Stile Antico

Europe’s Renaissance cities not only competed in the magnificence of their architecture and the opulence of their visual arts, but also in the richness of their music. Our program assembles musical postcards from six of these great centers, the date of each chosen to showcase a city at the peak of its cultural achievement.

Who is the author of our postcards? We might imagine an Englishman abroad: an ambassador, a man of business, a spy—or perhaps all three. Had he set out from Henry VIII’s London early in the 1530s, he could have prayed at the gaudily bejeweled shrine of St. Thomas Becket at Canterbury, before riding on to Dover—where the young Thomas Tallis was organist at the Benedictine Priory—and taking ship for the English port of Calais. Yet a few years later, the journey would have seemed very different. Henry’s infamous minister Thomas Cromwell had the priory dissolved in 1535, and the shrine destroyed in 1538. Calais, too, was lost in 1558; later that year, the dying Queen Mary told her ladies-in-waiting that “when I am dead and cut open, they will find Calais inscribed on my heart.”

Tallis’s career flourished in spite of this religious and political turmoil. He wrote some of his finest music for the joint forces of Mary’s Chapel Royal and her husband Philip II of Spain’s Capilla Flamenca, including the vibrant Pentecost responsory Loquebantur variis linguis. It has been suggested that the text (“they spoke many languages”) is a grumpy comment on the challenges of working with a polyglot choir, but it might just as well remind our putative traveler to engage some good interpreters!

Our first postcard arrives from Paris—a thriving university city, given new confidence in the early 16th century by the return of the kings of France from the Loire. Pierre Moulu (c. 1484–c. 1550) was probably associated with the court; the text of his Mater floreat includes a long list of composers, many of them active in the city. It may have been performed in 1517 to mark the entry into Paris of Francis I’s wife, Queen Claude.

The most distinctive musical genre of Renaissance Paris was the secular chanson. Less contrapuntal than its Flemish and Burgundian ancestors, it drew heavily on the elegant poetry of Clément Marot, as in Claudin de Sermisy’s (c. 1490–1562) charming Tant que vivray, whose simple textures allow the singers great opportunities to characterize the text. Clément Janequin (c. 1485–1558) was famed for his programmatic chansons depicting the sounds of battle, birdsong, or—in Les Cris de Paris—the chaos of a Parisian market. Few musical works evoke a sense of time and place more vividly than this, as we hear the competing cries and mots justes of the street-sellers echoing between the voices

In 1503, the city of Seville was granted a trading monopoly with Las Indias, Spain’s American possessions. For the next century, the quayside on the River Guadalquivir buzzed with activity as fleets arrived laden with precious metals and exotic goods, and the city’s population was swelled by merchants from all over Europe. Seville’s prestige was reflected in an explosion of building work, including the completion and lavish decoration of its cathedral, whose musical tradition was equally opulent.

Francisco Guerrero (1528–1599) spent most of his career at Seville Cathedral. Ave virgo sanctissima epitomizes his fervent style, crowned by a canon between the two highest parts. Alonso Lobo (1555–1617) sang as a choirboy under Guerrero before being appointed to his teacher’s post early in the 17th century; his luscious motet O quam suavis est would have been performed during the Eucharist. However, not all Spanish church music was so ornate and devotional. Vernacular Spanish villancicos often replaced Latin music on important feast days, especially at Christmas and Epiphany. The gently lilting Niño Dios d’amor herido shows that Guerrero was equally adept in this attractive genre.

Our next postcard comes from Munich, which became capital of a reunited Bavaria in 1506. In the early 1520s Duke Wilhelm IV decided to establish his own court music, recruiting the composer Ludwig Senfl (c. 1486–c. 1543) to his service. Alongside his new master, Senfl may have attended the 1529 Diet of Speyer, where he would have heard the cathedral bells so memorably depicted in his most famous work, Das Geläut zu Speyer.

Although Wilhelm was a staunch Catholic, Senfl corresponded with Luther, even exchanging gifts—a motet in return for a chest of books. His Protestant sympathies seem to have caused him little trouble, but his pupil Ludwig Daser (c. 1526–c. 1589) fared less well: he was removed from his position as Kapellmeister to Wilhelm’s successor Duke Albrecht V after an inquisition, though the official reason given was ill health, and he retained a pension. While Daser later worked at the Protestant court in Stuttgart, his music continued to be sung in Munich; his sonorous double‑choir motet Fratres, sobrii estote likely dates from this period.

It was the 1556 arrival of the Franco- Flemish composer Orlande de Lassus (c. 1532–1594) which cemented Munich’s status as one of Europe’s foremost centers. Employed first as a court composer, Lassus succeeded Daser as Kapellmeister, remaining in post until his death. Such was his fame that other eminent composers such as Andrea and Giovanni Gabrieli traveled to study with him. His lighthearted song Es jagt ein Jäger was first published in 1572, and reflects the court’s obsession with hunting, even if in the end the poem turns out to be about the pursuit of love. Lassus was famously encouraged to write short masses, so that Albrecht could spend more of the day indulging his passion for the chase!

The first years of the 16th century saw Renaissance Rome at its apogee. Under the papacy of Julius II, building work began on the new St. Peter’s Basilica, Raphael painted the Vatican rooms, and Michelangelo the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. The Eternal City and the Catholic Church must have seemed untouchable, and yet in 1527, barely two decades later, Rome had been sacked by the ill-disciplined troops of Charles V, their ferocity fueled by Lutheran iconoclasm. Slaughter, flight, famine, and disease reduced the city’s population by more than eighty percent. The French composer Philippe Verdelot (c. 1480/85–c. 1530/32), then working in Florence, reflected on these events in Trist’Amarilli mia, an allegorical madrigal in which the shepherd Tityrus (representing Pope Clement VII) leaves the Vatican and the Tiber, while his pasture (Rome) lies in ruins.

Though the city slowly recovered, the era of ostentatiously powerful Renaissance popes was over, and the Church embarked on a long period of reform in response to the Lutheran threat. This was the background to the career of Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (c. 1525–1594), who devoted virtually his entire working life to the city. The assurance of his motet Tu es Petrus, written shortly after he returned to papal service, perhaps reflects the returning confidence of both city and Church. Felice Anerio (c. 1560–1614) was Palestrina’s successor as composer to the papal choir; his Passiontide motet Christus factus est is both simpler and more frankly expressive.

Our fifth postcard comes from the proud city-state of Venice. Though its trading position was seriously threatened by Lisbon in the 16th century, its status as an artistic center was without rival— particularly after the Sack of Rome, as displaced artists, composers, and printers flocked in search of patronage. The most famous composer associated with Venice is of course Claudio Monteverdi (1567–1643), maestro di cappella at San Marco for the last thirty years of his life. His richly devotional Adoramus te Christe, with its spacious pauses between lines, exploits the famous acoustics to the full.

We continue with two contrasting madrigals. Vergine madre, figlia del tuo figlio is an intense setting of lines from the final canto of Dante’s Paradiso by Claudio Merulo (1533–1604). Merulo’s successor as first organist at San Marco was Andrea Gabrieli (c. 1532–1585), who did more than any other to establish the grand polychoral style—heard to great effect in Ecco Vinegia bella, scored for two choirs of six voices. Its elaborate and obsequious text welcomes Henry III, king of France, who passed through Venice in 1574; it praises the merits of both monarch and city with equal hyperbole.

Our final postcard comes from Washington, D.C., in the shape of the world premiere of Christopher Cerrone’s It looks quite curious, commissioned especially for this program by Miller Theatre. The composer writes:

I grew up in Huntington, New York, the birthplace of Walt Whitman. His name was everywhere: my high school, the roads, most ironically, the mall. But I long struggled to connect with his poetry. Whitman’s verse tends toward the expansive, and I’ve always been drawn to adapting more economical language in my music. I found my way back to him indirectly, through George Oppen’s Of Being Numerous, a poem I recently set for voices that quotes an 1864 letter Whitman wrote to his mother from Washington, D.C. The fact that it was a letter and not a poem seemed to unlock something for me: the grandiosity of Whitman’s verse gives way to something honest and unguarded. Phrases like “I suppose” appear where optimism might otherwise reign, and I set those words in imitation through the ensemble, letting the uncertainty ripple outward.

Like me, Whitman is dazzled by the Capitol and bemused by the mediocrity of its inhabitants. He calls it all “curious”, and Oppen’s isolation of that word in his own poem invited me to build a polyphonic web of ambivalence around it, with a gleeful nod to Lewis Carroll: Whitman’s “curious” becomes “curiouser and curiouser,” because more often than not I do feel rather Through the Looking-Glass in this strange American moment. For Stile Antico’s Polyphonic Postcards program, this piece offers a postcard from Washington, D.C., written by our great American poet, and a reminder that ambivalence toward one’s own capital is among our oldest national traditions.

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