This coming Sunday, February 23rd, Capitol Early Music, a group founded by amateur recorder players and Early Music enthusiasts in the Washington, D.C. area, brings us a concert by the Abella Harp Consort at Saint George’s Episcopal Church in Arlington, VA. If you’re already a fan of 16th- and 17th-century canzonas, cantatas, and sonatas, this concert will be right up your alley; and if you’re new to the world of Early Music, this concert offers a great introduction to what popular high-brow music-making was all about in the time of Shakespeare (and a few decades after). I thought I’d provide a little introduction to the various contexts surrounding this chance for imaginative artistic time-travel, so that veterans and newcomers alike can have a good idea of what to expect and perhaps whet their Early Music-al appetites.
The Abella Harp Consort is a type of ensemble called a ‘broken consort.’ This doesn’t mean there’s something about them that needs fixing, but rather that it consists of a mix of very different types of instruments: ie. plucked strings, bowed strings, and winds. An unbroken, or ‘whole consort,’ would be a group of instruments that are all in the same ‘family,’ like a string quartet, producing a very homogeneous tone up and down the pitch spectrum. Now, to a music lover in the Renaissance, these different types of consorts would imply what sorts of songs the group is likely to play: are you in the mood for serious, contemplative explorations of music and the soul? Then you’ll want to look for the ‘whole consort’ group. But if you’re in a more rambunctious, clever, often bawdy love-poems-and-popular-dance-tunes sort of mood, the broken consort is the one for you. Indeed, we can also tell that’s what our February 23rd concert is going to focus on from the title of the program: Si Dolce e’l Tormento (Yes, Sweet is the Torture). It’s a reference to the common trope in Renaissance Italian love poetry, of finding ever more clever and creative ways to describe how romantic courtship is at once the most pleasurable and the most painful thing a person can possibly experience.
So before we even look at what composers will be in the program, we know that this will be a concert of music that Renaissance men and women would want to go to, let’s say, at the end of a long week, meeting up with friends, kicking back, and indulging in clever, musical repartee about romantic foibles and raunchy dancing. The music may have markedly different sonorities, but in many ways, the themes and subject matter for this kind of musical and social experience have not changed very much over the intervening centuries.
As for the composers and their musical styles that we’re in for, the mix here is going to encompass the transition on either side of the most momentous single event in classical music’s history: the invention of opera, which is the most immersive, multi-sensory, popular entertainment experience in the history of Western culture.
Before opera was invented (right around the year 1600), there was a long-running European music tradition based on a notated, published repertoire of melodies, songs, and instrumental pieces (as opposed to the oral traditions of folk and popular music traditions running in parallel with the literate tradition), which we now sometimes call Renaissance style classical music. This style came out of a complex evolution of church music, cross pollinating with popular song and dance musics over the centuries since the Middle Ages. In this style, we enjoy a delightful and complex blend of two big elements: 1) the long, smooth melodies originally designed for spiritual contemplation, stacked upon one another to create a continuous musical interweaving texture called ‘polyphony’; and this is injected thoroughly with 2) the rhythmic vitality characteristic of popular song and dance, originally used for very secular entertainment. Two composers highlighted in our upcoming concert represent this type of sonority: Orlando di Lasso and Jacob Clemens non Papa. They wrote prolifically in their careers, spanning most of the 16th-century, and for notated music, this was an era almost exclusive to vocal music. But even back in the day, it was very common practice to replace or double any singer’s part in the score with any instrument that can play the same notes. So these songs will be titled by the words of the poem that they were meant to set to music, even in cases where the song is played by a consort of instruments.
All the other composers on our program lived through the invention (and then the explosion in popularity and influence) of opera. In them, we are treated to musical experiments that freely mix the old polyphonic textures with opera’s revolutionary techniques creating dramatic monologue through a type of solo singing that’s really kind of a musicalized theatrical acting out of passionate emotions in the context of a human story. In this new style of musical expression, the accompanying instruments use polyphonic textures to make a kind of a social/musical backdrop to the soloist’s emotions, very like the role of the chorus in ancient Greek drama.
In the Abella Consort’s upcoming concert, the dramatic soloist role will come most obviously from the great soprano singer joining the consort, Margaret Carpenter Haigh; but as instrumental music developed later into the 17th-century, composers found ways to also make instruments, like a solo violin or recorder, present such theatricality very effectively even without words. Claudio Monteverdi was the greatest and most influential master of these sorts of polyphony-plus-music-drama experiments, and this concert will feature lots of his irresistible style, as well as contributions from one of his most popular disciples from Cremona, Tarquinio Merula. The other soprano-range instruments in the consort, courtesy of recorder player Sarah Shodja, will be showcasing a Venetian contemporary of Monteverdi and Merula’s, who specialized in writing for wind instruments in the new operatic style: Giovanni Bassano. He was also known for indulging in unusually dense and complex polyphonic techniques, which was a mantle that would be taken up most famously by J.S. Bach over a century later.
Lastly, this concert is also going to give us a taste of how the polyphony-plus-solo-drama style of the early Baroque era influenced music written for the most popular types of instrument in your average musical home throughout the 16th and 17th centuries: the plucked strings of lutes and harps. The lute was the more popular, but both these types of instruments could be capable of chordal and rhythmic accompaniment to a singalong, a dance band, or an amorous serenade, while also being capable of playing the whole package of expressive melody over the top of polyphonic textures, all by themselves. Lutenist William Simms and harpist Liv Castor will be showcasing the music of a couple very influential developers of virtuoso techniques for the lute and theorbo (which is usually the most visually striking member of an Early Music consort, it looks like a giant lute with a neck that extends way up into the air out at an angle from the player’s left shoulder): Alessandro Piccinini and Giovanni Girolamo Kapsberger. The collections of lute music from both these composers are today constantly being rediscovered by modern guitarists who often start out as teenagers wanting to play rock music on electric guitars, then as they discover the visceral joys of more complex guitar technique they move into the classical guitar repertoire, and end up falling in love with playing these 17th-century gems from the original manuscripts of lute tablature. It’s a very common story in today’s guitar world for a reason!
So hopefully, this excursion into the musical stylistic trends of the last two centuries of the Renaissance inspires you to check out the Abella Harp Consort’s concert this coming Sunday, courtesy of Capitol Early Music; and if you can’t make it to the concert, I do hope you check out some recordings or videos of performances of all these composers’ music soon. Happy listening!
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