AMS Philadelphia 2009 Abstracts - American Musicological Society

88 Friday afternoon AMS Philadelphia 2009
offers Voragine’s popular Legenda aurea opportunity for commentary on the four foundational
stones of the Church and the perfection of gold.
CIPRIANO DE RORE’S SETTING OF DIDO’S LAMENT:
THE BEGINNING OF THE SECONDA PRATICA
Jessie Ann Owens
University of California, Davis
Every student of music history encounters terms like “seconda pratica” or its cousin “contenance
angloise.” Musicologists use them as a short-hand for defining a period of music history
or capturing features of musical style, and imbue them with a wide range of meanings. Seconda
pratica is especially polyvalent, symbolizing just about any innovation of the seventeenth
century, from rhythmic regularity to basso continuo. This supposedly novel and all-encompassing
style is almost always associated with Monteverdi, who wrote about it at length and
who occupies pride of place in most accounts of early modern vocal music.
The conventional focus on Monteverdi’s music as a way to define seconda pratica neglects
an important source that he himself identified. In 1607, Giulio Cesare Monteverdi, amplifying
his brother’s statements, identified Cipriano de Rore as the founder of the second practice
(“seconda pratica ebbe per primo rinnovatore ne’ nostri caratteri il divino Cipriano Rore”),
and explained that his brother “intends to make use of the principles taught by Plato and
practiced by the divine Cipriano.”
My paper argues that de Rore’s setting of Dido’s lament, written no later than 1559 and thus
at least forty years before Monteverdi’s famous statements, reveals precisely the features and
strategies that Monteverdi would strive for in his new practice. A massive three-part composition
for five, six and seven voices, dissimulare etiam sperasti (Aeneid IV.305–319) presents a
striking, almost textbook, example of the seconda pratica. Its text consists of a monologue in
which Dido, in the classic manner of laments, passes through rage to grief in responding to
the news of Aeneas’ imminent departure. De Rore reworks Vergil’s hexameter verses to heighten
the drama of this speech, creating a form of genere rappresentativo. The newly created prose
text (half again longer than the poetic text) is similar to Rinuccini’s Lamento d’Arianna in its
use of repetition, of structural crescendo, of dramatic outbursts. Using David Crook’s concept
of “normative tonal compass,” we can see the subtle shifts in tonal palette that de Rore uses
to portray the range of Dido’s emotions. I argue that this dramatic representation of human
emotion constitutes the true beginning of the seconda pratica.
The paper concludes by demonstrating Monteverdi’s appreciation and even emulation of de
Rore’s strategies through a reading of his more famous Lamento d’Arianna against de Rore’s lament
of Dido. Seeing Cipriano de Rore as a more active protagonist in the story of the second
practice challenges some of the most basic narratives of the history of seventeenth-century
music and by extension of the origins of opera.