Historical Performance: Theory, Practice, and Interdisciplinarity

Friday, May 19 8:00am Registration; no fee/open to public 8:45am Welcome and introductory remarks (Sweeney Hall) 9:00-10:00 Opening Plenary Address (Sweeney) Session Chair: Margaret Bent (All Souls College, Oxford) The sound of (sixteenth-century) music Laurie Stras (University of Southampton) Thirty years ago, in a ground-breaking chapter that lifted the veil on the music of medieval convents, Anne Bagnall Yardley called for “an increased sensitivity...to the musical activities of nuns.” Since then, interest in convent music has flourished, yet lacunae still exist—particularly with respect to the sixteenth century, both in terms of performance and scholarly literature. Performing groups appear to have more freedom to explore either side of the high renaissance: while numerous ensembles investigate nuns’ music up to the mid-fifteenth century, and perhaps fewer concentrate on the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the sonic world of sixteenth-century HPI – Conference 2017 9 convent music has remained largely closed to our ears. Musicology, too, has found the sixteenth-century convent difficult to fathom; perhaps because of the apparent dearth of verifiable sources, perhaps because the combined effects of the dissolution of the monasteries, the counter-reformation, the Napoleonic suppression—and (I’d argue) the English choral tradition and Vatican II—have all but wiped out any curiosity about the sounds of convent music that once filled the cities of Europe. It is clear, however, that sixteenth-century convents were filled with music, despite the dual pressure on nuns’ music-making that came from a dwindling access to music education on one hand, and an increasing intellectual engagement with the practice of music on the other. Even when beset by episcopal mistrust and opprobrium, nuns found ways to praise God “imitating the angelic hierarchies,” as Gaffurio put it. Three manuscripts, two Florentine and one of indeterminate origin, show that nuns could reproduce for themselves and their congregations the sounds of falsobordone, canto fermo or contrappunto alla mente, carnival song, and later improvised ornamentation, even improvised poetry. There is, of course, always a tension between notation and realisation, but the rationale behind these manuscripts points to a strong will to recreate the sound of a wide range of ostensibly or partially improvisatory performance practices associated with male ecclesiastical and secular cultures, even if the nuns did not have the extensive training to reproduce them spontaneously. Added to our growing recognition of printed repertoire for convents, this knowledge enriches our understanding of nuns’ contribution to sixteenthcentury culture, and enlivens our own attempts to recreate of the sound world of the sixteenth-century city. 10:15-12:30 Vocal Genre and the Sixteenth Century (Sweeney) Session Chair: Laurie Stras (University of Southampton) Interpreting florid vocal music from late sixteenth-century Italy: A blended procedure for pre-tonal analysis Bianca Hall (Old Dominion University) In late sixteenth-century Italy, celebrated singers performed in a manner that moved the passions of their audiences through their delivery of highly embellished pieces. For modern singers, the successful performance of a florid piece requires analysis in order to understand its construction and thereby develop an effective interpretation. According to Cristle Collins Judd, there are generally two approaches to analyzing sixteenth-century music: historical or teleological. The first group approaches the music from a historical performance practice perspective, in which the goal is to approximate the musical practices and theories of composers, performers, and theorists at the time that it was written. The second group examines the music from a purely modern perspective, often analyzing it as a precursor of seventeenthand eighteenth-century tonality. Although these are both valid perspectives that present valuable historical and contextual information about the music, I believe that a more practical method of analysis combines aspects of these two approaches. HPI – Conference 2017 10 In my paper, I will present an analytical procedure that blends historical modal theory and musica poetica, based on the writings of various theorists including Johannes Tinctoris, Gioseffo Zarlino, and Joachim Burmeister, with modern analytic reduction techniques, similar to those developed for tonal music from the writings of Heinrich Schenker. This blended method gives the modern performer the tools needed to gain an understanding of a piece’s structure and develop an effective interpretation. To demonstrate the application of these techniques, I will use Io che dal ciel cader (1589) by Giulio Caccini as a case study.