Zarlino

Gioseffo Zarlino (1517–1590), a priest, was maestro di cappella at San Marco for the last 25 years of his life, following Adrian Willaert and Cypriano de Rore. A year after arriving at San Marco, he published this book of 13 motets for six voices. These motets are being published this year (2013) in a modern edition by Cristle Collins Judd, the annotator of this disc, along with four motets for four voices published a year later (not recorded here).

Marc Sabat's Gioseffo Zarlino is "the third in a series of pieces inspired by ideas in the history of music theory, which I seek to experience and unfold in a sounding world" (taken from the liner notes by the composer). In the piece, unfolding cyclically over 70 minutes, voices, strings, harp, and flute, weave through each other exploring a novel tonal space developed by the Renaissance Italian Composer-Theorist, Gioseffo Zarlino in 1558 and reinterpreted in the 21st Century by Sabat. By articulating minor differences in tone and interval (through instrumentation and vowel formants) during successive interpretations of the piece, Sabat conjures the spirit of restless innovation put forth, and all too often forgotten in modernity, over 400 years ago by musical theorists such as Zarlino.

This recording of lute music may be of most interest to fans of the lute and of the Renaissance-Baroque transition era, but it will be of considerable interest to them: it marks the first recording of the Libro d'intavolature di liuto, or Book of Lute Tablatures, of Vincenzo Galilei (1584). Galilei was the father of none other than astronomer Galileo. The work is given the title The Well-Tempered Lute here; that was not Galilei's title, but the music was apparently the first collection intended to demonstrate the possibilities of equal temperament that Bach would exploit so dramatically a century and a half later. Some scholars have opined that this was a primarily theoretical work; as music, it is both technically difficult and a little monotonous, consisting of groups of dances that may or may not have been danced to. Lutenist Žak Ozmo makes a good case for these little pieces as performer's music, differentiating learned counterpoint from works of a more expressive character.