Music for the Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost

The composer of today’s Mass ordinary settings perplexes me more than any other composer of his time. At the turn of the seventeenth century, a great philosophical debate in Italy divided composers and theorists into two opposing camps: those who wished to adhere to the meticulously defined rules of the “perfected” system of high Renaissance counterpoint (by then over two hundred years in the making), and those with a penchant for eschewing these rules in the name of emotive musical pictorialism, a new style defined as the “Seconda pratica.” Those of you who were able to attend Early Music Vancouver’s staging of Monteverdi’s opera Orfeo over the summer will have heard one of the most famous cases for the seconda pratica, where the interaction between different voices becomes secondary to beautiful melodies that reflect the text being sung.

Much like Monteverdi, Lodovico da Viadana worked in a variety of cities as maestro di capella before landing in Mantua, taking up direction of the cathedral’s music in 1594, just as the aesthetic debate around musical style was reaching a breaking point. Up until that time, most of his mass settings are like the one you will hear today; perfectly by-the-book, written in a conservative sixteenth-century style, and rarely breaking the counterpoint rules.

Despite his renown as one of the most influential composers of his time, I must confess that I knew him only in this facet of composition, at least up until several years ago. After his arrival in Mantua, Viadana’s expressive style rapidly diversified, perhaps due to influence from the new style of madrigals and arie being performed at the court. Imagine my surprise to hear the most astonishingly bold seconda pratica music published in 1615 when it was first recorded in Mantua by a Canadian ensemble in 2024 (those wishing to experience this record can do so below).

– Abraham Ross

The Viadana Collective