Cipriano de Rore – Calami sonum ferentes (1555)

Two things I know about Rore:  One, he was a crazy experimentalist that Monteverdi called “the founder of the Second Practice,” and two, he’s supposedly responsible for the existence of text-painting in 16th-century madrigals.  Only one of those things is evident in this piece — the first thing I’ve actually heard by him.

Calami sonum ferentes is a Latin madrigal, a setting of a poem by Catullus.  The meaning of the text is somewhat opaque to me — unlike Renaissance intellectuals, I know very little about Classical literature, and the references to various places in Rome are lost on me — but as far as I can tell, the gist of it is:  “I’m miserable, and I don’t like listening to people play cheerful Sicilian music.  Muse, come inspire me and make me feel better!”  Rore’s setting is not what you’d normally think of as “madrigalistic”:  he’s working with text on the paragraph level, reflecting Catullus’s dark mood, rather than on the individual word level, like Luca Marenzio setting the word “occhi” (“eyes”) to two whole notes that look like eyeballs staring off the page in Occhi lucenti e belli (1582).  But it certainly does qualify as “crazy experimentalism.”  First of all, it’s for four bass voices — a very difficult ensemble to write for without muddying the harmonic waters, but Rore manages it.  Secondly, and more importantly, it’s by far the most chromatic piece of music I’ve heard in the entire span of time between the Ars Subtilior and Gesualdo.  It opens with a four-part canon based on a theme that consists almost entirely of half-steps;  unlike in highly chromatic Baroque music, there’s no attempt to fit the half-steps into a tonally functional chord progression.  I guess to Renaissance listeners with progressive tendencies, it probably just sounded like a series of consonances related by highly expressive intervals, but to my modern ears, accustomed to tonal harmony, it sounds both startlingly disjunct and intriguingly awkward, full of uncomfortable third relations like G major followed by D# minor.  Nothing that isn’t familiar from Gesualdo’s madrigals, I guess, except that this was eleven years before Gesualdo was even born.

Actually, the ultra-chromatic opening isn’t my favorite part of the piece.  What spoke to me more was a passage that comes later.  It starts on the words “me adi” (“visit me,” addressed to the Muse):  an F major triad falling to E major by way of A minor, repeated twice to create a pained augmented second between the high-register G# at the end and the low-register F at the beginning.  And then a passage in which Catullus writes about his wretchedness and Rore gets chromatic again, but this time it’s not just ascent by half-step:  instead, all of the parts slide up and down, sometimes with a slight delay but often simultaneously, so that whole triads are shifted around by half-step:  G major, F# major, G major, Ab major, G major.  It’s an utterly bizarre and eerie effect.  I don’t know if it conveys wretchedness, exactly, but it certainly makes it clear that our protagonist is not the kind of person who enjoys light-hearted Sicilian music.