Giulio Caccini

The principle question concerning the setting of any text to music is:
What does the music actually do to the text? How does it change or
transform it? The answer is twofold: first, music provides increased
expressivity, and second, it seeks to interpret the text. It is difficult to
express in words the additional depth of emotion achieved by adding
music to any text, let alone a story that concerns cruelty and death
and is directly related to religious beliefs. It is even harder to describe
how a composer might seek to contribute to our understanding
of this story by highlighting certain words, reordering the events,
or even by adding innovative elements to the traditional narrative.
Nonetheless, the developmental history of musical settings of the
passion is directly concerned with increased expressivity and is
intimately linked with developments in musical style. Study of musical settings requires reference to manuscript and source studies,
reception history, performance practice, cultural studies, and to
changing theological concerns, all of which demonstrate how
composers have sought to make the death of Jesus engaging to their
audiences.

Might composers of solo song and opera c.1600 have modelled these emerging musical forms, in part, on plainchant recitation? As this dissertation demonstrates, chant and monody were contiguous musical practices, united in their imitation of ancient speech-like song, with composers like Jacopo Peri, Giulio Caccini, and Claudio Monteverdi inserting chant-like formulas into their solo vocal works. The evocation of plainchant in early monody may have had a pointed purpose: to gesture musically towards antiquity and to formulate a distinct melodic character for solo-voiced music. This was by virtue of plainchant’s apparently “antique” remnants: use of mode, extended recitation, and centrality of text. By exploring intersections between sacred and secular spheres in Early Modern Italy, and by examining chant, monodies, and theoretical writings from ca. 1600, this dissertation highlights the previously obscured triangle of plainchant, ancient song, and monody. It furthermore provides new tools for analysis of music in the formative years of the first operas, and reframes sixteenth-century plainchant—largely neglected in music histories—as a significant creative force in Early Modern musical culture.

The article publishes the first "libretto" ever written. That is an unknown manuscript version of "Dafne" by Ottavio Rinuccini, the poet who then wrote "Euridice" (1600) the "opera in musica" staged at the wedding of Maria de' Medici and king Henry IV of France. The article, by analyzing the metric forms, reconsidering the theatrical genre, comparing the inedit text and what remains of its music, and shed new light on the cultural and social context which led to the birth of opera.

How could we manage the Orpheus’ heritage? How to handle a voice that charms the wild beasts and the gods, moving the rocks and silencing the mermaids?
Apparently it’s easy: it’s enough turning back to look and deal with one’s own Eurydice. But the path is more mysterious and fraught with pitfalls than one could imagine.
This short summary about the birth of opera and the development of artistic voice through the centuries and history of music is described throughout half-serious reflections of a modern ”grandchild of Orpheus”. It begins from the ‘glottal stop’, that is the origin of the voice (and many other things), following through the multifaceted phases of the challenges and trials every singer has to experience to become an artist, and therefore deserving the heritage of the most famous singer of mythology.

The activities we subsume under the single term 'improvisation' comprise a complex and varied field of musical behaviour, not all elements of which are quite as spontaneous or 'in the moment' as they might appear. This paper argues that the oral/written divide is less central for improvisation than the prepared/unprepared one. It also examines the constraining role of 'common practice' styles within  improvisation and how 'spontaneity' frequently is not a compositional 'cause' but an arch style of performance presentation. Finally it examines in relation to Caccini and Monteverdi the dialectic between oral and written cultures when improvisational practices began to be recorded in print c.1600,

How can academic research, continuing professional development, artistic training and international-level Early Opera performance be better integrated?

17th-century priorities guided Andrew Lawrence-King's 5-year investigation at the Australian Research Council's Centre for the History of Emotions and with IL CORAGO, the production company for historical staging. With a unique combination of academic rigour, unified focus, practitioner expertise and international scope, this program applied historical research to the development of new training methods for modern performers in some 2 dozen award-winning productions of Early Modern music-dramas and Historical Action worldwide.

The posted paper includes open access links to documentary films, videos and further articles.

"Il finto Arlecchino", breve commedia musicale scritta da Gian Francesco Malipiero nel 1925, costituisce un'occasione fondamentale per chi intende comprendere la riforma del melodramma portata avanti dal compositore veneziano. Opera 'sintetico-melodrammatica' per eccellenza, può essere considerata una metafora del conflitto tra il 'cantar bene' e il 'bel canto', qui rappresentati, rispettivamente, dall'eroico Arlecchino-Don Ippolito e dai simpatici corteggiatori di Donna Rosaura. Malipiero utilizza l'artificio narrativo di una gara canora e costruisce una divertente, ma mordace parodia dei vizi del teatro sette-ottocentesco, con un chiaro riferimento alle riflessioni già presentate nel saggio "I profeti di Babilonia" (1924). Il libretto della commedia è un collage di antiche poesie italiane, ricche di interpolazioni e variazioni: il compositore cita le liriche arcadiche di Magalotti e Rolli e i versi del 'prediletto' Poliziano, per ricreare lo spirito del teatro musicale delle origini.


"Il finto Arlecchino", a small-scale musical comedy written by Gian Francesco Malipiero in 1925, constitutes a paramount opportunity for those intending to understand the reform of musical theatre carried out by the Venetian composer. A ‘synthetic-melodramatic’ opera par excellence, it can be considered a metaphor of the conflict between two different singing models, namely the ‘cantar bene’ (singing properly) and the ‘bel canto’: these are represented by the heroic Arlecchino / Don Ippolito and by the funny suitors of Donna Rosaura, respectively. Malipiero used the narrative artifice of a singing competition and built up an amusing, yet mordant parody of the vices in the eighteenth-and nineteenth-century theatre, with a clear-cross reference to the reflections he previously presented in the essay "I profeti di Babilonia" (1924). The libretto of the comedy is a collage of old Italian poems presenting several interpolations and variations: the composer went back to the Arcadia poets Magalotti and Rolli and to his ‘favourite’ Poliziano to recreate the spirit of original musical theatre.

Despite the varied repertories of early Baroque solo singing, music history has tended to focus discussion on pitch-related aspects of Florentine recitar cantando and its supposed declamatory freedom from strict meter and the proportional execution of rhythmic values. Deriving some rhythmic performance practices from two even freer genres of florid singing, improvised octaves and Latin falsobordoni, this study examines their presence in two chamber monodies by Giulio Caccini and Kapsperger. Composed passaggi do more than emphasize poetic meter and individual words. They contribute to rhythmic organization and, in their patterns of distribution, they express central, non-verbal aspects of the poems.

ABSTRACT: Just over a century, art historiography, specially with German origin, seems to have redirected its reading of Italian Renaissance, focusing upon anticlassical components noticeable not only on the production of the 500' but also on the 400'. Following the historian Aby Warburg's perspective on pathos in Italian Renaissance art, we present here a parallel with aspects of certain strands of late Renaissance music. We seek to reveal similarities and differences in the process of survival or memory from Antiquity within both fields of expression, proposing a reading hypothesis of certain traces of avant-garde florentine music of this period.

RESUMO: Há pouco mais de um século a historiografia da arte, sobretudo de matriz germânica, parece ter reorientado sua leitura do Renasci-mento italiano, se debruçando sobre os componentes anticlássicos visíveis na produção não apenas quinhentista, mas também quatro-centista. A partir da perspectiva do historiador Aby Warburg sobre o pathos na arte italiana do Renascimento, fazemos um paralelo com aspectos de determinadas vertentes da música tardo-renascentista. Buscamos atentar para as similitudes e diferenças no processo de so-brevivência ou memória da Antiguidade nos dois respectivos campos da expressão, levantando uma hipótese de leitura de determinados traços da música da vanguarda florentina deste período.