Last night at St. Mark’s Lutheran Church, Voices of Music (VoM) presented the third of the four concerts it prepared for its 2019–2020 season. The full title of the program was Stylus Phantasticus: Virtuoso music of the 17th century. It is unclear when the term cited in the title first emerged. However, it was documented by Athanasius Kircher, whose 1650 Musurgia Universalis accounted for nine styli expressi (styles of expression). The program notes by David Tayler (lutenist and co-Director of VoM) gave the following English translation of Kircher’s description of stylus fantasticus:
The fantastic style is especially suited to instruments. It is the most free and unrestrained method of composing, it is bound to nothing, neither to any words nor to a melodic subject, it was instituted to display genius and to teach the hidden design of harmony and the ingenious composition of harmonic phrases and fugues. It may especially be seen in those works which are commonly called fantasias, ricercars, toccatas and sonatas.
In other words the style allowed for an adventurous departure from the strictly strophic approach to songs or the ternary form that had been emerging since the twelfth century for both songs and dances. Mind you, such a departure had probably entered practice, in one way or another, long before Kircher wrote his treatise. Think of the endless numbers of verses in the thirteenth-century Cantigas de Santa Maria. Can we really imagine that a singer would have droned his (and, yes it probably was a “he”) way through them all in rigid repetition, rather than inventing little embellishments to endow each verse with its own meaning? (Actually, when Russell Oberlin released his recording of the Cantigas, his variations from one verse to the next ran the gamut from minimal to non-existent.) The very idea of a fantasia, as Kircher cited it, suggested the potential for spontaneous invention that was part of an ongoing practice that Kircher was simply legitimizing through documentation.
By the twentieth century the English language had its own term for such spontaneity. Many may have thought that “jamming” was a practice exclusive to the jazz world; but it was just a new word for a centuries-old practice. Nevertheless, from a contemporary point of view, that spirit of jamming was very much alive and well in last night’s VoM concert. This was particularly evident in the many stunning solo turns taken by violinist Augusta McKay Lodge. Similarly, while much of cellist Eva Lymenstull’s work involved providing continuo, she served up an equally dazzling solo in her account of a ricercar by Domenico Gabrielli (not to be confused with the differently spelled Giovanni Gabrieli).
On the wind side, Hanneke van Proosdij (the other co-Director of VoM) presented an equally virtuosic ricercar for recorder, composed by Aurelio Virgiliano. The other wind soloist was Doron David Sherwin playing cornetto. This instrument has the finger-holes of a recorder with the mouthpiece of an early trumpet, somewhat similar to the serpent (which dates back to the late sixteenth century) without all the curves.
The design amounts to an attempt to match wind technique with brass sonorities, and performance can be quite challenging. Sherwin made it all seem easy as pie, even playing his own inventions on vocal compositions by Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina and Orlande de Lassus. For most of his selections, Sherwin performed with the “backup” of a trio of sackbuts played by Greg Ingles, Mack Ramsey, and Erik Schmalz.
This was another one of those programs in which pretty much all of the selections and most of the composer names were unfamiliar, but the abundance of virtuosity made the evening a thoroughly memorable experience.
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