Chromaticism [from Ancient Greek χρῶμα, colour] is a rare and exotic bloom in Western music. Referring to the use of notes which lie outside a piece’s primary mode or scale, it flowers only when conditions allow: when a harmonic theory exists which can accommodate it, and more importantly when composers desire to use it to increase the emotional expressiveness of their music. We can see it blooming tentatively in the fourteenth century in the work of Guillaume de Machaut, adding dashes of piquancy to his music’s modal sound. But the first full flowering of chromaticism came later, at the start of the sixteenth century, and it is this extraordinary chapter in music history that the present recording surveys: the story of the Chromatic Renaissance. Like so much artistic innovation of the period, the inspiration for forging into new harmonic realms came from Ancient Greece. At the turn of the sixteenth century, with the rediscovery of classical Greek music treatises, many composers and theorists began to speculate on the sound of Ancient Greek music itself, which was lost to them. In the treatises they read of three ‘genera‘ of harmony: the Diatonic [roughly corresponding to the modal system of the time], the Chromatic [based on the interval of the chromatic semitone] and the Enharmonic, the most alien of all, which entailed the use of microtones, intervals even smaller than a semitone. In the 1520s and ‘30s there was much discussion of this Ancient Greek music, and how it might be revived within the music of time, which scarcely featured chromaticism in any thoroughgoing sense, let alone the fantastical realm of the enharmonic. In Venice, Adriano Willaert composed a musical puzzle in which tonal space seemed to lock into an Escher-esque impossible spiral; Giovanni Spataro experimented with melodic uses of the chromatic and enharmonic genera [though never with microtones]. But it was the composer and theorist Nicola Vicentino who became the most celebrated and notorious practitioner of this esoteric art. Arriving in Ferrara most likely in the late 1530s, he established the Este court as the epicentre of harmonic research and of musical progressivism in general, a reputation it was to maintain for the rest of the century. Possessed of a truly visionary [and certainly zealous] cast of mind, Vicentino’s theories proved controversial. In 1551, he took part in, and lost, a famous debate in Rome with Vicente Lusitano on the subject of whether it was possible for the chromatic and enharmonic genera to exist in modern music. Doubtless piqued at losing the debate, Vicentino published in 1555 his treatise L’antica musica ridotta alla moderna prattica [Ancient music adapted to modern practice], in which he achieved a modern version of the enharmonic genus by dividing the interval of a tone into five roughly-equal steps, thereby producing a thirty-one degree scale. He constructed a two-manual, split-key harpsichord [the archicembalo] and similar archiorgano to play music using this scale, and wrote madrigals which employ these minute shifts of pitch for novel sonic and expressive effects. Sadly his enharmonic work is mostly lost; apart from the complete song Musica prisca caput, all we have left are the fragments of madrigals with which he illustrated his treatise – only just enough to give a flavour of what must rank as one of the most amazing musical-intellectual flights of imagination in history. Even the brief Hierusalem shows Vicentino stepping off into the unknown, as he builds a paragraph of imitative counterpoint from the structure of an Ancient Greek chromatic tetrachord [here, A-Bb-B-D] and ends in a completely different tonal space from where he started. The celebrated Musica prisca caput demonstrates the diatonic, chromatic and enharmonic genera in turn, leading us gradually away from the familiar [the modality of the diatonic genus] into the unfamiliar [the chromatic] and finally into what must have seemed [and still seems] like a different planet altogether, when at the name of his patron Ippolito d’Este the music shifts up a fifth of a tone and into Vicentino’s enharmonic genus. The outlandish boldness of this move [so tiny, yet so significant!] can hardly be exaggerated, and it is perhaps not surprising that this bizarre music, virtually impossible to sing without support from Vicentino’s specially-tuned keyboard instruments, was not taken up by other composers. Yet listen to the fragments Soav’e dolc’ardore, Dolce mio ben and Madonna, il poco dolce: once one has adjusted to the minuteness of the microtonal shifts, do these moments not possess their own special expressivity, a particular, subtle change of light that is entirely unique to them? Notice too how each piece’s title includes the word dolce [sweet, soft, gentle, tender] – clearly the emotional correlative to these tiny harmonic movements. Poi che’l mio largo pianto is a straightforward chromatic madrigal except for one, ambiguous notation: on the first syllable of pianto [lament] in the upper voice, he places both a natural and a flat sign. We have taken the liberty of imagining that he wants a microtonal pitch in between these two options, giving a highly plangent, neutral third [neither major nor minor] that seems to illustrate the text vividly, and certainly seems within the spirit of his musical personality. The 1550s were a golden decade for chromaticism in Italy, as composers rushed to explore this exciting new harmonic resource. Though Lusitano, a Portuguese composer and theorist, had won his debate with Vicentino on a traditionalist platform, this did not stop him from writing the truly audacious chromatic motet Heu me, Domine. This work, constructed almost exclusively from ascending and descending chromatic scales, feels primarily like an extreme technical exercise, though not without memorable moments, the most remarkable of which is the complete descending chromatic scale over an octave and a fifth, passing from cantus to bassus parts at the phrase ‘quando cœli movendi sunt et terra’ – ‘when the heavens are to be moved, and the earth.’ Among other early-adopters were Cipriano de Rore, a Franco-Flemish composer based in Ferrara alongside Vicentino from 1546 to 1559, and his countryman Orlando di Lasso, who was in Naples and Rome in the early 1550s and must have encountered the new style there at that time. Lasso’s first major work, Prophetiae Sibyllarum, remains perhaps the most famous of all chromatic music before Gesualdo. Probably written some time between 1555-60 [though potentially later] when the composer was in his mid-twenties, it is a setting of passages from the Sibylline Oracles, preceded by a prologue that announces the novelty of the style: ‘Songs which you hear based on a chromatic tenor…’ Clearly the precocious young Lasso is proud of his avant-gardism, aimed at discerning cognoscenti and already dubbed musica reservata, an ‘exclusive music’ for those with the sophistication to appreciate it. The Prophetiae, five of which are recorded here along with the prologue, demonstrate Lasso’s fluent eloquence in this new language, modulating freely in his habitual chordal style but balancing out wilder excursions with more diatonic passages. The result is a general feeling of tonal disorientation, clearly with the intention of conjuring the mysterious, otherworldly aura of these enigmatic utterances, a communication not quite rooted in the human. For Lasso, that most urbane of composers, the hermetic nature of chromaticism seldom suited his later music [though he retained a fondness for the occasional surprising harmonic twist]. His engagement with it after Prophetiae was sporadic, amounting only to two motets published in 1564, of which Timor et tremor is one, and the short song Anna mihi dilecta, published in 1579. These two very different works show how emotionally malleable his use of chromaticism could be, expressing psychic distress and desperation in Timor et tremor and a deliciously erotic sensuality in Anna mihi dilecta. We don’t know exactly when or where Lasso first encountered chromatic music, but he certainly knew and admired what is arguably the first real masterpiece in the new style, Cipriano de Rore’s Calami sonum ferentes, because it was published within his own debut collection in 1555. Rore’s work is quite different from Prophetiae Sibyllarum, however. A setting of a complex allegorical poem by Giovanni Battista Pigna shot through with allusions to Classical literature, it expresses a desire for Prince Alfonso [patron of both Rore and Vicentino] to return home to Ferrara, in music of yearning longing. Here, Rore harnesses the emotive power of chromatic melodic lines to stunning effect, both at the start, where they evoke groans of lamentation welling up in the poet’s breast, and most touchingly later on, when he implores the Muse to come to him, ‘sad at the departure of my prince’ [me adi recessu principis mei tristem]. Note, too, the allusions to the music and poetry of antiquity here, a nod to the style’s Classical origins. Rore’s significance in the development of chromaticism lies in his ability to sense the expressive potential of this new resource even while it was in its experimental infancy. The emotional power he unlocks in Calami was still being exploited more than a century later [think of the ground bass of Purcell’s Dido’s Lament]. Yet he also sought balance, perhaps realising that with chromaticism, less is often more. The exquisite, shifting play of emotions in Da le belle contrade d’oriente is a masterclass in light and shade, the latter provided by the mock-tragic, chromatic speech of a lover left alone in bed one morning. More weighty is O sonno, where the chromaticism is woven into a polyphonic recitation of striking psychological depth. By the time of Vicentino’s death around 1576, the initial explosion of interest in chromaticism and Greek genera had dissipated, but chromaticism as an expressive force was far from exhausted. Indeed, its finest hour was arguably still to come, not only in the special genius of Gesualdo but in the music of many composers who found in it a vital key to the new expressionism that was to take over the madrigal in the 1580s and ‘90s. Here we see chromaticism used judiciously as an intensifier of feeling, expressive of strong emotion, terror and mental anguish, the disorientation of the sublime, or of divine appearance. The madrigals of Luzzasco Luzzaschi and Luca Marenzio show this second-generation approach. The prolific Marenzio used chromaticism sparingly but to strong effect, typically in settings of Petrarch. The early madrigal O voi che sospirate [interestingly, published in 1581, soon after Marenzio had visited Ferrara] proceeds diatonically until Petrarch asks Death to ‘change his ancient style’, which Marenzio illustrates through a chord sequence moving through most of the circle of fifths in the space of a few seconds. If this short moment feels almost like a compositional joke, the late masterpiece Solo e pensoso is anything but. Here, Petrarch’s great description of the desolation of lost love is rendered in a magnificent, extensive setting, calling on all of the composer’s expressive range. There are two unforgettable moments of chromaticism here: at the start, where the soprano ascends and descends in semitones, brilliantly illustrating the extremities of landscape and emotion through which the poet is passing; and later, where Petrarch despairs of finding a terrain harsh and wild enough to escape from Love. Here, the tension and anguish of this chromatic phrase dissolves into the heartbreaking harmonic beauty of the final lines, as he finally accepts that he cannot outpace his pursuer. Luzzaschi was surely fated to play a pivotal role in the Chromatic Renaissance, being a native of Ferrara, student of Rore and principal organist of the Este court from 1564. He must have known Vicentino, though the latter had left Ferrara in 1563, and is documented as having been a skilled player of his archicembalo. While not writing microtonal music himself [as far as we know], he carried the chromatic torch after Vicentino’s death, most notably hosting Gesualdo at Ferrara for several years in the 1590s. It was here that, under Luzzaschi’s gaze and indeed seemingly in collegial competition with him, Gesualdo developed his dramatic chromatic style. Luzzaschi’s setting from Dante’s Inferno, Quivi sospiri, is a vivid, even grotesque, description of that fearful place; and his Itene mie querele – which shares much of its text with and bears more than a passing resemblance to Gesualdo’s Itene, o miei sospiri – is a work almost of a different age altogether, that of the early baroque and the innovations of the seconda pratica. Thus it is with Luzzaschi that the story of the Chromatic Renaissance can be said to end and new stories begin, born from the extraordinary expansion of the harmonic universe that was discovered and explored by this remarkable group of composers, dreaming of the music of the ancients. — James Weeks EXAUDI is one of the world’s leading vocal ensembles for new music. Formed in 2002 and comprising some of the UK’s top ensemble singers and new music soloists, EXAUDI has collaborated with hundreds of composers, from today’s leading figures to tomorrow’s stars, evolving a unique and expanding repertoire that has blazed new trails in contemporary vocal composition. EXAUDI’s special affinity is for the radical edges of music new and old, whether mind-bending medieval rhythm, Renaissance or 21st-century microtonality or experimental aesthetics, championing composers as diverse as Cassandra Miller, Michael Finnissy, Jürg Frey, Catherine Lamb, Evan Johnson, Georges Aperghis and Naomi Pinnock. EXAUDI’s many international engagements have taken them across Europe, from Musikfest Berlin, Wien Modern and Wittener Tage für neue Kammermusik to Muziekgebouw [Amsterdam] and Ircam [Paris], often collaborating with ensembles including Ensemble Musikfabrik, Ensemble Modern, L’Instant Donné, London Sinfonietta and Ensemble intercontemporain. EXAUDI has also appeared at all the leading UK venues and festivals, including BBC Proms, Aldeburgh, Wigmore Hall, Manchester International Festival and hcmf//, Wigmore Hall, Café OTO, Kings Place and South Bank. EXAUDI has strong links with the Guildhall School, London, and Durham University, broadcasts regularly on BBC Radio 3, Deutschlandfunk Kultur and WDR. Please see www.exaudi.org.uk for further information