More information

Concert programme

Christe, adoramus te
Ch’io non t'ami
Domine ne in furore

From Messa a 4 voci da Cappella (1650)

• Kyrie
• Gloria

Ohime, il bel viso

From Messa a 4 voci da Cappella (1650)

• Credo

Adoramus te, Christe

INTERVAL

From Messa a 4 voci da Cappella (1650)

• Sanctus

Four madrigals from Il Quarto Libro de Madrigali a cinque voci

• Sfogava con le stelle
• Luci serene
• Anima dolorosa
• Ah dolente

Laudate pueri
Rimanti in pace

From Messa a 4 voci da Cappella (1650)

• Agnus

NB: Our concert in Brighton at the Friends Meeting House on Sunday, 10 May 2026 will be shorter (approximately 1 hour, with no interval) and will contain a selection of the music above.

Programme notes

In the early years of the 17th century, in a quite famous academic argument (and what better kind of argument can there be?), an up-and-coming northern Italian composer by the name of Claudio Monteverdi came in for serious criticism. In his early thirties, he was already pretty successful and had a great job as maestro di cappella for the Dukes of Gonzaga in Mantua, but had not yet entered the upper echelons of internationally renowned composers. Nevertheless, his music was circulating among the intelligentsia who would gather in places like Florence and Ferrara to discuss art and culture and make themselves look good of an evening. As was predictable, these gatherings involved clashes between ‘conservatives’ and ‘progressives’, as they always have and always will, but in this particular argument something very important happened in the history of music.

A music theorist and academic (alarm bells should already be ringing) named Giovanni Maria Artusi became so incensed by some music he heard at one of these academic parties because of the ‘monstrous errors’ he identified in it that he went to the trouble and expense of publishing a pamphlet - a short treatise presumably only read by people who attended these gatherings and no one else - decrying, like every other culturally minded man over the age of 40 has done ever since, the ‘imperfections of modern music’. So far, so predictable. In a gentlemanly fashion, Artusi didn’t name the composer of the works he heard that contained the ‘sins against nature’ that had so offended him, but he did include the music itself (printed without the words) and this has allowed us to identify the pieces as madrigals by, of course, Claudio Monteverdi.

The main charge was that Monteverdi was breaking the ‘rules’ of counterpoint, how to set note against note in polyphonic music. These were developed over centuries by many composers to avoid dissonance and create works of transcendent beauty. Without getting technical, these rules involved some maths about frequency relationships and didn’t, as evidenced by Artusi’s failure to include them, take into account the words, neither their meaning nor their emotional impact, that a vocal piece might set.

Evidently a man not lacking in self confidence, Monteverdi’s primary retort to this criticism was to briefly mention in the preface to a published book of madrigals containing some of the very pieces Artusi had highlighted, almost by way of a throw-away comment, that he wasn’t really breaking the rules as much as throwing them out entirely and creating his own. He was, by his own assertion, creating a completely new way of writing music. Indeed, so he said, he had already ‘found’ it and it was in fact entirely dependent on the words Artusi hadn’t even bothered to include. Music was, for Monteverdi, to be ‘ruled’ by the meaning of the words, and the words were to come ‘first’.

In a way, this is still not unexpected. Successful and talented people in their early thirties often claim they are creating the future and destroying the past. The difference is that this time, insofar as the history of music is concerned, Monteverdi was right. He is now known by some as the ‘Father of Modern Music’ and his unabashed belief that music should fundamentally be about human psychology and things we can grasp and understand (words, stories, characters), rather than abstraction and ineffable transcendence, has shaped every kind of music that came after him. He was of course a product of his time and his contribution fit into the broader cultural movements of humanism and the Enlightenment to come but he is alone among composers as having so clearly articulated what ‘modernity’ meant for him in a way that was then so validated by the rest of history. Monteverdi was absolutely at the cutting edge, he knew it, and he was unapologetic. He moved incredibly fast and broke many things, and the result was music of extraordinary power with literally centuries of influence.

The music on our programme tonight contains some of the technical experimentation at the heart of the controversy, but all of the arrogance, ambition, and power with which Monteverdi raced into the future. Much of the sacred music he wrote throughout his life confronted, probed, examined, and almost satirised the clash between old and new that he had identified. His secular music is where his new ideas found their fullest expression. We present both of these kinds of music, using a mass setting composed late in his life entitled simply ‘a mass for four voices’ and appearing on the surface to be a conservative piece but powered by the beating heart of Baroque music, as a scaffold for a programme that contains an early madrigal (Ch’io non t’ami) and a late one (Ohime, il bel viso), some wildly contrasting sacred music (the exquisite pair of Christe, adoramus te and Adoramus te, Christe contrasts so well with the jagged and uncontrolled motets Domine, ne in furore and Laudate pueri), and a focus on the pinnacle of Monteverdi’s a cappella madrigal output with four selections from his fourth book of madrigals (published right at the middle of the controversy with Artusi). This all leads toward a towering masterpiece, the lengthy and incredibly powerful madrigal Rimanti in pace, claimed by many to be the best he wrote.

Monteverdi’s take on the perennial clash between old and new, conservative and progressive, traditional and scandalous, was unique in ambition, audacity, and influence. Monteverdi’s modern music, while indeed breaking things, ushered in a way of thinking about what music is for at a fundamental level that has never left.

Greg Skidmore, April 2026