Description:

Jason Rosenholtz-Witt, one of our own musicology graduate students, will be presenting on "Cipriano de Rore Reappraised: Lovesickness and Eroticism in Calami sonum ferentes," in preparation for his upcoming talk at the national American Musicological Society in Vancouver. 

Abstract:
“Every musician knows that four basses is not musically appealing.” So writes Edward Lowinsky about Cipriano de Rore’s enigmatic composition, Calami sonum ferentes. Although Orlando di Lasso admired Calami enough to include it as the last piece in his first collection (Antwerp: Tielman Susato, 1555), the piece fared badly in eighteenth through twentieth-century criticism largely because of anachronistic analytic methods. Critics from Charles Burney to Alfred Einstein and beyond have called it bizarre, unseemly, and unattractive. Not only did they find fault with its unusual combination of four bass voices, the particular use of chromaticism was perceived as “rebelling against law and nature” (August Ambros, 1868). Lowinsky believed that de Rore intended his piece to be unappealing, most likely a satiric composition meant as an “anti-chromatic manifesto.” His reasoning is that the music is deliberately harsh and contradicts the text. How might a reading differ if we take this supposition as fallacious?

G.B. Pigna’s poem invokes Catullus, the first-century Roman poet. A close study of Catullus’ readership in the sixteenth century illuminates allegoric messages in the verse, both erotic and melancholic, and facilitates a more accurate hermeneutic reading of de Rore’s composition. Additionally, knowledge of early modern medicine helps contextualize the physical and corporeal nature of the narrator’s malady––he is a deeply ill individual who has degenerated from lovesickness into the more dangerous and less treatable melancholia. A musical-textual analysis in this light shows de Rore thoughtfully matching the music to the text.