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Madrigali: Six "Fire Songs" on Italian Renaissance Texts Notes by composer The choral masterpieces of the High Renaissance, especially the madrigals by Montervedi and Gesualdo, provided the inspiration for my own Madrigali. Italian love poems of that era have constituted a rich lyric source for many composers, and while reading them I became increasingly intrigued by the symbolic image of flames, burning and fire that recurred within this context. I decided to compose an intensely dramatic cycle based on Renaissance love poems employing this fire motive while blending stylistic musical features of the period with a contemporary compositional idiom. These characteristics include word painting, modality, bold harmonic shifts, intricate counterpoint, and augenmusic, or "eye music," which occur throughout the cycle. I wanted this music to emanate (like ripples from a pebble thrown into a pond) from a single, primal sonority — one dramatic chord that would encapsulate the intensity of the entire cycle and which would provide a musical motivic unity to complement the poetic. This sonority, which I've termed the "Fire-Chord," opens the piece and is found extensively throughout all six movements in myriad forms and manipulations. Like several of my cycles, the Madrigali are designed in an arch form with significant sharing of material between movements I and VI, and II and V. The cycle has its dramatic high point in movement IV, "Io Piango," where the music gradually builds from pianissimo to a fortissimo, seven-part explosion of the Fire-Chord before settling to a quiet reprise of the opening measures. The Fire-Chord returns in its original key and spacing in the final movement, on the word you. The final cadence in the cycle is left unresolved — this love will forever remain unrequited. The Madrigali were premiered in 1987 by the USC Chamber Singers, conducted by Rodney Eichenberger, and the complete cycle has been recorded by the Seattle Pro Musica, Donald Brinegar Singers, USC Chamber Singers, Nordic Chamber Choir, University of Alberta Chamber Singers, and Polyphony. |
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