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Music City Baroque and Venice
Titled Venice and the Ottoman Empire, there has been an extraordinary exhibition in the Ingram Gallery at the Frist Art Museum for most of the summer. The exhibition looks at the long and quite turbulent relationship between the Republic of Venice and the Ottoman Empire as documented in several artistic mediums, including armor, glassware, metalwork, paintings, pottery, printed books, sculptures, silk textiles and even treasure rescued from a Venetian shipwreck. The exhibition engages multiple senses as it documents Venice as a very important trade city and also as a border between, or perhaps better, within both East and West.
The Music City Baroque, in another wonderful collaborative concert with the Frist titled From Constantinople to La Serenissima – Music of the Venetian and Ottoman Worlds, will add sound to those senses when they visit the museum to perform works from the era and place on August 24th. The concert will document the marvelous East-West cosmopolitan sound of Venice from the 15th to the 18th Century. I managed to get a look at the composers on the program; the works that they’ve chosen form a remarkably diverse list of composers and compositions—both well-known and not so well known. Here is a selective description of those composers and an admittedly selfish preview of the concert that gives those aspects that I am most excited to hear:
Bridging Eastern and Western traditions from the 17th century are the works of Ali Ufki and Dimitrie Cantemir. Ali Ufki was raised in Poland in the Calvinist Reformed church but eventually converted to Islam in Constantinople where he became the treasurer, translator, and court musician to the Ottoman Sultan. In a remarkable expression of cross-cultural understanding, he is known for Mezmûriyye (“Psalms”) a translation of the Calvinist Genevan Psalter into Turkish and adaptation of its organization to the Turkish modal system so that they might be comprehensible to a “Ottoman Turkish audience.”
Dimitrie Cantemir was a Moldavian folklorist and Prince who compiled a treatise on the theory of Turkish music using a sophisticated system of notation based on the Arabic alphabet. At the end of the treatise there are 350 instrumental pieces that serve as unique documents to an otherwise lost 17th Century Ottoman instrumental repertory. For the works by both of these composers, I will be listening for the beautiful, cross-cultural connection of their musical expression, where microtonality, spirituality, and historicism are couched in a context that is at once familiar and new.
Alongside these remarkable composers are works by some of the most pivotal and Avant-garde composers in the Western tradition of the Renaissance and Baroque eras. The three least well-known are Biagio Marini, Marco Uccellini, and Dario Castello who were known especially for their virtuosic compositional writing. Here I will be listening for the MCB’s remarkable virtuosity to bloom! While Uccellini did not work in Venice, both Marini and Castello were students or employees of our next composer, Claudio Monteverdi. They all worked at St. Mark’s Basilica in Venice (a structure, based on the 6th Century Church of the Holy Apostles in Constantinople, is itself an architectural monument to the meeting of East and West).
Many of Monteverdi’s works come down to us as masterpieces, from his operas (Orfeo, L’incoronazione di Poppea) to his madrigals. In particular, his madrigals are known for their juxtapositions of opposites e.g. Sì dolce è ‘l tormento (So Sweet is the Torment) places the ideas of “Sweet” and “torment” together, in a poetic text that was quite popular for composers in his day. Be sure to listen and follow along with the translation so that you can hear how his placement of dissonance and lamenting descending bass enriches the marvelous poetry and imagery of what otherwise might seem to be a simple strophic song:
| Si dolce è’l tormento Ch’in seno mi sta, Ch’io vivo contento Per cruda beltà. |
So sweet is the torment That lies in my heart, That I can live content With unfeeling, infatuating beauty. |
Antonio Vivaldi’s La Folia (The Follies or Madness) employs an ancient progression that had become so stylized by his time (over 150 composers have written variations of it) that it no longer expressed the original madness. Instead it became a musical convention over which musicians might improvise and often set in theme with variations. It is a simple recurring idea, like a 12 bar blues, a polka, or a waltz that provides a framework for a composer’s creative force. I’ll be listening for the way Vivaldi dramatizes the progression into remarkable different characters, gradually building from a dance-like character to the fearsome virtuosity of the explosive finale. Especially pay attention here to the ensemble, the work is vicious fast and the voices pass between the instruments with absolute abandon. To be done well, the players not only need to be good, they need to be good together.
Compared to some other cities of similar size, in the Music City there is a lamentable dearth of early music, something the Music City Baroque is working to mend, one marvelous concert at a time—especially next Sunday. Tickets for From Constantinople to La Serenissima: Music of the Venetian and Ottoman Worlds are on sale at Frist’s website here. See you there!
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Joseph E. Morgan is a father of two, husband, teacher and recovering guitarist in Middle Tennessee.
