FANTASIA SENZA PAROLE

The art of diminution in seventeenth-century Europe



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The first decades of the seventeenth-century coincide with the discovery of new worlds, where the innovative ideas of Galileo Galilei and Kepler changed the rotary motion of the Earth, matching with the change of styles in the arts.
This earthquake in the world of arts brought forth the birth of a new musical style, whose only objective was to be as expressive as possible; an art of the sublimation of the words.
At the dawn of the seventeenth-century, not just only the conception of the human voice and the vocality were changed, but also the means of musical expression. New instruments were invented together with new genres of music, new rules of composition and new methods of compositional technique, and composers were searching for a completely idiomatic instrumental language, which was invented not to imitate in a mimetic way the word but its sense. The ideal of true art became the complete abstraction from verbal semantics, a universe of fantasy without the word itself; fantasia senza parole.
From the end of sixteenth- to the first three decades of the seventeenth-century we can discover a musical universe full of metamorphoses; in a never ending search of new, more efficient ways of expression. One could almost say that the essence of the primo Seicento lays in this compelling need of constant search in a musical horizon where the limit between vocality and instrumentality became narrower and narrower until their complete eclipse.
Our objective is not only to highlight the high virtuoso aspect of the instrumental music of the period, but also to find a convincing manner to interpret vocal music with period instruments; an approach that has not yet been thoroughly examined. The integration of improvisation based on period treatises on diminution is another important feature of our artistic concept.
With our programme Fantasia senza parole, we would like to propose our public a journey across early seventeenth-century Europe, offering a musical panorama of the art of diminution, through a highly contrasting palette of musical genres.



Works by J. H. Kapsberger, Diego Ortiz, Giovanni Bassano, Orazio Vecchi, Isaac Posch, Orazio Tarditi, Johann Schop, Adam Jarzębski, G. G. Gastoldi, Antonio de Cabezón.