SFCA’s “Musical Menagerie” Program

Adriano Banchieri, Venetian composer of a madrigal whose text consisted of animal sounds (Cartella musicale, Giacomo Vincenzi, 1614, public domain, from Wikimedia Commons)

Yesterday afternoon at St. Mark’s Lutheran Church, San Francisco Choral Artists (SFCA) concluded its 40th season. Readers may recall that the title of this final program was Welcome to the Zoo! A Musical Menagerie. The prelude was the Renaissance madrigal by Adriano Banchieri “Contrapunto bestiale alla mente,” which the program book translated as “Counterpoint by Animals in their Minds.” The text amounts to “Latin nonsense,” but the bass voice singing the words is accompanied by animal sounds made by the other vocalists. This was the perfect offering for “welcoming” the attentive listener to what would follow.

What did follow was a plethora of original a cappella vocal compositions by 23 different composers (three being world premieres) and one Samoan folk song. Two of the composers were contemporaries of Banchieri and thirteen of them were living. Three of the living composers contributed world premiere offerings: “The Lizard” by Patricia Julien, “Seal Lullaby” by Zoe Yost,” and “Benjamin Bandicoot” by Bryce McCandless. Only the final selection, Prayers from the Ark, was a multimovement composition, beginning with “Noah’s Prayer” followed by the prayers of a little bird, a cat, a mouse, the raven, and the dove (the last two being the only ones to appear in Genesis).

While the number of selections was relatively large, the compositions themselves tended to be brief. As a result, the program was performed entirely without intermission. As far as I was concerned, this made for a more coherent journey through the full menagerie. Each individual selection left me with both satisfaction and curiosity as to what would come next. It also left me with a new perspective when I look out from my window to see dogs being walked down Franklin Street!

SFCA Goes to the Dogs (and Other Animals)

Poster design for the performance being discussed (from the Web page for ticket purchases)

San Francisco Choral Artists, led by Artistic Director Magen Solomon, will conclude its 40th season with a program whose full title is Welcome to the Zoo! A Musical Menagerie. The selections will span a wide range of music history with a Renaissance madrigal by Adriano Banchieri (“Contrapunto bestiale alla mente”) at one end and two world premiere performances at the other. One of those, “Seal Lullaby,” will feature the work of this season’s Composer-in-Residence Zoe Yost. The program will be arranged into seven sections with the following titles:

1. Serious Birds
2. Very Small Animals
3. Reptiles & Creatures of the Waters
4. Silly Birds
5. Cats and Dogs and Bandicoots
6. Large Four-Legged Creatures with Fur
7. Animals of the Ark

The San Francisco performance of this program will take place at 4 p.m. on Sunday, June 8. The venue will be St. Mark’s Lutheran Church, which is located at 1111 O’Farrell Street, just west of Franklin Street. A Web page has been created for online ticket purchases on a pay-what-you-will basis. Tickets at the door will be sold for $35 with a $30 rate for seniors and $15 for those under the age of 30.

Getting Beyond the Bad Old Days of Early Music

courtesy of Naxos of America

During both my undergraduate and graduate years as a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, there were almost no opportunities to encounter engaging performances of repertoire that pre-dated Johann Sebastian Bach. That was a time when membership in the Musical Heritage Society provided a generous number of recordings, and the ones originating in Europe tended to rule over any performances in the United States. Indeed, about the only American group that provided recordings was the New York Pro Musica; and in 1966 Everest Records released a seven-record set entitled New York Pro Musica: An Anthology of Their Greatest Works. After I acquired this anthology, I discovered that the contents did not include any useful booklet notes for any of the records. It was only after I became an Assistant Professor of Computer and Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania that I began to dig up useful information sources to compensate for Everest’s negligent packaging, and that was because my office was in a building that was right next to the Music Department!

The one record in the collection that interested me when I first acquired the collection was an album entitled Festino, a cycle that constituted the third book of madrigals in five voices composed by Adriano Banchieri, which was published in Venice in 1605. It was only much later that I learned that the full title could not fit on a record label: Festino nella sera del giovedì grasso avanti cena (party on the evening of Shrove Tuesday before dinner). In other words the madrigals were to be sung as part of the last festive occasion prior to Ash Wednesday and the beginning of Lenten solemnity. As might be expected, there was more than a little raucousness associated with Banchieri’s music and texts, the most obvious of which was the eleventh, entitled “Contrappunto bestiale alla mente” (bestial counterpoint for the mind). One did not need program notes to relish the imitations of barnyard sounds in the text of this madrigal.

Over the many years that followed, I lost touch with the music of Banchieri; and the Festino became a distant memory. Thus, when I learned that, at the beginning of this month, Tactus released an album of this music, it was impossible for me to resist adding it to the queue I maintain of recordings I plan to cover. To my surprise, there was much more to this album than a cycle of nineteen madrigals. The Dramatodia theatrical company, directed by Alberto Allegrezza, reconstructed an entire Shrove Tuesday feast, interleaving the madrigals with narrations of texts by Giulio Cesare Croce, while also leading both vocal and instrumental resources. As the advance material for this album (which can be found on its Amazon.com Web page) observes, the entire performance serves up “an irreverent and paradoxical triumph of hyperbole, satire, jokes, and double meanings.”

That said, I have to confess that I came away feeling that this was a package that would have been better served by video, preferably with subtitles. There is no doubt that Allegrezza captures the orgiastic spirit of the music; but, when it comes to interleaving the madrigals with Croce’s texts, a well-staged visual account would have been far superior to simply reading the texts being declaimed. Fortunately, Tactus created a Web page for a PDF of all of the texts, both sung and spoken, the only down-side being that it is only in Italian! However, if the creative team behind this album really wanted to do justice to the indulgent extremes of a pre-Lenten feast, a visual account would have had far more impact than an audio recording, on which the impact of the music rises high above the spoken interjections.

Composition and Disclosure in Description

This past Thursday, in a piece for Examiner.com about the first symphony of Gustav Mahler, I presented the extensively prolonged introduction to the first movement in terms that the German Medievalist Ernst Robert Curtius had applied to the Roman poet Ovid. Curtius was discussing the literary genre of landscape description, and he was specifically comparing Ovid to Virgil. His point was that Virgil approached description as a process of composition presenting the component parts and elaborating on how they were assembled in what Curtius called an "epic succession of scenes." Ovid's approach, on the other hand, involved a strong preference for rhetoric over logic, using rhetorical devices to convey the impression that the described landscape "comes into existence before our eyes." In my Examiner.com piece I referred to Ovid's strategy as one of disclosure to distinguish it from Virgil's "composition."

On further reflection I realize that one possible indicator of "progress" in music history may involve an appreciation of rhetoric-based disclosure as an alternative to logic-based description. We find approaches to "sound painting" through music going all the way back to the Middle Ages; and in its earliest forms it tends to be based on the "composition" of sound effects. Tonight in San Francisco San Francisco Renaissance Voices will be singing examples of this approach in the Festino nella sera del giovedì grasso ("Entertainment for the eve of Carnival Thursday") of the Renaissance composer Adriano Banchieri. More familiar to most listeners is Antonio Vivaldi's musical "translation" of four descriptive sonnets, one for each of the four seasons of the year, in the first four of his Opus 8 violin concertos. We find a similar compositional approach to description in the sixth ("Pastoral") symphony of Ludwig van Beethoven.

Without trying to be historically accurate over when the disclosure strategy first appeared in music, I would suggest that its first major appearance took place in the prelude to Richard Wagner's Das Rheingold, where, with his customary arrogance, he brought "into existence before our eyes" (or ears) the entirety of the natural world. I selected Wagner because, as a conductor, Mahler was as familiar with Wagner as he was with Beethoven. Thus, he understood that certain works were of a descriptive nature (what we would call a "text type" in literary theory) and that Wagner had pursued a descriptive strategy significantly different from that of Beethoven. Thus, it may be that he decided to take Beethoven's approach in composing his Wayfarer songs and then move on to Wagner's strategy to begin his first full symphony, which drew upon material from that song cycle.