For Choral Music aficionados

[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.”


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*

Comments

[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...