Program Notes for "Christmas at San Marco"

by Sanford Dole

I am delighted to be introducing myself to Baroque Choral Guild audiences at these concerts. As a native of Berkeley and a lifelong choral singer, it is a pleasure to be continuing the tradition of first-rate choral music performance here in the Bay Area. For the programming of this set of concerts, I am indebted to my predecessor Mitchell Covington, whose plans for the season were already in motion at the time that I came on board. Happily, I thoroughly enjoy the Italian Renaissance repertoire and was glad to have a hand in shaping these concerts for your enjoyment. I would also like to welcome our friends The Whole Noyse to augment this joyous occasion.

The concept for this evening’s program is that all the composers represented were employed at St. Mark’s Basilica in Venice sometime during the High Renaissance period of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. We have created a collection of works to give you an idea of the types of works typical of the time and place. Much of the new music created during this period was for the annual festival days that occurred in Venice throughout the year. In a slight misnomer, "Christmas at San Marco" refers primarily to the second half of the concert. The first half contains works probably first performed on other festive occasions.

After the Flemish masters Josquin, Ockeghem, and others developed the polyphonic style of composition in the early sixteenth century, native Italian composers began to emerge who continued this music’s development. Along with the influence of Palestrina at St. Peter’s in Rome, St. Mark’s in Venice became a center for new music, shifting the international spotlight to Italy. This transition began with the Belgian Adrian Willaert, the earliest composer on tonight’s program, who came to Italy as a chorister in 1522 and was appointed maestro di cappella at St. Mark’s in 1527. His tenure, which lasted until his death in 1562, marked a period of tremendous growth and development in Italian musical culture. As the first major composer to hold the post, he presided over all the musical establishments of the period. This included the division of the chapel into two choirs, or cori spezzati, which would become a standard feature of later composers’ works. A prolific composer, he wrote in all the contemporary genres of sacred music: masses, motets, hymns, psalms, etc., as well as in lighter secular forms, such as French chansons and Italian madrigals. His sacred works show an allegiance to the techniques and models of his Flemish predecessors Josquin and Mouton.

Perhaps Willaert’s most important legacy, however, was from his duties as a teacher at St. Mark’s. His mastery of polyphonic writing, along with his theoretical ideas, were to heavily influence Gioseffo Zarlino, who succeeded him as maestro di cappella in 1565. Zarlino held the post until his death in 1590. Better known as a theorist, whose work with the Pythagorean theory helped to shape the concept of dividing the octave into the intervals we recognize today, Zarlino nonetheless wrote many motets that are learned and polished. Among his students were Merulo and Croce.

Claudio Merulo was primarily an organist, considered by many of his contemporaries to be the finest of his generation. He was appointed organist at St. Mark’s in 1557 and remained in the doge’s employ for thirty years. Working briefly as a printer (Venice having become the center for publishers), he also composed several books of madrigals, numerous motets, and much solo organ music. His motets for single choir, such as "Salvator noster, dilectissimi" heard tonight, have a massive quality that is less influenced by the intimate madrigal style favored by his colleagues.

Becoming a member of the choir at St. Mark’s while still a boy, Giovanni Croce took orders in 1585 and became a priest. After working at a parish church, he was appointed vicemaestro di cappella of St. Mark’s in the early 1590’s, and in 1593 was put in charge of teaching singing at its seminary. In 1603 Zarlino’s successor died, and Croce was appointed the maestro. He suffered from gout, however, and there is evidence that during his six-year tenure the choir did not perform up to its usual standard. Croce’s church music is conservative. His four-part motets, such as tonight’s "O sacrum convivium," are excellent examples of small-scale church music, probably intended for his old parish church. Describing these works in Grove’s Dictionary, Denis Arnold writes, "Designed for a group of singers lacking a true soprano, they are very easy to sing, never too demanding in either technique or emotion even when a penitential text might suggest a less detached attitude." His earlier works in the cori-spezzati style, however, are more traditional to St. Mark’s and show the influence of Giovanni Gabrieli, his almost exact contemporary. Listen for this in "Buccinate."

Along the way, these composers knew and worked with Giovanni Bassano. He was a cornett player appointed as a member of the instrumental ensemble at St. Mark’s as a teenager. He also taught singing in the seminary and in 1601 was named head of the instrumental ensemble at the cathedral. While Bassano’s primary importance is in the instructional books he wrote, along with his method of embellishing, he was also a talented composer. Again I quote Denis Arnold: "Bassano also composed some excellent motets for cori spezzati, less intense than those of Giovanni Gabrieli but brighter in sonority in the manner of Giovanni Croce and Andrea Gabrieli. ‘Dic nobis, Maria’ (1599) is especially attractive with strong rhythms and lively use of the upper voices."

So much for the composers you have never heard of. Now we come to the big three, on whom the fame of Venetian Renaissance music rests. Andrea Gabrieli was organist at St. Mark’s from 1566 until his death in 1586. He therefore worked under Zarlino and alongside Merulo and Bassano. He was respected as a performer although not as highly as his fellow organist Merulo. And while it took the posthumous efforts of his nephew Giovanni to get his works published, we can see that Andrea Gabrieli helped to establish a distinctive Italian style that is independent of the traditional Netherlands technique. Owing to the tremendous resources available to the musicians at St. Mark’s, a large number of his motets use eight or more voices, and most use texts belonging to the major festivals of the Venetian year. As Arnold puts it, "Gabrieli’s novelty of style lies in his appreciation of how this separation [of the divided choirs] could be exploited to give the effect of quickly moving dialogue, with the choirs constantly alternating in phrases of varying lengths and thus providing an element of unpredictability." As you will hear in the Magnificat, he enjoyed creating a deliberate contrast of voices, pitting a high choir against a low choir. In later years, as the ensemble at St. Mark’s was expanded, it became possible to reinforce the high and low voices with cornetts and sackbuts (trombones), further heightening the contrast.

As mentioned above, Giovanni Gabrieli edited a large number of Andrea’s works for publication on his uncle’s death. The most important is a collection of large-scale secular and sacred pieces published in 1587, which is a prime source of Venetian ceremonial music. He also took over his uncle’s role as the principal composer of such music in St. Mark’s, as well as the responsibility of hiring the extra musicians needed for the important annual festival days. Giovanni’s compositions represent the pinnacle of the Venetian school begun with Willaert. His influence on such students as Heinrich Schütz makes him one of the most significant figures of the time.

Most of Gabrieli’s motets were written for the state festivals and therefore use texts appropriate to the occasions and usually employ two or more choirs in the tradition of cori spezzati. Historians now believe that certain choirs were performed by homogenous groups of instruments, such as violins or flutes or cornetts for the upper choirs, sackbuts or curtals (bassoons) for those of lower tessitura, and that in these choirs at least one part had to be sung to ensure textual completeness. Choirs marked "cappella" were the only ones to use voices in all parts. As an example of this distribution of forces, listen to tonight’s opening work, "Exultet jam angelica turba." Here there are two distinct groups, an upper and lower choir, each with five voices. A sackbut and a curtal play the lowest voices of each choir while cornetts double other parts. Toward the end of the work, a third choir, marked "cappella," emerges to bring the piece to a grand conclusion of repeated alleluias.

The only other composer from the period to be as revered as Giovanni Gabrieli, or as often performed today, is Claudio Monteverdi. Born in Cremona to non-musicians, his early life included musical training at the local cathedral, although he never sang in the choir. Clearly precocious, he published his first book of three-part motets at age fifteen. A few years later he was working as a string player, and eventually he landed a steady job as a viol player in the ducal palace in Mantua. He very quickly became one of the leading musicians in Mantua, publishing three books of madrigals during this period (1590-1600). Then, in 1601, when the maestro di cappella at the Mantua cathedral died, he was appointed to the post. It is clear that until this promotion he had no responsibility for writing church music, and throughout his career his duties in this sphere were nominal.

Although he wrote a six-voice mass based on themes from Gombert’s "In illo tempore" at around the same time, the Missa "In illo tempore" you will hear tonight is a work that was only recently discovered in 1975 in the archives of Santa Barbara in Mantua. While the authorship was at first unknown, scholars have deduced that it must come from Monteverdi’s pen. Based on the four-voice motet "In illo tempore" by Cristoforo Morales, it is in a strict post-Palestrina style, very concise and functional in form. For all its comparative austerity, I find this to be a work of transcendent beauty.

It was not until later that Monteverdi became the maestro di cappella at St. Mark’s. In 1612, now living in Cremona, he got the call to come audition with performances of his church music in Venice. Monteverdi easily won the job and found himself largely concerned with the reorganization of the cappella. Apparently, Croce’s successor in the position fared no better in training his musicians, and Monteverdi was left to mop up a sad situation. Along with reintroducing the custom of singing masses at weekday services as well as on Sundays, he brought in virtuosic players and singers, and shortly thereafter the ensemble went from a per-diem basis to a full-time payroll. He proved to be an adept, efficient administrator and held this post until his death thirty years later. Although Monteverdi must surely have written many large-scale works for St. Mark’s, as he was expected to produce fresh pieces for each festival, most of this music is presumed to be lost. The works extant today, found in two volumes published in 1615 and 1629, do not account for his long tenure. Fortunately many smaller motets remain, as do the incomparable operas and madrigals which place him in the firmament of history’s great composers.

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