The blazing music of the Roman Baroque

Holy and profane, spirituality and material aspects face themselves with an infinity of rhythm, tones and harmonic and melodic inventions in an amazing sparkling of sounds that represent one of the happiest and high moments of the History of the Music.
The spirit and the essence of the Roman Baroque, more than words, is revealed by its fascinating music. Any esthetical art element match with music of its period, reflecting a substantial unity, and in Rome, between the sixteenth and seventeenth century it takes place one of the most exciting moments of European art and culture.
Nowhere else there is such a high concentration of artists, architects, musicians, each one able to create works of universal value; just mind, e.g., to Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel, to Raphael’s stylistic perfection, to the revolutionary paintings of Caravaggio, or to the daring sculptural and architectural works of Bernini and Borromini.
The presence in Rome of the Holy See gave a decisive impulse to this extraordinary creative moment. Especially in music, many styles already existing were perfected and others were created.
At the end of the XVI° century, Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina leads the Poliphonical holy music to a level of absolute perfection whose works are comparable only to the frescos of the Sistine Chapel were he worked as master of the papal choir.
In that time San Filippo Neri produced the environment where flowered new musical forms like the Oratory, one of the most important genre in european music. This amazing moment is not limited to the lithurgical music: the “Representation of Soul and Body” by Emilio de Cavalieri, in the 1600, starts the history of the Melodramma destined to clamorous developments in the following centuries.

The expressive value of music

Thanks to some of the most virtuous musicians of those times like Gerolamo Frescobaldi, famous player of Clavicembalo and pipe Organ or the violinist Arcangelo Corelli, the roman Baroque produces fantastic accelerations with the instrumental music. A rank of composers, instrumentalists, singers converged to Rome to study or find a job in the numerous choirs. They also worked for rich roman families like Colonna, Borghese and Pamphilj: these Patrons commissioned not only paintings, sculptures or frescoes, but also a large quantity of musical pieces that still today we trace in many Roman archives and libraries*.
To understand better the features of this music we can use the visual culture of this time. Listening to a piece by Frescobaldi leads us immediately in a caravaggesque world. The listener will perceive how the main element of the melody, the singing, stands out against the harmonic structure; Caravaggo modelled the light parts of the subjects standing out against the darkness of the environment, like emerging beauties.
The Virtuousism of the pieces for guitar by Lelio Colista or François Le Cocq is comparable with the virtuousism of Bernini’s Sculptures where the waves of the marble are a mirror of the note’s volutes dancing on the musician’s fingers. The development of architectural volumes in the buildings, like the ones of the church Santa Agnese in Agone by Borromini, finds a correspondence with the treatment of the sound’s volumes into the Mottetto (musical religious compositon ) by Giacomo Carissimi. In fact we can talk about architecture as “crystallized music”.

*Many musical pieces about the itineraries by ”Roma Opera Omnia” comes directly by our musicological researches we carry out in different roman archives, this means that some of the pieces we play are unpublished music.