Cori Spezzati
The Spatial Art of Split-Choir Sound
Our season opens today with a celebration of the cori spezzati (“broken choirs”) tradition. This polychoral style arose in what is now northern Italy in the late 15th century and flourished in the centuries that followed, most famously at St. Mark’s Basilica in Venice. The style, whose major practitioners include Adrian Willaert (c. 1490–1562) and Giovanni Gabrieli (1557?–1612), grew out of traditional psalm-singing, in which two antiphonal choirs sing successive verses of plainchant in turn. Like many genres within the Classical idiom, however, it steadily evolved in complexity and grandeur.
By the early 16th century, two maniere (“styles” or “modes”) of polychoral singing had been established, both preserving the original plainchants. The first involved the alternation of polyphonically sung verses with plainchant—a blend of ancient psalmody and modern polyphonic style. The second involved the alternation of choral verses between both choirs, consisting of three to five voices, with no overlap between them. These techniques took hold among a collection of French and Flemish composers who emigrated to northern Italy in the early 16th century—as well as the native Italians with whom they intermingled—including not only Willaert, but Francesco Santacroce (c. 1478–c. 1556), Jachet de Mantoue (1483–1559), Ruffino Bartolucci (c. 1490–c. 1532), Dominique Phinot (c. 1510–c. 1556), and Jan Nasco (c. 1510–1561). This group made the leap to the third maniera by overlapping the end of one choir’s verse with the other choir’s next entrance before bringing them together in dense, eight-voice polyphony at the conclusion of each motet. This mature style soon spread widely—both geographically and to sacred texts outside the Psalms.
Born in Flanders, Willaert moved to Italy in the mid-1510s, eventually entering the service of the famous Este family in Ferrara. In 1527, he was appointed maestro di cappella at San Marco, a position he held for the last thirty-five years of his life. It was there that he began writing the grand double-choir motets of the third maniera. This fact, combined with the Basilica’s unique architecture—specifically, its opposing choir lofts—gave rise to the enduring assumption that Willaert wrote such settings for spatially separated choirs, though there is no actual evidence to support this. Still, San Marco rightly maintains its reputation as the epicenter of the spezzati style’s evolution in the century that followed. The first two works on today’s program come from Giovanni Gabrieli—who himself served at the Basilica for the last thirty years of his life—and his student Heinrich Schütz (1585–1672). Through Schütz, among others, the polychoral style spread to the German-speaking world. Schütz’s influence fell upon later composers like Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750), whose own polychoral psalm settings later inspired Felix Mendelssohn (1809–1847). Our final concert of the season will feature Mendelssohn’s double-choir setting of Psalm 2, alongside settings by Schütz and others, so tonight represents the start of a season-long journey from the origins of this tradition through the centuries of its evolution and influence.
Gabrieli’s Sacrae Symphoniae of 1597 is a collection of sixty-one pieces for various choirs of instruments and voices. The scale of these works—some scored for as many as three five-part choirs—attests to the musical forces available at the Basilica. Like many of Gabrieli’s sonatas in this collection, his Canzon per sonar duodecimi toni opens with a long-short-short figure of repeated notes that echoes through Choir I (voiced tonight by strings of the viol and violin families) before Choir II (a cornett and three sackbuts) interjects and pulls the whole ensemble into a triple-time dance. Following a return to duple time, Choir II takes up the opening motive again before transforming it in various ways. Later on, the two bass instruments anchoring each choir engage in a lively dialogue before the opening section returns to close the piece.
Gabrieli spent the last three years of his life teaching a young Heinrich Schütz, and Schütz’s work bears the footprints both of Gabrieli’s teaching and of the great musical changes that were afoot in Europe at the time, including an expanded harmonic palette, use of basso continuo, and gestures toward modern tonality. His Singet dem Herrn ein neues Lied imitates Gabrieli’s alternating passages of polyphony and homophony and flexible use of choral exchange. Schütz ventures beyond his teacher’s style, however, in his use of madrigalisms—such as his depictions of trumpets, trombones, and natural imagery—and heavy chromaticism. Schütz hews to tradition in the doxology, restating the opening material, bringing the two choirs together, and ending with a sustained plagal cadence.
Born sometime around 1510 in one of the French-speaking realms, Dominique Phinot evidently made his way to Italy in the early 1530s. By the 1540s, if not earlier, he entered the employ of the Duke of Urbino, gaining fame as maestro di cappella there. His setting of the Lamentations of Jeremiah is firmly rooted in the third maniera, though he displays a rare genius in the variation he obtains within it. Comprising six short movements, the work is a palindrome of sorts; movements I and VI, II and V, and III and IV all mirror each other in various ways. The opening entrances of the outer movements quote each other, as do the closing sequences of the second and fifth movements.
Phinot reserves his most striking writing, however, for the two middle movements, isolating the treble voices in movement III and the bass voices in movement IV to create delicate webs of polyphony in close harmony. This arresting diversion from Phinot’s otherwise traditional canvas of antiphonal polychorality fittingly forms the core of the Lamentations, expressing its most desolate passages:
We have become orphans, fatherless;
our mothers are like widows.
We must pay for the water we drink;
the wood we get must be bought.
With a yoke on our necks we are hard driven;
we are weary, we are given no rest.
We have given the hand to Egypt,
and to Assyria, to get bread enough.
In 1550, the Venetian publisher and composer Antonio Gardano issued a landmark collection of settings of the psalms commonly sung during Vespers services. The lion’s share of the music contained in this collection is by Willaert and Jachet, though it also includes works by Phinot and others. As these settings, adhering to tradition, are all based on their psalm’s plainchant, the sonic language each employs is primarily dictated by the mode of each psalm tone. We must therefore resist the modern expectations of tonal harmony as we listen. The Beati omnes collaboration between Jachet and Phinot, for instance, sounds somber to our modern ears, yet its text is full of joy, all of which is contained in a single, brilliant A major chord sounding just before the doxology. This fleeting moment vanishes with the very next tactus, as we revert to the chant melody’s dark fourth tone. Conversely, Willaert’s De profundis—setting one of the most desperate biblical texts—sounds bright and optimistic to us today.
The next portion of our program consists of selections from this monumental collection. The first is Willaert’s Credidi, propter quod locutus sum, performed tonight not with voices, but by strings and winds alone. While there is little contemporary documentation of performance practices of this music, nothing about the known forces at San Marco or the musical ethos of the time would have prohibited such a performance. Even absent human voices, Willaert’s compelling contrapuntal writing, shimmering blocks of homophony, tasteful dashes of harmonic adventurism, and inexorable build to the final “Amen” hold up brilliantly. Willaert treats this motet’s fourth tone rather differently here, destabilizing it through deft use of musica ficta and unexpected plagal moves.
We then come to Jachet and Phinot’s remarkable Beati omnes – composed, like the other collaborative motets in this compilation, in the second maniera. It is not known whether Jachet (best known as Jacquet of Mantua) and Phinot composed their joint motet in person or via correspondence between Mantua and Pesaro, but to Beati omnes Jachet contributed Choir I (the odd-numbered verses of Psalm 128), while Phinot contributed Choir II (the even verses). Notable in this setting is Phinot’s introduction of an ear-tweaking modal shift at “et videas bona Jerusalem.” The doxology contains a nod to earlier generations of Franco-Flemish composers with the insertion of a quinta vox that echoes the chant melody in canon. Choir I’s material will be performed by a solo quartet tonight – a practice consistent with Sanmarcan tradition and preserved in Schütz’s later compositions for coro favorito and cappella.
We then present another collaborative work, Jachet and Willaert’s Nisi Dominus, performed again by our Renaissance band. This setting of Psalm 127 is marked by persistent syncopation, even in the doxology, which features another canon. This portion of our program then concludes with a trio of motets by Willaert drawn from the final section of Gardano’s anthology. De Profundis stands out for its rich harmonies, effectuated by Willaert’s liberal use of ficta. Additionally, there are several elided cadences at choral exchanges, providing fleeting moments of dense polyphony. In convertendo Dominus follows in this same vein. Its opening triple-meter section, featuring both choirs in turn, suggests the dancing of the Israelites upon their homecoming from the Babylonian captivity. The rising motion that opens the chant melody predominates throughout, including a Baroque-style dotted ascending line in the bass of Choir II. Domine probasti me begins as Nisi Dominus’s opposite—stubbornly homophonic—though it eventually gives way to a series of duets between various pairs of voices, again hearkening back to the early Franco-Flemish composers. Its prevailing homophony then returns before the customary concluding eight-part polyphony. This work, sampling techniques spanning the first century of development of the spezzati idiom, is a fitting end to this portion of our program.
Two centuries after Willaert and his contemporaries brought the polychoral tradition to its first maturity, J.S. Bach penned some of the greatest examples of its evolved form. We close tonight’s program with perhaps the grandest of these, Singet dem Herrn ein neues Lied. Unlike the other works on tonight’s program, Bach’s opens with a joyful introduction deploying all eight voices. The second section features more traditional antiphonal exchanges, followed by a series of canonic duets in perhaps another nod to the Franco-Flemish School. The quintessentially Baroque second half of this first movement takes the form of an extended accompanied fugue, featuring the transfer of a melismatic subject across every part and ending with a partial recapitulation of the opening material.
The second movement—a chorale harmonization punctuated by a more florid four-part “aria” sung by our solo quartet—recalls the coro favorito–cappella texture codified by Schütz. The third and final movement then begins in the unexpected key of E-flat Major. Choirs I and II open the movement trading nearly homophonic material, but as these exchanges accelerate, the choirs come together before uniting for a concluding gigue-like fugue. Bach therefore brings the motet—and our program—to a close like the other works on tonight’s program: with clarity and climactic convergence.
by Nate Widelitz