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Polychoral Music: A Venetian Phenomenon?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 1981

Anthony F. Carver
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Extract

It used to be thought that Willaert invented double-choir music, drawing his inspiration from the famous organ galleries in San Marco. That his Salmi spezzati were not unique or even innovatory is now beyond dispute. His predecessors and contemporaries working in other important churches of the Veneto — Albertis in Santa Maria Maggiore, Bergamo, Ruffino and Passetto in Padua Cathedral and the Basilica del Santo, Santacroce in Treviso Cathedral — contributed to a significant regional repertory of double-choir psalms, many of which are more adventurous in their use of the medium than those of Willaert. Ruffino extended the use of double-choir to the ordinary of the mass.

Type
Research Article
Information
Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association , Volume 108 , 1981 , pp. 1 - 24
Copyright
Copyright © 1983 The Royal Musical Association and the Authors

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References

1 See Giovanni d'Alessi, ‘Precursors of Adriano Willaert in the Practice of Coro Spezzato’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, v (1952), 187.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 In his Missa Verbum bonum, Verona, Accademia Filarmonica, MS 218, Discantus f.45r. For a transcription see Anthony F. Carver, The Development of Sacred Polychoral Music to 1580 (diss., University of Birmingham, 1980), ii, 187.Google Scholar

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8 A possible offshoot of the salmo spezzato was Festa's Litany: Costanzo Festa, Litaniae Deiparae Virginis ex sacra scriptura collectae (Munich, 1583), RISM F 643. Transcription in Carver, Development, ii, 160; discussion ibid, i, 83–5. The piece applies a mixture of anti-phonal and responsorial techniques.Google Scholar

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45 Printed in Lyons; RISM P 2017.Google Scholar

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52 See below.Google Scholar

53 See note 4.Google Scholar

54 Zwickau, Ratsschulbibliothek, Mus. 109, 1. Modern edition by Hugh Keyte (London, 1980), who suggests that it may have been first performed in Florence in 1561.Google Scholar

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57 Reprinted from O. di Lasso, Modulorum … secundum volumen (Paris, 1565), RISM L 784; modern edition: Sämtliche Werke, xxi, 63.Google Scholar

58 Modern edition: P. Giovanelli, Novus thesaurus musics Vol. V, ed. A. Dunning (= CMM, lxiv) (Rome, 1974), 154, where it is unaccountably not laid out in two choirs.Google Scholar

59 Complete transcription in Carver, Development, ii, 279.Google Scholar

60 Osthoff, Niederländer, 333–5.Google Scholar