da: A smiling human with short hair, head tilted a bit to the right. It's black and white with a neutral background. You can't tell if the white in the hair is due to lighting, or maybe it's white hair! (18 musicians)
[personal profile] da
Here we have an entry in the "Filing Oops" department:


“[T]he forty-part Missa sopra Ecco sì beato giorno ... by Alessandro Striggio languished throughout the twentieth century disguised as a nameless four-part Mass by Strusco. Since such a work would appear to be entirely banal, and since no such composer ever existed, scholars have not been in a rush to study this music.”


[livejournal.com profile] mirabilis_syn :

http://mirabilis.ca/2007/12/02/lost-16th-century-mass-discovered-by-berkeley-music-scholar/

Lost 16th-Century Mass Discovered by Berkeley Music Scholar.

More than 400 years after Italian composer Alessandro Striggio wrote his extravagant 40-part Missa sopra Ecco sì beato giorno, it has been rediscovered by a Berkeley music scholar who identified the work and rescued it from obscurity.

Although most of Striggio’s piece is in 40 different voice parts, the last movement is for 60 separate voices (five 12-part choirs) and is the only known piece of 60-part counterpoint in the history of Western music. "It’s one of the first great pieces to use architecture and space, with musical phrases physically moving around the ring from choir to choir," says Professor of Music Davitt Moroney, who after years of research located a complete set of partbooks for the mass in the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris. "It is an intellectual achievement of the highest order. There are other large choral works, but Striggio’s mass is unique, with its five eight-part choirs. This is Florentine art at its most spectacular."


I wonder if anyone will ever get to perform this. *hopes*

Date: Monday, 3 December 2007 02:23 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] dcseain.livejournal.com
Oh, neat! What fun that would be to assemble and perform. Hm i wonder if we could do it as an encore the Hallelujah chorus next year. There are enough of us to do it, we'd just need to distribute parts well in advance. Hmmm...

Date: Monday, 3 December 2007 03:04 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] mynatt.livejournal.com
Wow, I've heard of that piece. Crazy that it was finally found. I'd love to hear it someday. And I see from wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alessandro_Striggio) that its modern première was 17 July 2007 by the BBC Singers and The Tallis Scholars at the Proms, meaning it was broadcast live in RealAudio on the Beeb. Maybe someone has a stream capture.

Date: Monday, 3 December 2007 08:14 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] da-lj.livejournal.com
Wow. Excellent find. I'll be on the lookout.

...I got sidetracked just now, into this fascinating IHT article. Amazingly:

For some reason the powers-that-then-were at the BBC's classical music network, Radio 3, took against Phillips and his distinctive interpretations of Renaissance polyphony, and the Scholars discovered that they had been formally banned from the airwaves. This would almost certainly have wrecked the chances of a less dedicated and determined ensemble. But in 1987 the Scholars won the "Gramophone" Record of the Year award for their CD of Masses by the Flemish composer Josquin Des Près, coming top not only in the early music category, but also beating the best records in all categories, a feat never achieved before or since by an early music group.

Days before the prizes were announced, word reached Phillips that the decade-long BBC ban had been lifted. "The timing was suspiciously precise," he said. "But then all doors were flung open to us."

Date: Monday, 3 December 2007 08:28 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] mynatt.livejournal.com
Also fascinating, and from that article: Tallis himself almost certainly never heard it complete. It was his swan song, an idealistic enterprise, but he never seems to have managed to find 40 suitable singers to perform it.

Date: Friday, 14 December 2007 10:29 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] morgan-starfire.livejournal.com
Wow. Wow. Yes, awesome to hear. Can you imagine singing it? Wow.

We just did!

Date: Tuesday, 10 June 2008 04:04 am (UTC)
From: (Anonymous)
Not sure if you could make it, but the Striggio mass was just performed in Berkeley this past weekend. Here's a review: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/06/09/DDLJ115LV4.DTL&feed=rss.entertainment.

--Chris LeCluye (sang with Magnificat)

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