Gloria - Thoroughly Modern Monteverdi

by Mitchell Covington

For most of the first millennium of Christian worship, the musical vehicle for liturgy was melody. In the simplicity of chanted plainsong, like the Gloria fragment with which we open tonight's program, the single line of unison melody, unadorned by accompaniment, became a perfect symbol for the unity of Christian believers.

The full flowering of melodic chant reached its zenith in the Middle Ages with the production of florid chant with soaring melodies. By the eleventh century, Christian composers had taken music as far as it could go in the linear (melodic) direction, and there was only one way to go: up. This was made possible in the second millennium by the invention of musical notation. Now that composers had a way to notate their music, it was possible to layer multiple melodies, creating early counterpoint and opening the doors to the rich and exciting world of polyphony ("many voices" and harmony.

The relationship between two melodies became a metaphor for man's relationship with God. Therefore, the music was composed to be free of dissonance or discord. Certain intervals were considered to be perfect, and all music was to begin and end with these perfect intervals. The result was a form that was rooted in chant, melodically expressive, and characterized by harmony, balance, and profound beauty. This quest for beauty and perfection was fundamental to the Renaissance in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Europe, which idealized the balance, form, and symmetry of ancient Greece and Rome.

Renaissance polyphony began in earnest with the masses and motets of Orlande de lassus and reached its zenith in sacred works of Palestrina and Victoria, represented on the program by the Gloria from Victoria's Missa "O quam gloriosum." When Lassus died in 1521, western Christendom had settled on a universal music that was immediately recognizable in any country.

Toward the end of the Renaissance, however, the Reformation opened the way for vernacular liturgies and a variety of new compositional practices particular to the Lutheran, Calvanist, and Anglican Churches. But the Catholic Church itself began to employ two divergent styles, corresponding to Monteverdi's prima prattica and seconda prattica.

Prima prattica described the old style of Renaissance masters like Palestrina and Victoria, with several independent and equal vocal lines and without instrumental accompaniment. For centuries all musicians learned to compose in this style as part of their training, and as sacred composition tends to be rather conservative, this practice persisted into the eighteenth century.

However, there emerged a second practice that was born and grew up in the church of San Marco in Venice in the second half of the sixteenth century. The hallmark of this style was the use of contrasting groups of instruments or voices playing off each other in various combinations.

Since San Marco, at this time, employed a consort of as many as twenty instrumentalists, it was natural to give the more difficult music to the stronger players. The less experienced players would join in for the easier, more repetitious sections. And because the layout of San Marco featured several self-contained raised galleries, it was easy to place these different groups of musicians in different galleries to heighten the musical effect of contrast between groups.

From then on composers at San Marco, most notably Andrea Gabrieli and Giovanni Gabrieli, experimented with every possible combination of voices and instruments distributed throughout the church and with contrasts of all kinds: loud against soft, small ensemble against large, solo against tutti, voices against instruments, and strings against brass or woodwinds.

Meanwhile, in Florence, composers experimented with another musical style that planted the seeds for the development of opera. Composers like Giulio Caccini sought to emuate Greek philosophers who believed music should represent the emotions. They produced music with a single melody that was supported by a simple harmonic underpinning that gave them the freedom they needed to portray the meaning and emotions of the text. They employed dissonance for expressive purposes and contrasting textures and tempos to heighten the emotional content of the text. The result was a new musical style that was highly expressive, full of contrast, and heavily reliant on instrumental accompaniment.

These musical innovations eventually made their way north to Venice, the city that built the world's fist public opera house. Monteverdi took the seeds planted by the Florentine camerata and composed works of surpassing expressive power, with greater formal organization, and with more elaborate orchestrations. For this reason, many scholars consider him to the true father of opera.

While Monteverdi continued to compose music for the church in the old prima prattica, he also began to compose sacred music in the new style. His genius lay partly in his ability to compose with equal brilliance in both styles. The Gloria for Seven Voices is a wonderful example of his seconda prattica, also known as the stile moderno. In it you will hear music with instrumental accompaniment as well as contrasting sections that emphasize the meaning of the text, some aria-like in their melodicism. You will hear Venetian contrasts of rhythm, texture, dynamics, and differnet voice groupings: men and women, solo and tutti, and so forth. All of this Monteverdi has meticulously worked out to support the broad range of emotions in the Gloria text.

The use of contrast as a compositional principle and the use of harmonic underpinning provided by instrumental accompaniment became the two most important features of the Baroque period. Over the next century, extended, single-movement works with contrasting sections, like Monteverdi's Gloria for Seven Voices, evolved into the larger multi-movement forms of the high Baroque, composed of several independent movements, each with its own unique affection or mood. These are exemplified by the cantata masses of Italian masters like Vivaldi, such as his Gloria in D on tonight's program, and by the Lutheran cantatas of J.S. Bach, such as his Cantata No. 191, "Gloria in excelsis Deo."

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