Nationalism and Music

While not technically Early Music, here are some thoughts on “patriotic" music for this Early Music Monday.
”This use of folk music by the bourgeois was more to reassure themselves of the authenticity of their own patriotism as well as an appeal across the social barriers of the time. (For the nobility, it was not the national loyalties that counted, but dynastic ones.)”. Read more here

Chiavette

Hotly debated by theorists for centuries, Early Music Monday tackles the challenges of pitch level and clefs. What were “high clefs” and what did that really mean for performers?

Chiavette (plural of Italian: chiavetta, [kjaˈvetta] "little clefs") is a system of standard combinations of clefs used in polyphonic music of the 16th through 18th centuries, differing from the usual chiavi naturali (the combination of soprano, alto, tenor, and bass clefs.) Typically, these clefs place each staff line a third lower than usual. (A second possible set of clefs, in contrabasso, places each staff line a third higher; this is less common outside of Franco-Flemish compositions.)

Chiavette1.svg

The first author to mention a standard set of high clefs is Silvestro Ganassi dal Fontego, in his 1543 Regula Rubertina, chapter 22, which instructs the musician to transpose such music down a fifth.[1][2] Other theorists, such as Adriano Banchieri (1601) and Picerli (1631), indicate to transpose down a fifth if there is no key signature, and a fourth if there is a flat indicated. By mid-century, Italian commentators only mention a transposition down a fourth, and still later the practice seems to have been to transpose downward by a third to account for the high pitch of Italian organs.[2] The Austrian theorist Johann Baptist Samber (1707), meanwhile, gave as his rule to transpose downward by a fourth if the bass is notated in F3, but a fifth if it is notated in C4.[2]

Chiavette (plural of Italian: chiavetta, "little clefs") is a system of standard combinations of clefs used in polyphonic music of the 16th through 18th centuries, differing from the usual chiavi naturali (the combination of soprano, alto, tenor, and bass clefs.) Typically, these clefs place each staff line a third lower than usual.

Spem in alium

How big was the scale of polychoral music? The biggest was a mass by Alessandro Striggio for 5 choirs of 12, totaling 60 independent polyphonic lines. Lassus, Malvezzi, Rossetto, and others wrote 30-50 part pieces. But the best known is Tallis’ Spem in alium for 40 voices (8 choirs of 5).

Spem in alium (Latin for "Hope in any other") is a 40-part Renaissance motet by Thomas Tallis, composed in c. 1570 for eight choirs of five voices each. It is considered by some critics to be the greatest piece of English early music. H. B. Collins described it in 1929 as Tallis's "crowning achievement", along with his Lamentations.[1]

The early history of the work is obscure, although there are some clues as to where it may have been first performed. It is listed in a catalogue of the library at Nonsuch Palace, a royal palace that was sold in the 1550s to the Earl of Arundel, before returning to the crown in the 1590s. The listing, dating from 1596, describes it as "a song of fortie partes, made by Mr. Tallys". The earliest surviving manuscripts are those prepared in 1610 for the investiture as Prince of Wales of Henry Frederick, the son of James I.

A 1611 commonplace book written by the law student Thomas Wateridge contains the following anecdote:

Spem in alium ( Latin for "Hope in any other") is a 40-part Renaissance motet by Thomas Tallis, composed in c. 1570 for eight choirs of five voices each. It is considered by some critics to be the greatest piece of English early music. H. B.

When good composers do bad things...

How should we handle composers whose actions crossed moral/ethical lines?
Gesualdo murdered his wife, Gombert was a child molester, … the list goes on and on.
In my opinion, if the music is good, present it. BUT address these issues in spoken/written notes so the performances aren’t tacit approval of behavior.