Bartłomiej Gembicki

This article discusses the concept of ‘Monteverdi’s Vespers’ as represented in contemporary record releases of the composer’s works. This concept refers both to Monteverdi’s Vespro della Beata Vergine, published in 1610, and to various modern compilations of his works which musicians, musicologists and producers refer to as ‘Vespers’. The great wealth of Vespers-related pieces held in libraries and archives still considerably outweighs the number of performances and recordings of those works. Monteverdi’s Vespers, on the other hand, make up the majority of existing recordings of seventeenth-century polyphonic Vespers and thus constitute a key point of reference. I analyse around 500 albums (not only with Vespers music) released between 1952 and 2019, focussing on their iconographic and typographic content, as well as their graphic designs, in an attempt to show how the modern vision of this repertoire came to be formed and what persons and places are associated with this current in the history of early music recording.

Various definitions of the term ‘polychorality’ and instances of its use show how much researchers differ in their understanding of this concept. Even more interestingly, they rarely explain the terms which they apply, so readers have to find out the meanings themselves, which obviously gives rise to multiple meanings and interesting problems of interpretation. In this essay I am looking closely at a very popular term—widely represented in various discourses on polychorality by scholars, performers, or music marketers—cori spezzati (usually translated into English as ‘broken’ or ‘divided choirs’). For some scholars, cori spezzati is understood as a synonym for polychorality or as a very specific kind of that technique, referring, for example, solely to polychoral compositions from the sixteenth century. A large quantity of recently published books and articles dedicated to the history of Venetian Music deals with corrections of misunderstandings and generalizations made by earlier generations of scholars. ‘Mistakes’ are often inscribed in the capacious category known as the “myth”. Instead of talking about the ‘myth of cori spezzati’, however, I prefer to refer to meme theory.

The main purpose of my dissertation is to characterise selected narratives related to the contemporary (since around 1950) reception of the early modern Venetian music (including both musicology and musical performance). I try to examine examples of Vespers music composed from the 16th to the 18th century, since this kind of repertoire is often associated with the Venetian music practice, particularly with the St. Mark’s church – the most important religious centre of the Serenissima.
Therefore, more than the Venetian music itself I consider here its meanings, contexts and finally myths, which aroused around it in the recent past. One of the crucial question I pose here is to what extent the way scholars, musicians and music producers apply particular terms (such as ‘vespers’, ‘reconstruction’ or even ‘Venice’) can affect the modern perception of the musical past. Despite the use of different tools (musicological or performative), vehicles (academic and popular publications, music albums or concerts) and various approaches to sources (musicological hypothesis and their sonic implementation), the contemporary image of the Venetian music culture constructed by people of different professions may be established by the same myths.

A large quantity of recently published books and articles dedicated to the history of Venetian music deals with corrections of misunderstandings and generalizations made by earlier generations of scholars. ‘Mistakes’ are often inscribed in the capacious and vague category known as the ‘myth’. If I wanted to adopt a similar narrative, I should probably inscribe examined here terms into a such set of myths. However, instead of focusing on the myths themselves I prefer to refer to the meme theory. According to this daring but constantly discussed and improved hypothesis meme is an element of culture, transmitted by non-genetic means and just like the gene ‘tends’ to replicate itself. The best example of memes are words which copying and mutation does not need to be necessarily associated with their understanding. What is innovative and controversial in this theory is that memes are the main beneficiaries of their reproduction.

The first three words from the title impose structure on my dissertation. The text is therefore divided into three parts: ‘memes’, ‘psalms’ and ‘myths’. Names which appear in the title (a sixteenth century composer Adrian Willaert and a present-day conductor John Eliot Gardiner) determine the time frame of the dissertation.

At the beginning of the first part (chapter 1) I characterise chosen narratives connected to polychoral music. Then (chapter 2) I discuss the origins and significance of certain key-words typical for this kind of the repertoire. I examine particularly the Italian term cori spezzati, widely applied by modern scholars and performers.

In the second part of the dissertation I focus entirely on the Vespers music. I begin with the short introduction to the liturgical context of the Vespers service emphasizing particularities of rituals order in the ducal church (chapter 1). Subsequently (chapter 2), I discuss the settings of Vespers psalms possibly connected to St. Mark’s church. They consist of incredibly vast collection of very simple two-choirs compositions written from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century and are rarely performed today and almost never mentioned in the modern textbooks. In the last section of this part (chapter 3) I pose a few questions concerning what can be learned about Italian polyphonic Vespers – or rather their contemporary reception – from their recordings, mainly from album covers, assuming that our knowledge of early repertoire is shaped not only by the music itself and by the way it is performed, but also (perhaps in particular) by the methods employed to present it.

The third and the last part of my PhD thesis brings the discussion to another, more theoretical ground. It is entirely dedicated to the term ‘myth of Venice’, well represented in Venetian studies of different specialities. I start with the short history of this notion and its meanings, mainly in historical literature. The main emphasis is placed on the term ‘myth’. By recalling different definitions taken from myth studies I try to prove that in the context of the Venetian historiography the term ‘myth’ functions as a kind of interpretative pass key. What is more, scholars can be sometimes considered as mythmakers rather than mythologists. In the last chapter I track examples of implementations of the term ‘myth of Venice’ into music and musicological contexts.

The present article is devoted to selected views regarding polychoral technique to have appeared in the writings of Polish musicologists. A brief survey of those views forms the starting point for an attempt to pinpoint how polychoral technique has been defined by scholars (the context of Polish music serves here only as a background). Their views are then confronted with definitions found in the Western musicological literature. Special emphasis is placed on the so-called Italian schools of composition, especially the ‘Venetian polychoral school’. Another major issue discussed in the article is the inconsistent use of the term cori spezzati by scholars, who often treat it as synonymous with polychoral technique.

Deborah Howard, an architect involved in numerous projects related to the acoustics of Venetian churches and performance practice during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in one of her articles (2013), analyses recordings linked to the repertoire of St Mark’s. As regards one of the recordings in question she writes that it does not fully reveal ‘the festive role of music in St Mark’s’. In this paper I am not going to show what was the ‘real role’ of music in San Marco. I am much more interested in the extent to which this role is shaped or even constructed by present-day researchers or music performers and producers. I shall also consider the way in which a description of a particular musical technique (like polychorality) can influence contemporary reception of similar examples deriving from other places and periods. For both of these problems the history of polychoral music in Venice provides plenty
of material worth considering. For instance, a large quantity of recently published books and articles deals with corrections of misunderstandings and generalizations made by earlier generations of scholars. But these ‘mistakes’ are often inscribed  in the capacious category known as the “myth of Venice”. In the last part of my paper I will focus on the concept of myth and whether it is still the most accurate category to describe such a phenomenon.

A substantial part of the modern recordings of the so-called early sacred music consists of the Vespers psalms and Magnificats. Some of them attempt to reconstruct a specific performance from the specific day from the past, taking into account the possibly performed repertoire and the place of the service. In my paper I will consider some of these recordings, focussing on 16th- and early 17th-century Italian (mainly Venetian) Vespers collections. It is not my intention to criticize decisions made by musicians and their historical accuracy but rather to ask questions about the strategy adopted by the performers and producers as well as the possible impact on the present-day reception of this kind of repertoire. Assuming that record covers, rather than merely illustrating albums, represent content in themselves, I take a look at about 200 recordings of Italian vespers from the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries in order to consider to what extent they can shape contemporary reception of early music.

Gi studi recenti dedicati alla musica nella chiesa di San Marco non solo hanno illustrato nuove scoperte archivistiche, ma hanno anche discusso nuove prospettive e interpretazioni. Basti menzionare gli studi su problemi di natura metodologica e terminologica, le ricerche nei campi dell’acustica e dell’architettura, o addirittura le letture sociologiche di stampo marxista.
Il grande interesse suscitato dal repertorio veneziano è evidente non solo in ambito accademico, ma anche e soprattutto nei campi concertistico e fonografico. Numerosi musicisti contemporanei (spesso dotati di un ricco armamentario musicologico) definiscono il proprio lavoro nei termini di una ‘ricostruzione’ storica. In questo settore, la musica per il Vespro della liturgia delle ore ha assunto una particolare rilevanza, frutto della popolarità dei Vespri della Beata Vergine di Claudio Monteverdi.
Durante la mia presentazione, vorrei proporre alcune riflessioni sul fenomeno dei ‘vespri Veneziani’ come una ‘costruzione’ frutto dell’interazione tra musicologici, musicisti, produttori etc. Cercherò di descrivere la ricezione moderna della musica per il vespro (soprattutto quella di Claudio Monteverdi), leggendola come una forma di mitografia in cui sono coinvolti non solo esecutori e divulgatori moderni, ma anche, ovviamente, storici e musicologi.