Geographical proximity, ancient political ties, and continuing intellectual exchange had always bestowed common features upon music in Italy and the German-speaking countries. In the seventeenth century, expanding cities, exhibitionistic churches, profligate nobility, and burgeoning numbers of middle-class amateurs supported a rich profusion of new musical styles in both sacred and secular music. The stabilization of Protestantism in the north added further diversity. These groups demanded a rich menu of vocal ensemble works to display their standing. Such works ranged from large-scale festival works for major churches and the ruling class to smaller works for private gatherings, school choirs, and the day-to-day celebrations of city churches throughout Italy and the north. The rich variety of genres and styles obliges a modern performer to investigate a work’s musical construction in its original context.
The resolution of both stylistic and contextual issues addresses many questions: size and constitution of ensembles, vocal type and production, ornamentation and improvisation, tuning and pitch, tempos and rhythm, to name only the musical factors. Architectural venue, liturgical interactions, and dramatic or social contexts add further elements for consideration, which can only be alluded to here. Modern performance
practice thus depends on the model emulated as much as on the type of music or the apparent size of the ensemble indicated in the score. We are most familiar with large and celebrated ensembles of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: the Sistine Chapel, the chapel of Saint Mark’s in Venice, Michael Praetorius’s ensemble specifications, the Cathedral of Salzburg, the Habsburg Court, and performances at Hamburg’s Gertrudenkapelle.2 But smaller ensembles were much more common, and the ubiquity of part singing meant that the music had to be very adaptable.
Jerome Roche estimated that in the Po valley alone there were at least seventythree institutions employing a church composer as maestro di cappella, a significant indicator of the widespread use of polyphony. A city’s reputation rested partly on its church music, but these musical institutions were only the most visible ones in a culture well enriched by private music making and patronage among noble and wealthy citizens. The plethora of performing organizations explains the frenetic activity of Venetian (and other) music publishers required to supply them. Catholic areas of Germanic countries had similar social and ecclesiastical structures; and in Protestant areas, school music supplemented burgeoning civic, ecclesiastical, and private musical patronage. Considering all of these situations, we can postulate hundreds, perhaps thousands of singing organizations. The presence of so many models implies considerable variation in local practice and context within certain general parameters.
One key general principle is concertato practice. This principle arose from two significant developments of the sixteenth century: the advent of monody in the Florentine Camerata, and the use of cori spezzati in Venice and other Italian cities.
The monodic style enshrines a wide range of emotional contrast, while the works of Giovanni Gabrieli and other polychoral composers manifest contrasts of musical textures, timbres, dynamics, and spatial placement. Often, Gabrieli’s large works include choirs marked voce and cappella. The former were intended for a soloist on each line, the latter for a larger group of singers. A clear example of this practice, in which the two clearly labeled vocal choirs have dramatically different musical styles, is Gabrieli’s In ecclesiis. This principle of a choir of soloists (favoriti) versus a ripieno (full) choir became fundamental to seventeenth-century music throughout Italy and Germany, but it was influenced locally by the size of the available ensemble. At Saint Mark’s, where the number of singers grew from about twenty to forty in the first half of the century, alternation could still involve two choirs totaling only four and eight singers apiece; and even the normal maximum would have contrasted two solo quartets with two ripieno choirs of only sixteen voices each. Thus the normal ripieno would have used between two and four voices on a part. In Rome, for dedicatory celebrations in Saint Peter’s in 1600, multiple choirs included from three to six adults on a part, with more boys on the soprano and numerous instrumentalists whose roles are unspecified.
These were relatively large, opulent performances—exceptions to general practice. The Sistine Chapel’s thirty-odd members did not always perform together, and performances by extracted solo quartets may have been quite common. Even more common were small-to-middle-sized churches, like the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore in Bergamo, the chapel of the city. In the first decade of the seventeenth century, regular singers generally numbered around eighteen, with twelve to fourteen instrumentalists. Others were occasionally brought in, up to a total of twenty-five singers.
This fell off in the second quarter of the century to under ten singers, with about six instrumentalists. Part music was required on non-Lenten Sundays, some forty-six saints’ days, special occasions in Lent, and various vigils and processions. Similarly, at the beginning of the century, at the Basilica of San Antonio in Padua, there were three adults on each lower part, with unspecified numbers of boy sopranos. In the
third quarter of the century, the numbers at Santa Maria di Campagna in Piacenza were even smaller, with eight to ten singers and six instrumentalists in toto. In this case, the addition of a second singer on each part constituted the ripieno. By the end of the century, the cathedral of Messina had nineteen singers and ten instrumentalists. Thus, after subtracting four favoriti, the ripieno choirs normally used only two to four singers on a part.
When even smaller churches cultivated part music, they went so far as to use singers on some parts and organ on the rest, as described by Lodovico Grossi da Viadana. Monasteries and convents used polyphony, too, often with performance practices that astonish us. Practically any sacred polyphony was judged accessible to choirs of either gender. In male establishments, the presence of falsettists and occasionally boys and castratos permitted the use of the full vocal range in performance of virtually any liturgical polyphony. But female houses got around the physical vocal limitations we might allow to limit repertory by adopting expedients that would raise eyebrows today but that permitted them wide repertorial flexibility. They did not hesitate to perform polyphony not specifically composed for women, as well as occasional solo works. It was usually possible to find women who could sing in the normal tenor range, and—rarely—one who could sing bass. Otherwise, the problem of the bass part was solved by singing it up an octave or playing it at pitch on a bass instrument or the organ, or by transposition of the work upward by a fourth, fifth, or more. Yet even such tortured adaptations retained the distinction between favoriti and ripieno so characteristic of the Baroque concertato style.
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