{"id":642,"date":"2015-02-04T10:41:03","date_gmt":"2015-02-04T10:41:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/microsites.ifagiolini.com\/betrayal\/?p=642"},"modified":"2015-03-31T09:49:30","modified_gmt":"2015-03-31T09:49:30","slug":"deadend","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/microsites.ifagiolini.com\/betrayal\/deadend\/","title":{"rendered":"Dead end?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Thoughts on Gesualdo and his music: part one<\/strong><\/p>\n

Robert Hollingworth<\/em><\/p>\n

Sitting in a tiny parish church somewhere in rural Languedoc, one summer, I was listening to students on Francis Steele\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s singing week<\/a> performing Gesualdo madrigals. It is music that, more than 400 years after it was written, still surprises and shocks \u00e2\u20ac\u201c both a listening audience but also singers, otherwise quite proficient in music of this period, but who find that normal rules – expected harmonic progressions and melodic formulae – only partly apply.<\/p>\n

Gesualdo wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t really a one-off. He was, though, by far and away the most extreme example of a composer who depicted poetic images by advanced harmonic gestures and pictorially descriptive musical lines: musical mannerism.<\/p>\n

Such advanced harmonic composition was not to be heard all over Italy at the time and cannot be said to have caught on. Venice, for example, was particularly harmonically conservative, the Gabrielis and others modernising in other ways to do with grandeur, and usings musicians in dialogue. In fact as a genre, Gesualdo\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s chromaticism (a term which means using notes outside the normal \u00e2\u20ac\u201c or diatonic \u00e2\u20ac\u201c scale\/mode) it is a musical dead end until Wagner. And despite its avant-garde nature, it was still written for the polyphonic vocal ensemble which would shortly have had its day, at least for a while, giving way instead to simpler and clearer textures in which a single melodic line predominated.<\/p>\n

Other posts on this subject from Robert can be found here: 1<\/a>, 2<\/a>, 3<\/a>, 4<\/a>, 5<\/a><\/em>, 6<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\n

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