Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-7c8c6479df-5xszh Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-03-29T03:30:22.956Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

5 - ‘And all on a cantus firmus

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 January 2010

John Whenham
Affiliation:
University of Birmingham
Get access

Summary

Whether prompted by Mantuan precedent or an eye to papal reception, Monteverdi's decision to set the strictly liturgical texts of the Vespers service on appropriate plainsong cantus firmi was a strategy that had several advantages. It enabled him to present himself as a composer competent to work with the basic musical language of the Church and to demonstrate the range of invention that he could bring to cantus firmus based pieces. It allowed him to show that such settings, though conservative at base, could incorporate thoroughly up-to-date elements of musical style. And, perhaps not least, it helped him solve a problem inherent in setting the psalms and Magnificat – that of achieving musical coherence when working with texts that were sometimes long and unwieldy and certainly not designed for setting by an early seventeenth-century madrigalist.

The texts that Monteverdi set and the plainsongs he used are shown in Appendix 2 and, in the case of the psalms and Magnificat settings, the parts bearing the psalm tones are identified. Monteverdi uses not only the pitches of the plainsongs as the basis of his settings, but also their verse and/or phrase structures, so that his settings appear, as I suggested earlier, rather like falsobordone settings projected on to a larger canvas. For this reason the logic of the settings is most easily followed if the texts are laid out with the verse divisions found in the original liturgical books, as shown in Appendix 2 (in this scheme the doxology – the ‘Gloria Patri …’ – sung at the end of each psalm and the Magnificat forms the last two verses of each setting and has been numbered accordingly).

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1997

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×