MICROTONAL RENAISSANCE CHOIR!?!?! Musica Prisca Caput--Transcription
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- Опубликовано: 3 ноя 2023
- Performers: EXAUDI- Juliet Fraser (Soprano), Tom Williams (Countertenor), Stephen Jeffes (Tenor), Jimmy Holliday (Bass), James Weeks (Conductor)
Composer: Nicolà Vicentino (1511-1575)
Audio: • Nicolà Vicentino: Musi...
0:06 Diatonic
0:54 Chromatic
1:39 Microtonal/Enharmonic
*This transcription is written with quarter-tone accidentals although the piece is performed in 31TET. Imagine that the HalfSharps, HalfFlats, and ThreeQuarterSharps represent the SemiSharp, SemiFlat, and SesquiSharp respectively.
TEXT:
Musica prisca caput tenebris modo sustulit altis
Dulcibus ut numeris priscis certantia factis
Facta tua, Ippolite, excelsum super aethera mittat.
TRANSLATION:
Ancient music has recently raised her head out of the darkness
So that, with antique and sweet numbers to compete with ancient deeds,
Your great deeds, Hyppolitus, she might send above the heavens.
#choir #classicalmusic #vocal #music #voice #microtonal #renaissance #sheetmusic #transcription #composer 
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Superb performance. Microtonal choir is quickly ascending to my favorite genre.
Honestly, me too! I’ll post more microtonal choral music soon so stay tuned!
@@collinmccookcomposer tuned, Literally!
it went very quickly from sounding very familiar - the chords, the tonicizations, the cadences - and then it *very* quickly got weird (at least by most renaissance piece standards). but then came the second half...at no point did i know what was coming next. 😆 that was a wonderfully wild ride
what a fascinating piece! How beautiful is it that this composer from the 1500's is still stumping musicians today, hundreds of years later 😃 Thank you for sharing!
Thanks for watching! It is a wild piece that is still way ahead of our time!
@@collinmccookcomposer -- Thanks for posting the transcription! For anyone interested, they can search "Nicola Vicentino: Musica prisca caput" and actually watch the keyboard as the music changes from diatonic to chromatic to enharmonic!
These microtones were called "mobile degrees" in ancient greek music. The tetracorde is always a pure 4th (Mi-La) but the inner notes (fa-sol) could move, depending on the effect you want to give, where you want to go. This great choral is no exception to that rules, only the inner notes move but there's always the rigourous tonic !
That’s really cool! I know very little about Ancient Greek music (minus the Pythagorean tuning) but that’s something I should look into!
@@collinmccookcomposerI'm told the same is the case in Barbershop harmony, the first and fifth of any chord are always equal-tempered and the third and seventh are perpetually tweaked. "Blue notes." Eddie Van Halen detuning his B string to make his A barre chords not grate through an electric guitar amp (the more distorted a guitar, the worse an equal tempered third sounds; most hard rock bands disguise that in the arrangement). It's apparently something a lot of people worked out independently.
I've been fortunate enough to be able to sing this sort of music, and it is incredibly difficult. But love it. Thank you!
I love microtonality, but I can see why this style of it never took off and became a commonality. To be brief, the difficulty of performance and juxtaposition of otonal complexity and harmonic straightforwardness make it little more than what it was, as I understand it, meant to be: a theoretical exercise.
Yeah, especially seeing that the overwhelming majority of choral ensembles are in high schools and colleges, it would be difficult to try to teach something like this to those “pre-professional” groups. It’s hard for the professional groups too!
How do you think they sang Gesualdo chromaticism back then? They weren't being influenced by equal temperament and yet there were "impossible" enharmonic moves. I think professional singers of the late Italian madrigalists had to have done some of this in practice as implied by the very accidentals being introduced.
@@lerippletoe6893 oh absolutely! I was talking about our modern ensembles.
@@lerippletoe6893 Even then, as I said, quartertones and quartertonal are far less intuitive than 12-TET, so even if it was somewhat common practice, there would still be something extra difficult about it.
@@oscargill423 well literal quarter tones aren't in tune with anything, not remotely. Relativity matters. Singers can approximate just intervals with practice, and there is no reason they would sing equal tempered thirds historically. So this entails intuitive intonation adjustments that can involve small differences, and comma pump can happen. It was noted to happen, including good choirs.
Vicentino's music is next level because he has the chromatic, and the enharmonic as described vaguely by Greek but reimagined in his day. But Gesualdo/Marenzio etc already demands severe chromatic treatment which doesn't sound like 12tet. Gesualdo used split key instruments, they did not even use circulating well temperaments until years later.
Intuition develops from experience, these people didn't use 12tet. So historical practice was already microtonal/xenharmonic in some sense with the extended gamut meantone (Ab=/=G# etc) and singers. Vicentino pushed pitch beyond others for sure, and THAT extent never developed. But we have to be clear about what did seem to happen.
The excesses of seconda prattica expression were probably undermined by the basso continuo tradition, pragmatism, and different rhetoric developing. From 1580 to 1680 harmony got way more conservative.
My choir director loves this style of music. It's not easy to sing, and you have to be confident in your part. Our last piece had a piano accompaniment that was fast arpegio runs giving no definite chord, multiple key changes, and time signatures. I hated it to start, especially as an Alto1, but it was such a feeling of accomplishment when we finally performed it.
Really interesting and amazing to listen to! Certainly spices that familiar renaissance sound up a bit...
Durezze ed ligature! Marvelous
Exquisite
Fantastic!
Cooool❤
Epic!
For anyone interested in microtonal a cappella music, check out Fayha National Choir for a blast of Arabic music. In particular, you might like to check out album Sawt since it is full of Arabic microtonal scales.
you’re trying to notate a 31 tone octave with quarter tones. Sometimes you make the diesis too wide and other times inflections by diesis are missing entirely
I should’ve mentioned that in the description. It is in 31TET but I was using quarter tone accidentals. I should’ve made a key or just used traditional 31TET notation. I’ll do that in future videos.
But quarter tones are in 24 TET
@@MrTiger08-jo8rf yes! I made a key in the description. The quarter tone accidentals are just “stand ins” for the true intervals
@@MrTiger08-jo8rf yes, but this is not a quarter tone piece, it’s in 31 equal
Yes. It’s in 31Tet. I used quarter tone symbols to notate sesquisharps sesquiflats and other 31Tet intervals.
❤Наконец-то нашёл его
What should I transcribe/engrave next?
Great transcription!!! Cool to see it written out. I don't know what system it uses, but Lopez-Hanshaw's "You Were Fought For" would be really cool
@@stephenweigel I will do that one soon! I love that piece! I also love your work with the lumatone!
Thanks for this video! I highly regard presenting Vicentino to a wider audience; therefore I completely agree with the catchy video title.
I have two major suggestions for you to consider:
- The third chapter starting 1:39 should mention the term (or be named) "Enharmonic", since this is the traditional completion of "Diatonic" and "Chromatic" that Vicentino also sought for.
- Mention in the video description that the accidentals you put could be regarded as a "modern adaptation", but are only partly meaningful because they are based on a 24TET system and not a 31tone meantone system that Vicentino uses.
Good point! Thanks for watching!
Don’t kill me for making a modern music reference, but parts (especially 1:24 to 1:30) remind me a bit of Jeremy Soule’s Skyrim score, especially some of the choir stuff in that.
That’s very interesting! I never noticed! (And don’t worry this is a modern music affirming channel 😇)
Not for me I'm afraid! Nice singing though. Also, I assume this has been added later, rather than in the original manuscript?
This is a transcription but the original transcript does include microtonal notation!
Oh wow! I never knew. I'll be looking up this chap @@collinmccookcomposer
@gregorianlion5655 He’s very fascinating! I was very shocked that there were music theorists dealing with microtonal theory in Europe in the Renaissance!
Yes, it’s in the original, notating the diesis for the enharmonic passages with a dot on top of the note. We’ve recently recorded all the enharmonic pieces by Vicentino with Johannes Keller and will be released probably by December in a digital edition of his treatise.
@florenciamenconi3134 That’s awesome! Let me know when that’s been released!
What happened with the bass in m. 5? Transcribing from Nicola Vicentino's original score? 😁
Fantastic job, this is an amazing tool to introduce these ideas to musicians who might not know much about advanced harmony beyond 12TET, but will appreciate having a score to follow. The western system doesn't really have the tools to accurately notate the intervals, but this is close enough for demonstration. The singers mostly nail it, I love that original video!
This is GORGEOUS, but I'm very confused-how much of this composition is an original 16th century piece and how much is new? Are the lyrics new? Because they read as if recently written!
Believe it or not, this was written in the Renaissance period with the enharmonic/microtonal intervals. Although in the original score, he just added dots above the non 12-tone intervals.
Sounds great!
One gripe that I always wished, though, is if people wrote tenor parts in alto clef or tenor clef. I die inside every time I see the octave-downshifted treble clef.
Because it was written in the renaissance, the original score uses not just tenor and alto clef, but also soprano clef (c clef on the bottom line). For my transcription I just used the standard choir clefs since most people don’t read the others nowadays.
@@collinmccookcomposer I really wish tenor parts in most choral music nowadays were written in primarily alto clef, changing to the bass clef for lower passages.
I find it to be a huge annoyance for as long as I've been able to read music, since I always have to remember to shift the notes down an octave. With the alto clef I can determine what the note is right away without needing that extra step.
Honestly, the octave-shifted treble clef comes off to me as laziness and oversimplification, and not as a legitimate way of streamlining things. The only octave-shifted clefs that have legitimate uses are the octave-upshifted treble clef and octave-downshifted bass clef.
@@electric7487 I don't think it's fair to label it laziness - the reality is that a musicians needs have changed in the last 500 years. For the vast majority of modern people, exposure to choral music is only a fraction of their musical education. After learning recorder in G clef or piano in grand staff it makes sense to seamlessly transfer those skills to vocal music. If there were instead alto or tenor clefs on the page you'd be introducing an unnecessary barrier to the novice or hobbyist singer (and likely pushing them away). Do you not see value in accessibility (with notation that at the end of the day produces the exact same sound)?
N.b. I'm definitely not saying the clefs don't have their place stylistically, especially in early music, but that (unfortunately) represents a minority in the repertoire of choirs today.
@anthonycook6330 I like this thought! I think there’s a special history with every clef! And now we’ve landed pretty solidly on Treble and Bass (with the occasional Alto or Tenor) clefs and they have simplified much of music reading/making. I think it’s also super cool that there are still historical quirks such as transposing instruments that still bring a challenge to reading music!
@@anthonycook6330 I see the value in accessibility and I agree that music shouldn't be too hard to get into, but I still can't see a legitimate justification for this. It still comes off as laziness.
As for C clefs, alto clef really isn't any significant barrier, especially now that the Internet allows anyone unfamiliar with alto clef (or any of the C clefs for that matter) to look up what it means. Once they familiarise themselves with it, it'll be no problem. Not to mention that there is a very easy way to remember what alto clef indicates: "middle C, middle line".
And (in most cases) more knowledge is good to have, since you never know when it might come in handy even if it seems like you'll never use it.
And finally, accusing something of being pointless or overly complicated if you're not familiar with it is extremely fallacious.
Wtf is this wow