SFEMS PRESENTS

Special Event: La Morra

Ivo Haun de Oliveira, voice • Corina Marti, harpsichord, recorders • Michal Gondko, lute • David Hatcher, viola da gamba

with special guest Nigel North, lute

Friday, March 1, 7:30 pm • First Church Berkeley UCC

Derek Tam, Executive Director
Sarah Coykendall, Director of Operations
Daniel Cullen, Communications & Patron Services Manager
Stacey Helley, Administrator

Jan Brown, Production Manager
Zach Miley, A/V Engineer
Arthur Omura, Keyboard Crew

Staff and Consultants

The famous artist and scientist Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) was a musical man. Not only was he interested in the science of acoustics: he also designed musical instruments, played the lute (well enough to teach others) and accompanied himself, while singing, on the lira da braccio. For Leonardo, music was figurazione delle cose invisibili — “shaping the invisible”. 

Until he left for France in 1516 (where he spent the last four years of his life), Leonardo lived and worked in various places in his native Italy, notably in Florence, Milan, Venice and Rome. In the late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century those cities, as well as the courts of North-Italian nobility in Ferrara and Mantua and later also the papal court in Rome, were all places with a vivid musical life. It is in Leonardo’s Italy that oltramontani (literally “men from behind the mountains”, as the Italians called the many immigrant Franco-Flemish composers) created some of their most groundbreaking works at the request of wealthy nobility. The demand for their music and expertise was so great that native Italian musicians had little choice but to focus on cultivating what Northerners could not provide: improvised singing of Italian and Latin poetry, self-accompanied on a stringed instrument (such as the lute or lira da braccio). 

Originally from a small town in Tuscany, Leonardo spent many years of his life in Florence, where he became acquainted with the circle of the art-loving Medici family. The Sforza court in Milan was likewise attractive for musicians. However, it was in Venice, where Leonardo spent only a short period of time in 1500, that something of epochal significance was about to happen: in 1501, a Venetian publisher Ottaviano Petrucci issued the first ever printed collection of polyphonic music. Prior to this date, music, in order to be passed on, had to be either memorized or written down by hand. Now, technology became available that allowed production of music books in large quantities and much of the music previously only accessible to the few was within the reach of wider audiences for performance and study in written form. Petrucci recognized the commercial opportunity and continued publishing music books in the next decade and beyond. In the words of Stanley Boorman, “Petrucci’s production represents a major portion of the surviving music in each of the genres he covered”, providing posterity with a cross-section of old and new repertoire circulating in Leonardo’s Italy: from sacred music (masses and motets) through secular songs to purely instrumental music. With Se mai per maraveglia, an anonymous meditation on the suffering of the Christ on the cross, he even provided a sample of the seemingly uncapturable art of improvised singing which relied on poetical and musical patterns and memory for performance and preservation (and is thus almost entirely lost).

Petrucci’s publishing output contains, among other titles, as many as eleven books of frottole. Most of the songs performed in this program are frottole. The term frottola denotes a light secular song (chiefly in Italian) embracing a variety of poetic forms. This genre is rooted in the Italian tradition of improvised, self-accompanied singing of poetry. The chief hub for the cultivation of frottola was the North-Italian court of Mantua, where the marchioness Isabella d’Este (praised for her singing and lute playing by, among others, Leonardo himself) extended patronage over Italian poets and musicians (such as the famous singer-lutenist Marchetto Cara, a prolific composer of frottole). 

Before leaving for France, Leonardo spent three years in Rome (1513-1516). In 1513, the ascension of Giovanni di Lorenzo de' Medici to the papacy (as Leo X) brought about a Golden Age for musicians. Not only had  Giovanni inherited his family’s refined interest in, and zealous support of, the arts:  but above all else he favored music, for which his passion was legendary among contemporaries. A tangible proof of this (and of his proficiency as a composer) is a small but fine output of motets and instrumental pieces which survived with an attribution to the Pope (one of these compositions, the 5-part Cela sans plus, can be heard in today’s program). During Leo X’s pontificate the Sistine Chapel resounded with the best sacred music available, while the Pope’s private chambers were filled with the sounds of instruments, solo or in various constellations, with and without a vocal component. Musicians whom Leo selected to form part of his private musica segreta included, among others, the prodigy lutenist Francesco Canova da Milano (who later attained an almost legendary reputation which lasted until the end of the sixteenth century), the lutenist and viol player Gian Maria Alemanni (whose book of lute music was published by Petrucci but has not survived), and the keyboard virtuoso Marco Antonio Cavazzoni. In this time, Rome also became a hub of music printing, challenging the Venetian monopoly of Petrucci.

Such musical diversity is not easily reflected within the limited space of a concert (if it can be adequately reflected at all). Nevertheless, we believe that a glimpse of the fascinating “soundscape” of Italy at the turn of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries can be gained from the surviving manuscript and printed sources, and our goal is to provide one.

- Michal Gondko (Co-Director, La Morra)