Forum on Music and Christian Scholarship

“The Mass for Easter as an Integrated Cycle”

William Peter Mahrt, Stanford University

abstract pending

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Cantare in Pulpito: Polyphonic Improvisation and Public Ritual in Medieval Tuscany

Benjamin Brand, University of North Texas

The pulpits of medieval Tuscany have long numbered among the most celebrated works of sculpture from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Romanesque examples by Magister Guglielmo (fl. 1158–65) and Guido da Cuomo (d. 1257) feature elegantly carved scenes from the Life of Christ and thus anticipated the larger Gothic pulpits of Nicola Pisano (d. before 1284) and his son Giovanni (d. 1319). Scholars have long recognized the function of all these works as sites for the recitation of scripture and sermons, but have nevertheless failed to explore the full range of their liturgical uses. In fact, contemporary ordinals (collections of liturgical prescriptions) document the singing of virtuosic music from the pulpits located in Tuscan cathedrals. At Mass on high feasts of the Temporale – Christmas, Epiphany, Easter, Ascension, and Pentecost – the cantor and several hand-picked assistants ascended the pulpits to chant the Alleluia, the most melismatic genre of medieval plainsong. Those five occasions evoked the scenes from Christ's life inscribed into the pulpits, an affinity strengthened by the ornamentation of the Alleluia with exegetical chants such as prosulae and sequences. Even more exceptional, however, was the cantor's ornamentation of the Alleluia with improvised polyphony. While such

"organum" was common in Italy and north of the Alps, it typically occurred behind the choral enclosure that separated clergy from laity. The pulpits, by contrast, were public sites for virtuosic singing, a fact that finds oblique reference in the novel depiction of the Presentation in the Temple by Nicola and Giovanni. Their pulpits, then, were not only the culmination of a rich sculptural tradition but offered the most poignant expression of a long-standing intersection between music and image in medieval Tuscany.

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Music Theory, Christian Theology, and the Spiritual Madrigals of Vicentino and Zarlino

Timothy R. McKinney, Baylor University

For the first time in the known history of music theory, in the 1550s Nicola Vicentino and Gioseffo Zarlino presented systematic theories of musical affect that assigned specific extra-musical qualities to specific musical intervals. Both men established dichotomies between major and minor intervals in which the former suited the expression of “hard” concepts such as joy, harshness, bitterness, hardness, and cruelty, while the latter suited “soft” concepts such as sorrow, gentleness, sweetness, softness, and pity. Both men were influenced in this regard by their teacher, Adrian Willaert, who famously employed such affective dichotomies in the settings of Petrarch sonnets found in the madrigals of his Musica nova. In their treatises both Vicentino and Zarlino assert that the composer must craft his music according to the subject and decorum of the words being set and their intended venue. Vicentino specifically states that the composer should follow proper compositional procedures in sacred compositions, while in secular works his “sole obligation is to animate the words and, with harmony, to represent their passions—now harsh, now sweet, now cheerful, now sad—in accordance with their subject matter. . . . As a consequence, on such words you may write any sort of [good or bad] step or harmony, abandon the mode, and govern yourself by the subject matter of the vernacular words . . ..” The present paper examines the interaction of sacred subject and expressive secular genre in the spiritual madrigals written by Vicentino and Zarlino. I shall show how manipulations of mode and the dichotomous theory of interval affect originally deployed by Willaert to highlight Petrarch’s frequent antithetical juxtaposition of “hard” and “soft” imagery are utilized by Vicentino and Zarlino not simply to underscore similar concepts in sacred texts, but to communicate theological tenets of the Christian faith.