Mapping the post-Tridentine motet (ca. 1560-ca. 1610): Text, style and performance The University of Nottingham, 17-19 April 2015 Participants' abstracts and biographies (in alphabetical order) Todd Borgerding (Colby College, USA): Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John sing a motet The counterreformation saw an explosion of literature directed at developing and improving the art of preaching in the Catholic Church. These books—sacred rhetorics, sermons and homilies, 'preachable discourses', exegetical works, and the like—often make reference to music, and sometimes specifically to motets. Their authors, usually noted preachers, write about music in several ways: in discussions about the power of music (typically references to the classics or scripture), descriptions of angelic choirs making music, and, of particular interest, in allegorical or metaphorical reference to the sorts of choirs they knew from their own experience—that is, choirs made up of humans, either living or historical. This paper examines the writings of several of these authors, including Melchior de Huélamo’s Discorsos predicables sobre la Salve Regina (1601) and Juan Bautista de Madrigal’s Discursos predicables de las Domincas de Adviento y Fiestas de Santos hasta la Quaresma (1605), in which these discussions focus on the motet. These authors use the allegory of the choir of Evangelists, with the Holy Spirit as maestro de capilla, creating and singing a motet, in order to explain how scriptural texts are interdependent on each other. By reversing their analogy, we can better see how early modern preachers, and by extension, listeners to the counterreformation motet, understood this music as an inter- textual complex of word, counterpoint, and meaning. Biography: Todd Borgerding holds degrees in musicology from the University of Minnesota (MA) and the University of Michigan (PhD), and has been a member of the faculties at Stony Brook University, The University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh, and Colby College, where he is currently Associate Professor of Music and teaches courses in Music History, Theory, and leads the Collegium. A Renaissance specialist, his research addresses a broad array of topics, including Iberian sacred music, rhetoric, sexuality, and improvisation. He is editor of Gender, Sexuality, and Early Music (Routledge 2002), and his articles appear in such journals as Musical Quarterly and collections such as Musical Childhoods and the Cultures of Youth (Wesleyan). His book on the Motet in Sixteenth Century Spain is forthcoming from the Univ. of Rochester Press. Mapping the post-Tridentine motet (ca. 1560-ca. 1610): Text, style and performance The University of Nottingham, 17-19 April 2015 Roger Bowers (Emeritus University of Cambridge): Users of printed collections of motets to sacred texts in Northern Italy, c.1560-1610 The huge number of madrigal books issued in Italy c.1560-1610 demonstrates the existence of a substantial clientele of musically educated households as purchasers and users, and the publication of madrigals and contrafacta to religious texts indicates that lay tastes extended also to pieces of sacred character. Simultaneously the Roman church was undertaking a thorough revision of its authorised corpus of service-books. Close study indicates that these offered but few points at which the progress of the liturgical service might be punctuated or marked by the performance of motets (Matins none, High Mass two, Vespers one); and in 1588 the papacy’s Sacred Congregation of Rites was established to procure thorough compliance in the observance of the revised liturgy, so that any occurrence of (for instance) irregular deployment of motets as counterfeit antiphons to Vespers psalms (sometimes miscalled ‘antiphon-substitutes’) was promptly condemned. Conceivably, therefore, the contemporaneous issue of great numbers of books of sacred motets was undertaken in expectation of satisfying a market lay as well as ecclesiastical, for performance at home by the devout as devotional exercises for domestic edification. Books published under fancily sentimental titles such as Riviera fiorita di concerti musicali and Giardino di spirituali concenti seem to have been aimed more at a domestic market than at any hard-bitten maestri di cappella in the churches. Volumes of Sacrae cantiones were presented not as exclusively ecclesiastical but as ‘sacred songs’, for singing in any environment; Motecta were offered as merely collections of brief pieces to sacred words, for performance anywhere. Biography: Roger Bowers retired from his office of Reader in Medieval and Renaissance Music in the University of Cambridge in 2005. His interest in all manner of aspects of the complex interactions between the composition of music in England, the nature of the forces which the Church and social elites saw fit to furnish for its performance, and the political and religious considerations applied by those whom the musicians were constrained to serve and please, is represented in his book English Church Polyphony: Singers and Sources from the Fourteenth Century to the Seventeenth (Aldershot, 1999). He also works on music in northern Italy around 1600, and on certain abiding problems of transcription, especially the understanding of the finer points of the notation of music composed between c.1500 and c.1630. Antonio Chemotti (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München): Motets and liturgy for the dead in Italy, 1570-1650 Mapping the post-Tridentine motet (ca. 1560-ca. 1610): Text, style and performance The University of Nottingham, 17-19 April 2015 This paper draws on my doctoral research on polyphonic music pro mortuis in Italy between 1550 and 1650. Among this repertoire, it has been possible to identify a considerable number of motets. Some texts are chosen not because they are linked to the liturgy for the dead itself, but because they are traditionally connected to specific ritual moments (e.g. motets included in Requiem masses mainly display traditional texts for Elevation). Other times more specific texts are set, but they are not necessarily connected to the pertinent liturgical formularies. Sometimes they can instead establish meaningful links with other liturgical contexts (for example with the Holy Week, associated to death ritual by liturgists since Durand). Especially interesting are motets that use responsorial texts directly drawn from the office for the dead, and I will address the question whether this is a sufficient evidence to postulate a use within that liturgical context. Particular attention will be given to settings of the responsory Libera me Domine de morte aeterna: the comparison between compositions defined in the sources as 'motets' and those explicitly liturgical will also allow me to discuss the problematic distinction between liturgical and extra-liturgical compositions. In some cases, the boundary between the two appears to be blurred. Textual or stylistic parameters are not always decisive, making a clear classification a difficult undertaking. Biography: Antonio Chemotti was born in Trento (Italy) in 1987. He studied at the faculty of Musicology of Cremona (Università di Pavia), where he graduated cum laude in February 2013, with a critical edition of the Kyries of the manuscript Trento 93. His master's thesis was awarded a prize by the Soprintendenza per i beni library della Provincia di Trento in October 2013. In 2014 it was published by the Istituto Italiano di Storia della Musica in the series Codici musicali trentini del Quattrocento, edited by Marco Gozzi. He is currently writing his Ph.D. dissertation on Italian polyphonic music pro mortuis (1550-1650) as a member of the International Doctoral Program Mimesis (Munich), holding a position as wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter at LMU Munich, funded by the Elite Network of Bavaria. Dario De Cicco (Université de Genève & Università di Pavia): The texts of the motets for six voices by Orfeo Vecchi Orfeo Vecchi (ca.1553-1603), a composer and presbyter of ‘clear fame’, was unquestionably one of the distinguished figures of sixteenth century vocal polyphony following the Council of Trent. His fame, which lasted for a long time after his death, should be ascribed as much to his prolific compositional activity, expressed almost exclusively in the sacred music field, as to his performing, given that he was active at one of the most important ecclesiastical locations in the Ambrosian Diocese: the Collegiate Church of Santa Maria della Scala in Milan. His Motectorum liber tertius, 6vv (Milan: Tini and Besutio, 1598) represents one of the most important collections within Orfeo Vecchi's output, to the extent its motets were Mapping the post-Tridentine motet (ca. 1560-ca. 1610): Text, style and performance The University of Nottingham, 17-19 April 2015 later included in various anthological collections, both printed and handwritten. In particular, among the latter is the Pelplin Tablature that includes almost all the pieces, with faithful adherence to what the composer had actually written. From a textual point of view, the motets are linked to the Roman Rite then in use at the Scaligeri collegiate church, and belong in their variety to various moments of the liturgical year, allowing us to assume, also on the basis of the composer's biographical data, an extra-liturgical use for the pieces. Every aspect of these polyphonic-vocal compositions (the text, the compositional patterns, the use, etc.) is linked to post-Council of Trent spirituality in the particular and totalizing Borromaic-Ambrosian reading of it, while each motet is in line with the path traced by the numerous composers who applied the Council of Trent notions, above all that of the aural intelligibility of texts. The motets in question are always interesting to listen to, and on analysis, attest Orfeo Vecchi's full achievement of that balance between creative vis, originality, and spirituality that has ever been the arrival point of the sacred musical art. Biography: Dario De Cicco is a PhD candidate in musicology at the universities of Geneve and Pavia). He graduated in musicology at the Università di Pavia, and gained a diploma in piano, music education, choral music and choir direction.