Four hundred years after Renaissance music’s fall from favor, Emiliano Ricciardi is on a mission to save it from extinction.
Ricciardi has organized an Italian Madrigal Festival at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he is an assistant professor of music history.
The two-day event, on Saturday and Sunday, will feature symposium sessions with leading madrigal scholars from around the world, and concerts by early music groups.
Italian madrigals are a 16th-century genre comprising Italian texts set to short musical compositions. The pieces are scored for multiple voices, but each vocal part is sung by only one performer.
Ricciardi, who specializes in Italian madrigal history and teaches a course on Renaissance music, says he organized the festival to bring scholars and performers together with the local music scene.
“It’s a nice opportunity for us to convene and share our research,” he said. “Here in the Pioneer Valley, we also have a very strong early music community, so we have lots of performers that specialize in the music of the Renaissance.”
The festival is the second installment of a now annual spring music festival at the university; last year’s event spotlighted the works of Johann Sebastian Bach.
Italian madrigals emphasize an important point in music history when vocal music emerged as a prominent form, says Robin Bier, one of the performers in the festival.
But, in the 1600s, when the Renaissance period ended and the Baroque period began, vocal performance was overshadowed by a developing instrumental style.
Ricciardi says madrigal concerts and conferences are not common, adding that ensembles don’t often perform madrigals because the music is very challenging; the work needs to be performed by talented, specialized choirs who understand the Italian language.
Also, he says, because it is 16th-century music, much of it is written in Renaissance notation, which has a different format, different note shapes and different time signatures than modern notation.
“We have a lot of music that is sitting there in archives in Renaissance notation, but modern performers cannot access it unless someone transcribes it into modern notation,” Ricciardi said.
He says that without new, readable editions of the music it will be lost.
“The idea is that we want the scholarship to continue,” he said. “We hope to generate interest in this repertoire more and more, and to collaborate directly with performers.”
“Italian madrigals represent some of the highest art in Renaissance litany, the culmination of creativity and beauty and inventiveness for vocal ensembles,” said Bier, an early-music scholar and a co-director of Les Canards Chantants. The eight-person, solo-voice ensemble was founded in 2010 at the University of York in England, and moved to Philadelphia last year. The group will give a concert at the festival Saturday evening.
Bier says the future of the madrigal depends on the intersection of scholarly work and performance — a focus of the early-music movement in recent years.
“To have those two camps come together and influence each other directly is, I think, where the most exciting and important things happen,” Bier said. “That is injecting a lot of life into what could easily be just yet another dry, dusty, disconnected academic discipline,” she said.
The way she sees it, that collaboration will help people better understand madrigals.
“I’ve found, as a performer, that when I study a piece, or create an edition of it or read about the history, my ideas about that piece of music change dramatically. I then actually try to put it into action,” she said.
Bier and her Les Canards Chantants co-director and husband, Graham Bier, will give a talk on madrigal performance during the first symposium roundtable on Sunday.
Madrigals were created as a social genre, songs for people to sing with friends.
“High-flying, a cappella vocal jazz of the Renaissance is essentially what it is,” Bier said. “Composers really trying to do new and crazy and interesting stuff.”
Bier says Les Canards Chantants embraces the social, personal nature of madrigals to engage the audience in the music.
“It’s work that people can relate to and the music is both incredibly beautiful and accessible.” Bier said. “There’s really, really high emotion and I think that comes across to the audience even if they know nothing about the repertoire.”
The group often adds staging to its madrigals performances to help the audience get into the character of the song.
Its repertoire for the festival will include works by Agostino Agresta, Adriano Banchieri, Sigismondo D’India, Andrea Gabrieli, Carlo Gesualdo, Luca Marenzio, Claudio Monteverdi, Giovanni Valentini and Adrian Willaert.
Bier says the members love this particular collection because it is so varied in emotion.
“There’s just an incredible amount of color. There’s intense tragedy … intense love and passion. There are really funny moments,” she said.
While they try to make performances fun and engaging, Bier says, they also want to show audiences that this music is more than just pretty songs.
“When that music is sung incredibly well, by really, really good singers, it elevates itself simply from a great social experience to really high art,” she said.
Because vocal music was so popular during the Renaissance, a large number of madrigals were composed. Many of these pieces have been untouched since the Renaissance ended in the 1600s, or even longer for early madrigals. This wealth of music is exactly what makes this festival so special, Ricciardi says.
“When you perform a piece that has never been performed in the past 500 years, it’s almost like … a brand new piece because people have never listened to it,” he said.
The Sunday concert, in particular, will highlight some of these unperformed pieces. It will be a collaboration between members of the UMass Chamber Choir and the Illuminati Vocal Arts Ensemble, a local chamber chorus, guided by their conductor Tony Thornton, the director of choral studies at UMass.
“Many of the works on the program are going to receive their modern premiere,” Thornton said in a phone interview.
There are 10 madrigals on the program, which will feature groups of from four to nine singers. In keeping with madrigal tradition, each piece will be sung with one voice to a part, and will not be conducted while onstage. Thornton says a successful performance depends on each individual.
“You’re totally responsible for everything that happens because there’s no one supporting you,” he said. “In terms of building musicality and musicianship and artistry, I think that’s a wonderful experience for these singers to have.”
And while the musicians hone their skills, the audience will get to experience an uncommon repertoire, Thornton says.
“You very rarely get to go to a concert of just performances of Roman madrigals,” he said. “It’s just an incredibly unique experience for our audience.”
Les Canards Chantants will perform Saturday at 7:30 p.m. in Grace Church, 14 Boltwood Avenue in Amherst.
Sunday’s concert, “The Roman Madrigal” at 1 p.m, with the UMass Chamber Choir and the Illuminati Ensemble, will be presented in the Bezanson Recital Hall in the UMass Fine Arts Center
Tickets for each concert cost $10; $3 for UMass students; $5 for other students and seniors. To reserve, call 545-2511 or visit fineartscenter.com/musicanddance.