Strange Harmonies of Love

NOTE: All of the music on this program is from rogue recording Strana armonia d'amore and features the ensemble Les Cris de Paris directed by Geoffroy Jourdain. It is in the Harmonia Mundi label and is HMM 905383. For complete information:

From ConcertoNet: This program by the excellent early music vocal ensemble Les Cris de Paris offers both enjoyment and food for thought to even the casual Renaissance music enthusiast. The premise is to offer the listener a sense of the surprisingly dissonant turn taken by composers of madrigals in Italy roughly around the turn of the sixteenth century—in some cases, extending to microtonality—together with a sample of contemporary microtonal music allegedly inspired by these early antecedents. “Allegedly” is the operative word here, for a reason that warrants some reflection on narratives about dissonance in music history.

The few modern works here, all by Francesca Verunelli (b. 1979), represent the sort of totally charmless academic writing that I had thought today’s composers were finally abandoning—clearly not all of them have. There is some attempt at a Renaissance ambience, but the works are not only tuneless but shapeless. By contrast, in the two microtonal pieces from the actual Renaissance included here, both by Nicola Vincentino (1511‑1575/76), the microtonal scale is used as a tool for expressive effect, and not as the entire toolkit or raison d’être of a work. Vincentino’s Musica prisca caput, in fact, whose text refers playfully to the composer’s attempt to revive ancient scales, begins with largely diatonic harmony, only gradually turning dissonant, with the expanded scale used less for vertical dissonance (that is, in what we would today call chords) than for horizontal dissonance, with the effect of a series of slow unprepared modulations. The other microtonal work by Vincentino here, Madonna, il poco dolce, relies on more frequent and sudden dissonant contrasts, often vertically and also within phrases.

This range of effects is present throughout the conventionally chromatic Renaissance pieces that make up the bulk of the program. Typical Renaissance phrase structure and voice‑leading are generally evident, and there is plenty of consonant harmony, with dissonances providing expressive seasoning. O miseria d’amante, by Michelangelo Rossi (c. 1601‑1656), somewhat follows the first-mentioned microtonal piece by Vincentino in alternating between very consonant and very dissonant episodes. It’s very effective, in a way that subtly anticipates the way later styles of music, such as Classical sonata form, would dramatize tonal contrasts.

Another important point here is that this music (except the Verunelli) was conceived around text, even though some of it appears here in partly or wholly instrumental transcription. (The liner notes defend this practice by some kind of historical argument, but really that’s superfluous: it is musically effective in a way that speaks for itself, and like the alternation between accompanied and a cappella singing, it provides some welcome textural variety.) These are settings of poems that tend to dwell on unrequited love. The liner notes dwell on the “strangeness” with which this music would have been heard at its time of composition, and surely it was heard as strange to ears unused to extreme dissonance, but I am sure the deeper expressive consonance registered too even then. Modern avant‑garde music is not unique simply for using a constant language of high dissonance, but for using this without reference to the particular expressive context—frustration or yearning—that dissonance more commonly evoked through the end of the common-practice era. Dissonance in Classical instrumental music serves, for instance, to increase tension in order to heighten the effect of the eventual resolution, and it is no accident that Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, proverbially the death knell of tonal harmony, used its then‑unprecedented level of harmonic instability precisely to depict unfulfilled romantic yearning. The juxtaposition of very early and very recent dissonance on this recording reminds us how uninteresting dissonance per se, without any consonant context or expressive purpose, generally is. It also makes one wonder how the later Baroque period, and, indeed, the subsequent history of Western music, might have developed had these Renaissance works provided a model for expressive and coloristic uses of dissonances beyond, most prominently, some works of J. S. Bach. As it stands, the musical world would have to wait until the Classical period and Mozart in particular for this to become a consistently prominent aspect of the musical landscape.

Samuel Wigutow