The Ages of Bel Canto

Notes on the Program

by Michael Barrett

Italian composers have always devoted their greatest musical attention to the human voice, and the greatest Italian contribution to vocal music has been in opera. Until the 20th century, the art song was a poor and distant cousin to opera, often neglected as a serious genre by important composers. Fortunately, some composers gave up their grand ambitions for the stage long enough to write a few more intimate works for voice and piano with results as effective and beautiful as their operatic efforts.

Vocal music before the 16th century was contrapuntal and polyphonic. Arrangements for solo voice were frequently made with instruments playing the other vocal parts, but each line was still equal to the voice in importance. In the 16th century a group of Florentine artists and intellectuals known as the Camerata became influential to the future of Italian vocal music. Camerata members Giulio Caccini, a singer, voice teacher and composer, and Vincenzo Galilei (father of the astronomer) helped develop a new musical style. The new style known as stile rappresentativo eschewed equality of voices in favor of a stronger bass line. (This later became the basso continuo). Emphasis on the bass encouraged rich development of harmony which allowed for new experiments with melody. The new style also called for greater affinity of text and music. In Monteverdi’s “Ahi, Sciocco Mondo,” dotted rhythms express the anguish of bad fortune. Long descending scales illustrate death on the word morte. Likewise, Frescobaldi’s “Se L’aura Spira” uses a strong dance meter on the words “a balli” (come dance). Stile rappresentativo was, as a rule, modeled even more closely on actual speech and eventually became an integral part of the opera and oratorio in the form of recitative.

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