Orpheus’ Ballad: A counterpoint of ancient and contemporary music

Composer(s)

Claudio Monteverdi: (b Cremona, 15 May 1567; d Venice, 29 Nov 1643). Italian composer. The most important musician in late 16th- and early 17th-century Italy, he excelled in nearly all the major genres of the period. His nine books of madrigals consolidated the achievement of the late Renaissance masters and cultivated new aesthetic and stylistic paradigms for the musical Baroque. In his operas for Mantua and Venice he took the experiments of the Florentines and developed powerful ways of expressing and structuring musical drama. His three major collections of liturgical and devotional music transcend the merely functional, exploiting a rich panoply of text-expressive and contrapuntal-structural techniques. Although he composed little or no independent instrumental music, his writing for instruments was genuinely innovative. Schrade’s famous assessment (1950) of Monteverdi as ‘creator of modern music’ may be exaggerated, but his significant place in music history is assured

György Ligeti: (b Dicsőszentmárton [Diciosânmartin, now Tîrnăveni], Transylvania, 28 May 1923; d Wien, 12 June 2006). Hungarian composer. After being exposed to two tyrannies in his youth, Nazi and Stalinist, he left Hungary following the 1956 Russian suppression of his country’s independence and found himself, in western Europe, confronted by another stern ideology, that of the Darmstadt-Cologne avant garde. The effect was twofold. He was liberated to pursue long-cherished ideals of musical advance, but at the same time his critical, contrary spirit was sharpened. Unlike many of his young colleagues in the west, he was suspicious of system, rejoiced in the delightfulness and evocativeness of sound, and steadily reintroduced – though in quite new ways, guided by an exact ear – things that serial orthodoxy had refused, such as simple harmonies, ostinatos and palpable melodies. Just when this process of recuperation might have led him, in the early 1980s, to join the new dominant movement of postmodernist collage and retrospect, he found further stimulation and contradiction in non-European musical cultures, especially Caribbean, central African and East Asian. Always paradoxical, he found this music of the world enhancing his sense of himself as musically a Hungarian, and began to publish or republish many of the compositions he had written decades earlier.

Jacob van Eyck (b ?Heusden, nr 's-Hertogenbosch, 1589/90; d Utrecht, 26 March 1657). Dutch carillonneur, bell expert, recorder player and composer. He inherited the noble title of ‘joncker’, and was blind. He spent his early years in Heusden, and in 1623 visited Utrecht, where he was appointed carillonneur of the Domkerk in 1625. Three years later he became director of the Utrecht bellworks, having technical supervision of all the parish-church bells. Later he also became carillonneur of the Janskerk, the Jacobikerk and the city hall. It was he who discovered the connection between a bell's shape and its overtone structure, which enabled bells to be tuned properly. In this he had the cooperation of the famous bellfounders François and Pieter Hemony. His work gained the attention of such prominent intellectuals as Isaac Beeckman (1588–1637), René Descartes and Constantijn Huygens (a distant relative, and dedicatee of van Eyck's Der Fluyten Lust-hof). He was charged with carillon improvements all over the northern Netherlands and had several pupils.

In 1649 his salary at the Janskerk was increased, ‘provided that he would now and then in the evening entertain the people strolling in the churchyard with the sound of his little flute’, a practice that was first mentioned in a poem of 1640. His two-volume Der Fluyten Lust-hof, which was reprinted several times, contains almost 150 pieces for solo soprano recorder in C. The original prints contain many errors, mainly due to van Eyck's blindness. A few of the pieces are free compositions (preludes and fantasias), but the majority consist of variations on melodies popular at the time. Although most of these melodies have Dutch titles, many originate from the French air de cour repertory, and some are Italian (from Giulio Caccini, Gastoldi), English (Dowland), German and Dutch; 16 were borrowed from the Genevan Psalter. The process of composing variations was called ‘breecken’ (breaking): the notes of a theme were broken into notes of smaller values, each reprise becoming increasingly elaborate. Although van Eyck's ornamental style shows many features of Italian improvised passaggi, his pieces are to be considered as true compositions. Der Fluyten Lust-hof, i (1649) includes five duets that make use of some of the monophonic variations; these arrangements are not by van Eyck and can be attributed to his publisher Paulus Matthysz.

John Dowland (b ?London, 1563; bur. London, 20 Feb 1626). English composer and lutenist. He was one of the finest players of his time, and while his music was soon superseded in England, it had a profound influence on the Continent, where he spent much of his career. He is now recognized as the greatest English composer of lute music and lute songs.