Second Origins
D OUBLES , MASKS , AND GHOSTS ( SHADOW BOXING )
Before we examine the responses from the Monteverdi brothers, let us examine the various shadings in Artusi’s signature and its shadows. Two characters in the dialogues are entrusted with the task of defending the new music: the musical amateur Luca in
L’Artusi, and the anonymous intellectual L’Ottuso for the Seconda Parte dell’Artusi.
Luca speaks with familiarity of the arguments, motivations, and reasons behind the errors he himself brings under Vario’s consideration. His defenses, however timid, are revealing of the thinking of the time.52
The amateur speaks of “accented singing”—that is, extemporized ornaments such as appoggiaturas, rapid coloratura, and avoided notes— which he finds attractive.53 In another passage, he alludes to contrapunto a mente (the
practice, described by Tinctoris, of improvising counterpoint for a cantus firmus in which all voices are in accord with the tenor while not necessarily with each other) suggesting that some of the passages under examination seem to imitate the effects of this
improvised practice.54
Besides these references to contemporary musical practice, however, Luca’s excuses do little to aid Monteverdi’s case, and end up prompting even more severe attacks by Vario.
A more significant defense came from L’Ottuso Accademico, presumably a well- known musician from Ferrara or Mantua who wrote in private to the priest even before
52 Palisca “The Artusi-Monteverdi Controversy,” 130.
53 These are closely analyzed Fabbri, who remarks that “is significant that the ‘moderns,’ in their search for expressiveness, should have availed themselves of techniques specifically associated with vocal
performance (this also applies to Luzzaschi) as regularly used by singers as extemporized ornamentation of a given melodic line to underline a word, a conceit or an interjection.” Fabbri, Monteverdi, 37. Besides highlighting the centrality of the voice in the discussion, this passage is interesting for the desire, expressed by Luca, for a “universal sign” (un segno universale) by which composers could indicate to performers that such ornaments were to be realized. The problem, for Luca, is not that there is no way to accurately write and prescribe these effects, but rather that there are many ways, which thus lead to confused realizations. Vario’s retort effectively associates these improvisational practices with the “corruption of the senses” and the entire metaphysical apparatus under examination here. L’Artusi, 41v-42r.
54 That is, as in the case with accented singing (see above), Luca describes Monteverdi’s music as capable of recording—inscribing—improvisation. Palisca quotes Tinctoris’s description of contrapunto a mente as well as Adriano Banchieri’s fascination with the effects produced by that practice, which prompted him to make up “a set of ten instructions for counterfeiting such counterpoints in writing. The trick, he shows, is to write each of the parts against the bass independently of the others.” Palisca “The Artusi-Monteverdi Controversy,” 133; Fabbri, 37-40. In this respect, the Banchieri text is an important document of the history of musical inscription in the seventeenth century. Adriano Banchieri, Cartella musicale nel canto figurato, fermo et contrapunto… novamente inquesta terza impresione ridotta dall’antica alla moderna pratica (Venice, 1614), 230.
Second Origins—A Fantastic Musical Serata 141
L’Artusi was published in 1600.55
If Luca and Vario are the doubles of Artusi, the
anonymous Ottuso mirrors and distorts him like the audible mask of his name distorts the priest’s. The identity of L’Ottuso’s ghost thus haunts the controversy, his letters inscribed in fragmented form within Artusi’s publications, issuing defenses which only buttress the attacks of the priest—who will not cease to scream at the shadow—and motivate more and more text, to the point of setting the terms for the eventual participation of the Monteverdi brothers in the controversy. He provides the fetishistic face to the material forces of the printing industry which effectively fueled the controversy.56
It is from this deliciously mimetic character that some of the most important turns of the controversy issued: first, as noted above (note 15), he is the first to use the expression “seconda pratica” in print (in his second letter, which Artusi reproduced the in Seconda parte dell’Artusi, 16)—even if, as the Monteverdi brothers claimed later, it belonged to the composer alone and it “may not be appropriated by anyone else.”57
Not only does he coin the banner but also voices what will have been its ideology, arguing that the new
harmonic rules obeyed to entirely new purposes:
55 In the Seconda parte, Artusi reports that the first anonymous letter under the pseudonym of L’Ottuso was given to him in Ferrara in 1599. The pun on Artusi’s name has only been alluded to in the scholarship around the controversy by Susan McClary, for whom “our Wagnerian hero of 1600 actually punned on his Hanslickian opponent’s name, twisting it to Ottuso —‘the obtuse one.’” Susan McClary, Modal
Subjectivities: Self-Fashioning in the Italian Madrigal (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). This assumes that L’Ottuso is either Claudio or Giulio Cesare, possibilities that Palisca already dismissed (as for the reasons of Palisca’s dismissals, however, these are limited in that they are advanced in terms of divergences of style, as if style was itself coextensive and identical with its author, especially when in the context of a veiled public polemic like this one). Palisca also notes that the self-derogatory form of the pseudonym matches others at the time, and notes also the existence of two academies named “degli Ottusi.” Palisca “The Artusi-Monteverdi Controversy,” 137. See note 15, above, especially—in this context—the suggestion by Harper that Ottuso hides Artusi’s name under a similar sounding inganno. For an analysis of the musicological and historiographical issues at stake see, in addition of Palisca, Ossi, Divining the Oracle, 39-57.
56 I am referring to the suggestion by Tim Carter that behind the entire controversy might have been the economic interests of the two rival Venetian printers, Giacomo Vincenti (who issued all of Artusi’s books) and Ricciardo Amadino (who published Bottrigari’s Il Desiderio 1594—one of the earliest motivations for the controversy—, all the incriminating music, prefaces, and letters by Monteverdi, as well as music by other seconda pratica composers. In fact, as Carter writes, “The reticence of the chief duelists, and the use of (real or imaginary) seconds, gives a curious impression of shadow boxing; the only names that
constantly recur are those of the printers emblazoned on the title pages of these various treatises and music prints.” Carter, “The Poetics of Modern Music,” 177.
This being a new song [modulatione], it finds with its novelty new concenti, and new affetti, and without leaving reason in any way, it nevertheless departs in a certain way from some of the ancient traditions of some excellent musicians.58
L’Ottuso, whoever he was, set the terms for the musical aesthetics of the coming years by making an identification that, to judge by Artusi’s resistance, was entirely unheard of in 1599. As the analyses of Palisca and Ossi show, by proposing that novelty in concenti
had as its consequence novelty in affetti, and that the search for both was the purpose of the new music, L’Ottuso wholly redefined the meaning of affetti as it had been used in the sixteenth century. From this moment on, we are in the terrain of the modern “theory of the affections.” This is effectively a redistribution, the identification and regulation of a certain relation between a sonorous event (“concenti,” which for L’Ottuso means, in Palisca’s translation “consensus” or more loosely, “harmonic combination”) and a certain transformation in the listener—that ranges from the physiological to the psychological and the moral—called an affetto. In fact, this redistribution involves posing a new notion of the “listener” as subject—subiectum, the underlying and self-identical substance of transient affections—and not the judge, the “all-seeing eye” that verifies that the rules of counterpoint are followed correctly. Sound, in this model, is not a substance (composed of matter and form), but a force, a means by which an effect can—and must—be
produced. This relation, which comes to be interpreted as that of cause and effect (concenti produce affetti) is by no means straightforward, and in the critical reading we are attempting here it should be seen more as a result, a product, than a departure point.
Diverse forms of mimesis produce these distributions. The distance between Artusi and L’Ottuso is not that between a conservative and a progressive but rather that created by the transformations that changing notions of mimesis produce in all the terms involved in the relation. This is the period, in fact, the moment, when a transition that is now taken as commonplace and straightforwardly descriptive occurred, the passage from a presumed injunction in Renaissance music to express the affections, affectus exprimere,
58 Essendo questa modulatione nova, per ritrovare con la novità sua novi concenti, et novi affetti, ne discontandosi in niuna parte dalla ragione, se bene s’allontana in un certo modo dalle antiche traditioni d’alcuni eccellenti Musici. Seconda parte dell’Artusi, 6. Translation in Ossi, Divining the Oracle, 39.
Second Origins—A Fantastic Musical Serata 143 to arouse them, to “move the affections,” affectus movere.59
We take it for granted that music “moves” or “affects” us, and we equate “affection” with our contemporary emotions, entirely used to as we are to the results of a long history of which Ottuso’s letter is only one—however crucial—chapter.
59 Dietrich Bartel, Musica Poetica: Musical-Rhetorical Figures in German Baroque Music (Lincoln and London: U. of Nebraska Press, 1997), 32. For a survey of authors writing on the relation between music and the affections see Palisca, Music and Ideas, 179-202; for the continuation of this tradition into 1650, analyzed from the perspective of affect theory, see chapter 5 of this dissertation.