
Growing directly out of the lyrical and simply melodic frottola,
borrowing from the more serious canzone, and influenced by the already
well-developed French chanson, the madrigal quickly became the most
important form for profane vocal music in Italy, as well as later on
in England and elsewhere.

	Our program begins, however, with a motet by Palestrina,
Sicut lilium inter spinas, published in 1584.  Although it is a sacred
piece, its text, drawn from the Song of Solomon, is even more plainly
erotic than almost any madrigal poem of the period, and the composer
fashions a more warmly sensuous mood than that found in most of his
liturgical works.  Here the phrases are a little shorter and more 
concise, the lines more lyrical and directly appealing.

	A mere step away in technique is Palestrina's madrigal
Alla riva del Tebro, published in 1586.  Palestrina as a madrigalist
only slightly adapted the formal elements of his sacred style, and
while his works in this genre are beautiul in sound and of the finest
craftsmanship, they do not at all advance the development of the 
madrigal style but rather represent a conservative parenthesis within
it.  Alla riva is nonetheless a genuine madrigal and there is less
reserve and more emotional demonstrativeness in the music.  An
especially madrigalian intensity is provided for the closing words
"Ahi, miserabil' sorte", where the melodic lines successively descend
note by note over a full octave.

	While Palestrina was a conservative figure in the middle or
"classic" period of the madrigal, Jacques Arcadelt was a progressive
exponent of the early period.  One of the many Northerners (princi-
pally from what is now Belgium) who were drawn to Italy during the
fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries by the wealth of its cultural
life, he was one of the three or four "creators" of the madrigal--
endowing it with those distinctive characteristics that would persist
throughout its history, the so-called "madrigalisms".  Arcadelt's 
first book of madrigals, of which O felici occhi miei is an excellent
example, appeared in 1539.  It was so popular that it was reprinted
thirty-three times by 1654--phenomenal longevity for a music publication
during that period.  O felici occhi miei is a good example of the 
melodiousness and pervasive gentle melancholy of the majority of his
secular works.  These are characterized by a style which has been called
"polyphonically animated homophony", in which the linear character of
the separate parts is often and easily subordinated to the requirements
of basically chordal writing.  The treatment of dissonance is 
conservative enough to provide little contrast with that of Palestrina.

	Although a distinct province in the world of European music
at the beginning of the sixteenth century, toward the middle years 
Spain had absorbed enough influences to bring it close to the 
mainstream.  The most popular distinctively native form of secular
music was the villancico, a strophic song with a da capo musical
structure.  Spanish composers like Juan Vasquez continued the 
development of this form by absorbing elements from the madrigal and
chanson and elaborating it into a smoother and more sophisticated
musical presentation.  In Morenica mera yo we find a skillful
balance of the native idiom with its folktune-like melody, and the
complex polyphonic technique adapted from the madrigal.  The interplay
of verbal and musical accents that agree and clash by turns subtly
represent the yes/no ambivalence of the text.

	Of the friar Juan Diaz little is known.  The madrigal Quien
me dixera, his only extant composition, is a curiously personal and
direct expression, quite different from the more elaborate and formal
poetry of the Italian madrigal.  On the page the music could be 
Arcadelt's, but in sound it is unmistakably Spanish, founded as it is
in the phrygian mode so peculiar to Iberian music and so rare in
Italian.  One can't help suspecting that there had been no aesthetic
conceit involved in the creation of this piece, and that the actual
loss of a beloved 'Elisa' was perhaps a contributing factor in the
composer's monasticism.

	Gines de Morata, a probably Spanish composer whose career
unfolded in Portugal, is represented here by two pieces.  La rubia
pastorcica, a short madrigal written in a light vein akin to that of
the Italian canzonetta, has a pastoral setting and risque allusions.
The simplicity is deceptive, however, as the part-writing for three
voices is most adroit, and the grace and balance of the whole 
composition exemplary.  Ninpha gentil is a soneto, or madrigal-like
musical setting of an unrhymed sonnet in the Castilian language.
The text is a perhaps slightly extreme example of the mannered and
circuitously metaphorical language of Italianate poetry of the period.
Morata has done it the most painstaking justice musically; every 
phrase is accorded separate and distinct treatment, as the texture
continually shifts to express the meaning of the text.

	Claudio Monteverdi needs no introduction; his nine books of
madrigals were published from 1587 to 1651 (the last posthumously)
and span as well as exemplify the period of transition from Renaissance
to Baroque music.  The five works of his on our program are taken
from Books Two (1590), Three (1592), and Four (1603), and are all 
basically within the purview of Renaissance music.  Stracciami pur il
core, from Book Three, was called by the musicologist Leo Schrade
"...perhaps the most artistic and skillful composition in the whole
collection."  It displays the composer's consummate gifts for 
appropriate invention, beauty, and range of expression, and subtle 
balance and grace without loss of vitality or direction.

	Ecco mormorar l'onde, from Book Two, is one of his better-
known madrigals.  The poem, by Torquato Tasso (1544-1595), beautifully
evokes the coming of dawn beside the sea and its import for the 
observer.  Monteverdi finds perfect expression for every nuance of the 
text--the almost silent murmur of the waves, the gentle rustling of 
leaves, and the soft breath of the morning breeze--detail by detail 
every element in the scene is represented, until daylight breaks through
and everything is suffused with light and refreshed.  The two-sectional
Rimanti in pace (Book Three) is closer in technique to such expressive
works as the famous Lamento d'Arianna, and generally to the dramatic
recitative of early Baroque monody.  In this plaint, the wounded and
dying Tirsi laments and commiserates with his sorrowful Fillida.
"Madrigalisms" abound in this music.  Here we are far from the 
"structuralist" music of the polyphonic motet and madrigal; this is 
music pre-eminently for effect.  The emphasis is less even on melody
than on harmony, on chord progressions and dissonances both anticipated
and unprepared.  In this kind of music we are, in a sense, past the
midway point to opera.

	O primavera, also from Book Three, is another well-known work.
It is based on an abridged text drawn from the long dramatic poem,
Pastor fido, by Giovanni Battista Guarini (1538-1612).  It represents
in music the meditations of an aging man who marks the return of spring,
while noting the change in himself which gives such a bitter taste to
the sweetness of the world's renewal.  It bears contrast with the 
setting of the same text by Heinrich Schutz later in the program.

	Si ch'io vorei morire, from Book Four, is another composition
in which techniques associated particularly with the classic madrigal,
notably imitative polyphony, and the smoothly flowing diatonic harmony
exemplified by Palestrina and Arcadelt, are either abandoned entirely
or completely subordinated to the quest for greater expressive 
intensity.  The text gives as candid a representation of the ecstasies
of sexuality as one is likely to find in serious music before the 
twentieth century.  Still, the supreme values in Renaissance 
aristocratic culture of grace and balance, as well as eloquence and 
appropriateness of expression are not neglected by Monteverdi; every-
where structure and resourceful artifice guide and hold the separate
elements together.

	In the later madrigals of Carlo Gesualdo, Prince of Venosa, we
find the expressive resources of the madrigal in its full maturity
brought to the most intense and extreme possible state of development.
Nonetheless, even if striving for the ultimate in expression seems
to bring Gesualdo's music at moments to the brink of fevered chaos, his
skill as a composer always reveals an ordering and steady hand in the 
assembly of effects and the structuring of the whole.  He balances
comlexity and idiosyncracy in one aspect with clarity and simplicity
in accompanying elements.  O dolorosa gioia (Book Five, 1611), one of
the most beautiful and perfect of his later works, illustrates his
imaginative virtuosity.  Gesualdo's famous decadence and "modernism"
constitute a fascinating side development in the history of late
Renaissance music; it led to nothing beyond itself, but managed in
its way to anticipate musical innovations of three hundred years later.

	It comes as a surprise to some of the admirers of the music
of Heinrich Schutz, to learn that he wrote a significant number of
madrigals.  Published in 1611, the same year as Gesualdo's last two 
books and midway through Schutz's long first stay in Italy, they
constitute a kind of journeyman's work testifying to the twenty-six
year-old composer's perfect assimilation of the manner and idioms of
the Italian genre, and his creation of a personal style within it. 
His mature musical personality is already manifest in this music.  It
is irresistible to compare his setting of O primavera with that of
Monteverdi, the other great master of the early Baroque, in this last
flowering of Renaissance music.  In Monteverdi's treatment there is
overall more lightness, a greater felicity and poise in the progression
of ideas, an unfailing sense of melodic beauty, and perhaps a touch
of irony.  Schutz produces a larger-scale structure; the sound is lush
and spacious, the melodic ideas more angular and less tuneful.  In
the harmonic movement, as well as in the extensiveuse of sequence, a 
flavor of the Baroque is evident.  The prevailing mood is pensive and
serious.

	D'orrida selce alpina is very different music.  The harmonies,
relying on networks of suspensions moving against long pedal-like 
notes, are dissonant and arresting.  The attempt to convey a general
feeling of bitterness, and to illustrate musically the coldness and
cruelty of hard stone (as well as of a certain lady) is remarkably
successful and makes this madrigal a masterpiece.

	We end our program as it began, with a motet.  Schutz in 1625
brought out a great collection of four-part Latin motets entitled
Cantiones Sacrae.  Inter brachia salvatoris mei is representative of
the entire collection , as a wonderfully varied and inventive
synthesis of the Renaissance polyphonic motet and the later madrigal 
with the new resources and techniques of the Baroque era.  From the 
dancing joyousness of the opening declaration to the sudden painful
dissonances at the reference to death and elsewhere, the influence
of the madrigal is unmistakable.  And yet this is genuinely Baroque
music, as shown in the extended development of melodic ideas via 
figurative elaboration and modulating sequences, the busy restlessness
of the part-writing, and the sense of power and purpose in the general
movement of the piece.  Merely forty years after Palestrina's motet
Sicut lilium, we are in a completely different musical environment.



					-- Joel van Lennep