Riviste Polifonie/119_2005 n 2.pdf - Fondazione Guido d'Arezzo

MARCO GOZZI
Venice : Angelo Gardane, 1597.
Canzonette a tre voci di Horatio Vecchi, et di Gemignano Capi Lupi de Modona. - Nuremberg
: Paul Kauffmann, 1597.
Convito musicale di Horatio Vecchi da Modona. Madrigali e canzonette a III, IIII, V, VI, VII et
VIII voci. Novamente composto, et dato in luce. - Antwerp : Pierre Phalèse e Jean Bellère,
1598.
Canzonette d i Horatio Vecchi da Modena, libro terzo a quattro voci. - Venice : Angelo Gardane,
1600.
Canzonette a quattro voci di Horatio Vecchi da Modena, la quali per avanti sono in Venetia
spartatamente ite in luce, et ora per più comodità raccolte insieme. E con aggiunta di altre
a 5, 4 e tre voci - Nuremberg : Paul Kauffmann, 1600.
Asking Vecchi must have seemed the most natural course to Gardano. It
was the period when the composer was moving from Reggio Emilia to Correggio,
and it is probably as a canon of Correggio that he worked on the revision
of the Gradual.
If this hypothesis is correct, we can assume that Vecchi’s work was grafted
onto that of Gabrieli. It is not known how much Gabrieli had already done,
but there is evidence that suggests that the revision of the Gradual was done
separately by the various editors, over various years and using dissimilar criteria.
Perhaps Gabrieli began with the Kyriale and also revised a part of the
proprium de tempore, after which Vecchi stepped in (possible clues: first, the
similarity of the cantus firmus melodies in the Gradual and Gabrieli’s organ
masses; second, certain uncorrected errors in the Kyriale, as at the start of the
Credo de Angelis in canto fratto - FIGURE 4 - perhaps due to a hastier correction
of the proofs).
The anomalies of the 1591 Graduale Romanum (which, as Annarita Indino
has observed, include the fact that we find different versions of pieces
repeated in the Gradual, in which the dissimilar changes made to the musical
text betray the absence of systematic planning) can be explained by certain
events of those years. It was universally known in the musical world that Pope
Gregory XIII had entrusted Palestrina and Annibale Zoilo in 1577 with the
task of revising the chant books, an operation for which there was a great deal
of expectation. If the new Roman Gradual revised by Palestrina and Zoilo had
been imposed on all the Catholic dioceses, as had happened with the Breviary
of 1568 and the Missal of 1570, for the first time Christian liturgical chant
would have been drastically reformed by the wishes of the ecclesiastical
authority (instead this happened only three centuries later, in 1886, with the
Editio Typica of the Gradual, which - in an operation of historical recovery -
recuperated the readings of the Editio Medicaea instead of adopting the fin-
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