Recent Researches in the Music of the Renaissance

Musica Spirituale, Libro primo (Venice, 1563)
Edited by Katherine Powers

R 127	ISBN 0-89579-472-1	(2001) xxxvii+155 pp.	$80.00
	ISBN 978-0-89579-472-7 (13-digit)

A musical sign of the Counter-Reformation was the spiritual madrigal, an Italian-language polyphonic song with religious texts, sung for recreation or paraliturgical music-making in courts, academies, monasteries, and lay religious institutions. The first spiritual madrigals were composed in the 1520s and 1530s, alongside the new secular madrigal, and its texts included spiritual Petrachan poetry and other devotional poems. The close of the Council of Trent in 1563 and the aggressive turn of the Counter-Reformation brought the height of spiritual madrigal production; 16 books survive from the 1580s, including those by Marenzio, Monteverdi, and Palestrina.

The first book exclusively dedicated to spiritual madrigals was Musica spirituale, libro primo (Venice: Scotto, 1563). It was commissioned by Archpriest Giovanni del Bene, who worked in Verona under the reform Bishop Gian Matteo Giberti. Musica spirituale is an eclectic collection that transmits a variety of poetic and musical styles dating from ca. 1538 to the late 1550s, from stanzas of Petrach's "Vergine bella" set by Vincenzo Ruffo to madrigal cycles of six and 13 stanzas by Lamberto Courtois and Giovanni Nasco, to the meditative terza rima "Piaget'egri mortali," a poem in the guise of a sermon set in an unusual musical style by Adrian Willaert.

Music Sample

Contents:
Musica spirituale, libro primo
1. Mio pan'anzi mia vita, "Canon al S. Sacramento," Giovanni Nasco
2. Destra di quel amor, "Canzon," Lamberto Courtois
3. Pianget'egri mortali, Adrian Willaert
4. Dolc'è la pace mia
5. Ampia viva fornace, Grisostimo da Verona
6. Vergine santa, d'ogni gratia piena, Vincenzo Ruffo
7. Vergine sol'al mondo, Vincenzo Ruffo
8. Deh sparg'o miser'alma, Vincenzo Ruffo
9. Vergine santa, immaculata e pia, Grisostimo da Verona [or Giovanni Contino]
10. O foss'il mio cor fieno, Grisostimo da Verona
11. Con doglia e con pieta, Maistre Jhan da Ferrara
12. I' vo piangendo i miei passati tempi, Vincenzo Ruffo