Motets from 1549 (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Motets from 1549 Richard Freedman Gioseffo Zarlino. Motets from 1549. Edited by Cristle Collins Judd. (Recent Researches in the Music of the Renaissance, 145, 149.) Middleton, WI: A-R Editions, c2006–7. [Part 1, Motets Based on the Song of Songs: acknowledgments, p. vi; introd., p. vii–xxii; texts and trans., p. xxiii–xxvi; 10 plates; score, 103 p.; crit. report, p. 105–6. ISBN 978–0–89579–598–4; 0–89579–598–1. $83. Part 2, Eleven Motets from Musici quinque vocum moduli (Venice, 1549): acknowledgments, p. vi; introd., p. vii–xv; texts and trans., p. xvi–xix; 2 plates; dedication in Lat., Eng., p. 2; score, p. 3–110; crit. report, p. 111–12. ISBN 978–0–89579–608–0; 0–89579–608–2. $67.] Gioseffo Zarlino (1517–1590) is familiar to many as the author of a series of important writings on modality, counterpoint, and the craft of composition. Excerpts from Le istitutioni harmoniche (Venice: Francesco Franceschi, 1558; reprint, New York: Broude Bros., 1965; revised edition, Venice: Franceschi, 1573; reprint, Ridge-wood, NJ: Gregg Press, 1966), Dimostrationi harmoniche (Venice: Franceschi, 1571; reprint, Ridgewood, NJ: Gregg Press, 1966), and the Sopplimenti musicali (Venice: Franceschi, 1588; reprint, Ridgewood, NJ: Gregg Press, 1966; New York: Broude Bros., 1980) are more or less required reading for anyone keen to know how sixteenth-century musicians understood their work and the concepts on which it was based. But few of us remember that Zarlino was also a composer of over three dozen motets and about a dozen madrigals; fewer still know much of his intellectual milieu in Renaissance Venice. Now thanks to Cristle Collins Judd’s editorial patience and careful detective work we can all begin to measure Zarlino’s musical works against the twin contexts of his theoretical writings and certain cultural forces at work in northern Italy during the late sixteenth century. The focal point of this edition is Zarlino’s first book of motets, the Musici quinque vocum moduli, prepared for publication by the great Venetian printing house of Antonio Gardano in 1549. The book was dedicated to Alvise Balbi, prior of the monastery of Santo Spirito in Isola near Venice (text and translation given on vol. 2, p. 2 of the set). It is not clear how Zarlino was linked to this institution, or what he hoped to gain through the connection. But the eloquent language of the dedication evokes a unique combination of humanist rhetorical skill and religious sensibility reflecting Zarlino’s assumptions of the close connection between words and music. In any case some of the music assembled here points in still other directions. Some works are clearly connected with the ceremonial life of Venice itself; while one of the secular motets (“Clodia quem genuit,” vol. 2, pp. 70–79) was written to commemorate the death of the Marchesino Vacca of Chiogga, the town across the Venetian lagoon where Zarlino worked as a priest prior to his move to San Marco and Venice in the early 1540s. Heard from the standpoint of mid-century musical practice, the nineteen motets of Zarlino’s Musici quinque vocum moduli of 1549 hardly seem remarkable. Like the motets of his teacher and San Marco predecessor Adrian Willaert (ca. 1490–1562), Zarlino’s motets are densely contrapuntal, continuous, and generally [End Page 159] restrained in their approach to the imagery and syntax of the texts at hand. Some of the works are freely composed, but there are also tenor cantus firmus settings in a conservative style (including a Pater noster/Ave Maria setting in which the tenor part yields two additional canonic voices for a total of seven parts), and several works in which liturgical melodies for the given antiphon or sequence are paraphrased in the various polyphonic voice parts (the edition marks out the connections in the score). But as Judd explains, this music matters less for its stylistic innovations than for what it tells us about the many threads—both theoretical and cultural—that intersected in Zarlino’s work in the decade before the publication of his great treatise. Part of this story is to be read in the organization of the book itself (outlined in table 1...