2018. 11. 6. CAVAZZONI, M.A.: Works (Complete) / Italian Ricercars (G.

Wilson)

About this Recording Print

8.572998 - CAVAZZONI, M.A.: Works (Complete) / Italian Ricercars (G. Wilson)

English

Marco Antonio Cavazzoni (c.1490–c. 1560)

Complete Works • Italian Ricercars

‘Julio Segni’s playing is certainly of a rare beauty, but he is worth far more on quilled instruments than on the organ.’

This reference to the initiator of the epochal Musica Nova of 1540 is just one of many contemporary documents that
show the importance of the harpsichord and its smaller cousins in early 16th-century Italy. Our recording is an
attempt to do something about the universal blindness to their significance during the high Renaissance. Everybody
knows something about Raphael, Michelangelo, and Titian, but nobody knows the names of the musicians who were
their close friends, who played the harpsichord for their patrons—Pope Leo X, the procurators of San Marco and the
Doges in Venice, the brilliant court of Urbino—and who were members of the private academies that flourished in
every Italian city. My reasons for believing the masters represented here to have been primarily harpsichordists are
set out for the interested reader in an essay available online at www.naxos.com/notes/572998 and on my website
www.glenwilson.eu.

We take as our centrepiece the second surviving printed edition of music for the instrument, by Marco Antonio
Cavazzoni (1523). He may well have been the arranger of the pieces in the first (Andrea Antico, 1517, Naxos
8.572983). A second focus is on the transformation of the main form, the ricercare. This term for a while covered
anything played on a lute or keyboard instrument with which no words were associated, but basic line of development
of such works is from something (semi-) improvised to a work of the greatest complexity.

The lost art of polyphony—the simultaneous interweaving of more than one melodic line—was once the glory and
pinnacle of Western music. As it was perfected in Italy during the early 16th century, it had the straightforward,
muscular beauty of ancient Greek, and is now equally as dead to a world drowning in ephemera. Its Hellenistic late
flowering in the 17th and 18th centuries, the fugue, still echoes faintly, thanks largely to the harpsichord works of J.S.
Bach. But the foundation upon which that last great master of polyphony built his edifices—the Italian ricercare for
instrumental ensemble or keyboard—has been consigned, if anywhere, to university classrooms, where one imagines
reluctant students of music history yawning as they consult their social media.

Cavazzoni was born into a noble family in Bologna at an unknown date toward the end of the 15th century. His playing
was called ‘divino’ while he was still a teenager, and his precocious talents, together with his good upbringing, must
have smoothed his path into the service of the Duchess of Urbino, daughter of Isabella d’Este, before 1512; he most
likely followed her into exile back at her hometown Mantua in 1516. Those early years earned him the sobriquet
‘d’Urbino’. Later he is documented as a private harpsichordist to Leo X in Rome, as colleague and eventual successor
to Vincenzo da Modena, who had played a pedal harpsichord to the famous Duke of Ferrara, Ercole I (his patroness’s
grandfather) on his deathbed. The oldest harpsichord still in existence was owned by that most extravagant and most
melomane of the Renaissance popes, who is said to have kept Cavazzoni ‘very close to him’; it is pictured on our
cover. Later still we find Cavazzoni as a member of the charmed Venetian circle around Bembo, Aretino (who
addressed two of his famous letters to him), and Titian. Posts as organist at Chioggia and as a chorister at San Marco
(intermittently from 1517) rounded off his illustrious career; he died sometime after 1560.

The 1523 print is divided into two sections of four pieces each; the first comprises two ricercars as preludes to two
arrangements for keyboard of motets in praise of the Virgin Mary—a customary initial nod to the Church authorities,
found even in as raucous a gathering as that described in Antonfrancesco Doni’s Dialogo della Musica (1554). Similar
works of private devotion are found in other sources where the harpsichord is specifically indicated. In the second
group we find arrangements of French chansons. Much effort has been expended on finding the composers of the
original vocal versions of these, but Cavazzoni claims them as his own on the title page, and there is no reason to be
amazed at such a sophisticate dabbling in the fashionable new form. The deconstructed textures of all six of the
texted pieces reveal the work of a keyboard player, not that of a composer of serious polyphony.

But it is the two ricercars which are landmarks of the highest order. Their length alone, and especially their consistent
use of a small number of motifs and bold modulation, are unparalleled in previous instrumental music. They rather
surprisingly have their roots in Austria, where the harpsichord had been invented a century and a quarter previously:
the lengthy improvisations by the emperor Maximilian’s keyboardist Paul Hofhaimer are praised to the skies by
(among many others) the brother of his student Dionisio Memo, who was organist at San Marco by around 1510 and
later a bosom friend of England’s king Henry VIII. A very few pieces by Memo may have survived under the cloak of
anonymity, but I think that in Cavazzoni’s ricercars we have the clearest evidence of Hofhaimer’s late style, one of the
quantum leaps in the keyboard tradition, as transmitted to Italy by Memo.

A couple of Memo’s relics possibly come down to us in the first printed lute books of 1507, which contain the earliest
known ricercars, which are usually attributed to the arranger of the other pieces in these two collections, Francesco
Spinacino. In fact, all but one of the ricercars are anonymous, and are of such diverse complexion that they could not
possibly be by one man. The publisher Petrucci, in one of the strangest forewords in music history, offers his blessing
to anyone doubting their true authorship. The musical texts are often disastrously corrupt, to the point of
incomprehensibility. Petrucci was clearly in over his head in attempting to print lute tablature; he soon gave up, and
lost his monopoly to Antico in Rome. A few of the ricercars, once deciphered, closely resemble Cavazzoni’s. Our track
1 is my attempt to reconstruct one of them for harpsichord. These pieces are far too organised to be classed as
simple, improvised lute-preludes, as they always are in the musicological literature; they are embryonic toccatas, such
as continued to flourish until Ercole Pasquini changed the landscape a century later.

This is followed by a ricercar in a different style by the oldest named composer of such works, Jacobo (or Giacomo)
Fogliano. A prodigy who got into trouble with a lady in his early teens, he is already described in 1483 as a master of
the harpsichord. He spent most of his long life (c. 1468–1548) in Modena, where his tomb-monument can still be seen
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in the splendid cathedral. Our track 2 is preserved in the precious manuscript collection at Castell’Arquato, and
cannot be dated; hence its place in the evolution of the form is difficult to determine. It is clearly more contrapuntally
oriented than the freer types, but not to the extent of some of our later examples.

Cavazzoni’s two ricercar-motet pairs come next 3 – 6 . In order to offer some contrast to the consistent liveliness of
the four chansons 7 9 11 13 that end his collection, I have inserted three works by other composers between
them. The first of these is a masterpiece beyond all praise, by the most influential composer/teacher of early
16thcentury Italy, the ‘eccelentissimo e rarissimo’ (sic Zarlino) Adrian Willaert from Flanders. With two countrymen,
Clemens non Papa and Nicolas Gombert, he established the classic late-Renaissance style of vocal composition: a
short theme is passed in imitation through the several voices of a polyphonic texture, and dovetails with the next, in a
tightly-woven network which requires the highest level of musical craftsmanship. Only students of the art who have
attempted such things in counterpoint class can appreciate how difficult it is to make it seem as easy as the great
masters did.

The aforementioned Musica Nova of 1540 marks a watershed in the development of the ricercar, and of instrumental
music in general. Here, ephemeral improvisation is set aside, and the new imitative style is transferred to the
keyboard (and to consorts of other instruments if so desired), in works of a length and complexity which might
exhaust and confound a church choir. The print, which survives only in a bass part-book, can be largely reconstructed
using a reprint from Lyons, which is advertised on the title page as a means of ‘learning to play the harpsichord’; the
organ is not mentioned. Giulio Segni dominates the publication with thirteen pieces, but Willaert is present as a kind of
godfather with at least three. The longest of them (the masterpiece previously mentioned) 8 is an exploration of the
tetrachord, hexachord and octave scales, with a central section on la-sol-fa-re-mi, in homage to the ‘Prince of Music’,
Josquin des Prez, and one of a long line of pieces on this theme (which means lascia fare mi – ‘let me do it’). A series
of longish canons—difficult to hear, and hard even to find on paper—densely surrounded by imitations of fragments,
hold the piece together. It culminates with two joyous melodies developed from the previous material, the last one
breaking into triple time at the end.

Segni himself, noted in several sources as a brilliant harpsichordist whose playing was enough to utterly distract Pope
Clement VII from an important political conference in the Vatican, is present with a ricercar 10 of yet another type. A
more standard example from Musica Nova can be found on my Naxos recording of the Tientos and Variations of
Antonio de Cabezón [8.572475–76], since it was falsely attributed to the wonderful blind Spaniard in an edition of
1557. The present slow, solemn work is from Castell’Arquato, and may be intended for the mystical moment in the
Mass when the priest prepares the communion host. If so, it belongs to the organ, but I have appropriated it with the
same license used by organists for the rest of this music.

The final insert 12 acquaints the listener with Cavazzoni’s son Girolamo, who proudly took his father’s honorific
‘d’Urbino’. His two published books of keyboard music establish him as a distinguished composer in his own right, in
spite of the first, printed in 1543 when he was probably in his late teens, consisting of mere juvenilia, as he modestly
informs his dedicatee. These early works are in a transitional style between the free and the strictly contrapuntal. Not
so our track 14 , a brilliant and thoroughly worked-out piece with no trace of youthful exuberance, which,
astoundingly, had already appeared in Musica Nova; the young man’s name appears there in small print, indicating a
student relationship with one of the project’s guiding spirits—probably Segni, whose Roman career paralleled that of
Girolamo’s father.

We then return to that remarkable master for his only other preserved work, a ricercar 15 clearly composed later
than 1523, in the style of the classic Venetian toccata: a slow opening, and sections of passage-work alternating with
fugal episodes.

The term ricercar was broad enough to cover the complete reworking of a madrigal such as that by Jacques Brunel of
Cipriano de Rore’s five-part ‘Cantai mentre ch’i arsi’ 16 . Brunel, a famous French-born keyboardist in Ferrara whose
‘normal’ ricercars preserved in manuscript helped pave the way for a yet more learned style, takes each of de Rore’s
brief themes and gives them a treatment even more expressive than that of the great Netherlander’s original,
heightening the colours suggested by Giovanni Brevio’s lovely sonnet on the old topic of a rejected lover in tearful
contemplation of his new-found liberty. Brunel steps back and lets de Rore speak unaltered for the final line, ‘Alas,
there is no place for peace in the heart of a lover’. To balance all five voices and make them clearly audible is as great
a challenge as a harpsichordist can face.

Claudio Veggio was an early madrigalist from Piacenza; his few keyboard compositions reveal him as one of the most
advanced experimenters of his time. This magnificent ricercar 17 shows yet another direction into which the form
veered, since it clearly points the way to the colourful, many-sectioned Venetian sonata from the beginning of the 17th
century.

Both Veggio and Girolamo Parabosco make rare personal appearances in Doni’s Dialogo, Veggio as a feisty character
eager to make music, and jealous of Parabosco’s many-sided genius; the latter as madly in love with a woman who is
the main subject of the evening’s debate. Parabosco was not only first organist of San Marco, but also a respected
poet and composer of stage works. At the time of Musica Nova’s publication he was still listed among the students. His
ricercar on the ancient prayer for peace, Da pacem Domine 18 , may have been connected to the end of a war of
Venice against the Ottomans. It is a rare example of a ricercar taking the form of the oldest type of Western organ
music: a cantus firmus from Gregorian chant in long notes in the tenor, with added counterpoint. In this case, each
line of the plainsong is preceded in the discant or the alto by a pre-imitation. Improvising similar pieces from a book of
liturgical chant was a church musician’s main job for a thousand years, but he learned his art on stringed instruments,
not in cold churches where somebody had to be paid to pump the bellows.

Claudio Merulo, Parabosco’s successor in the foremost organist’s post in the world, was the most famous keyboardist
of the late 16th century, a kind of Franz Liszt avant la lettre. His brilliant but superficial pieces, mostly published by
himself, cannot stand comparison with those of his second organist, Andrea Gabrieli, with whom he is said to have
‘duelled’ on the two organs of the Doge’s incomparable chapel. His early ricercars are especially disappointing. One of
them is offered here 19 to mark the beginning of the decline and eventual fall of Italian keyboard music; it is rich in
effect, but poor in contrapuntal substance. For that, the reader is invited to listen to my recording of a selection of
Gabrieli’s masterworks [Naxos 8.572198]. Merulo—tired, as I suspect, of being out-duelled by Gabrieli—quit his post
at San Marco, and opted for an easy life serving the corrupt nobility of Florence and Parma. His best ricercars can be

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found, in a show of late regret, as sections of a toccata printed shortly after his death in 1604. By that time, a young
man from Ferrara named Girolamo Frescobaldi was beginning to spread his wings. Like J.S. Bach a century later, he
both heralded a new golden age and defended what was greatest from the past.

Glen Wilson

Additional notes to
Marco Antonio Cavazzoni (c.1490–c. 1560): Complete Works • Italian Ricercars

Except for dances, Italian keyboard music of the 16th century—a time of extremely important developments in the
history of the genre and for instrumental music in general—is consigned in the musicological literature and in editions,
over and over again, exclusively to the organ. Prima facie this ought raise eyebrows, but in the light of massive
evidence to the importance of the harpsichord in the period, not only in Italy but in the rest of Europe, this
automatism is nothing short of astounding. Harpsichordists, with their lopsided fixation on the 18th-century literature
(Bach, Scarlatti, Rameau, and Couperin le Grand ad infinitum) are partly to blame for the loss of some of their richest
repertoire.

Let a few selected title pages illustrate the organ fallacy:

The first collection of keyboard music printed in Italy, Andrea Antico’s Frottole Intabulate (1517, a collection of
frottolas arranged for keyboard—“per sonar organi”) shows the editor seated at a harpsichord.
Musica Nova (1540), the landmark collection of ricercars for keyboard or ensemble, which survives in a single
bass part book, can be reconstructed only by using the Lyons reprint, Musique de Joye, which was published as
a means of learning to play “les epinettes” (a term encompassing the harpsichord and its smaller cousins) and
melody instruments. The organ is not mentioned.
Antonio Valente’s Intavolatura de Cimbalo (“Harpsichord Music”) (1576) contains (besides dances) fantasias,
ricercars and a Salve Regina. Again, there is no mention of the organ.

(Printed collections of dances by Radino and Facoli mention only the harpsichord, although they were surely also
played on chamber organs.)

For music from outside of Italy, similar prejudices in favor of the organ can consistently be observed. One striking
example is Bernhard Schmidt the Elder’s Zwey Bücher Einer Neuen Kunstlichen Tabulatur auff Orgel und Instrument
(1577). “Instrument” at this time translates as “harpsichord”. Das Erbe Deutscher Musik published the collection in
1997 as an “Orgeltabulatur”, and the editor does not mention the Instrument once in his extensive prefatory material.

Many non-musical sources testify to the harpsichord’s importance and popularity in 15th- and 16th-century Italy.
Letters and other documents in official archives reveal that the line of musical patrons which I would call the most
distinguished in all of musical history were harpsichordists: Ercole I, Duke of Ferrara, who established that magical city
as the center of the musical world around 1470, owned several instruments housed in a special music room in the
castle, and sent one to his famous son, Cardinal Ippolito; the latter and his sister Isabella d’Este (who was called the
“First Lady of the World”) had harpsichord lessons from Girolamo da Sestola; and Isabella’s daughter was the
patroness of Marco Antonio Cavazzoni after she became Duchess of Urbino.

Also belonging to the first century of the harpsichord’s existence are the following three highly prominent performers:

Isacco Argiropulo (Argyropoulos) was given a contract as harpsichordist in 1472 by the Duke of Milan, Galeazzo
Maria Sforza, as was already revealed in an article from 1881. This brutal tyrant, who quickly built his private
chapel into one of the finest in Europe, names Isacco as “nostro Cortesano et Sonatore de gravacymbolo”. The
organ is not mentioned in the document; nevertheless, in all literature and lexica he is consistently referred to
only as an organist and organ builder.
The Spaniard Laurenzo of Cordova, documented from 1476 at the brilliant Aragonese court of King Ferrante I of
Naples, and given an introduction by him to Lorenzo de’ Medici in 1484, is praised for his “interpuncta facilitas”
(able precision) on the Gravecordio by the papal secretary Paolo Cortese (or Cortesi) in his famous treatise De
Cardinalatu (1510). This term has been incorrectly translated (Pirrotta, Atlas) as “clavichord”, but clavicordio
was the Spanish name for the harpsichord, and the prefix “grave-” is only associated with this instrument.
The earliest-born known composer of keyboard ricercars, Jacobo (or Giacomo) Fogliano da Modena, whose
memorial plaque can still be seen in the cathedral where he spent most of his long life, is already described
when he was still a teenager in 1483 as a master of the harpsichord.

Here are a few later sources of various kinds:

A correspondence of 1524 regarding Adrian Willaert’s controversial chromatic part-song “Quid non ebrietas”
refers to the famous theorist Pietro Aron playing the piece on his harpsichord (which, by the way, puts the
instrument at the center of furious arguments about tuning and temperament).
Ortensio Lando’s book of lists (1552) mentions two of the most important keyboard composers of the era as
harpsichordists only: Giulio Segni, the initiator of Musica Nova, is “most excellent on quilled instruments”, and
the great Jacques Brunel of Ferrara is “miraculous on quilled instruments and expert in chromatic music” (cf.
the previous remark).
Segni, one of the greatest masters of the early ricercar, is mentioned again in Cosimo Bartoli’s Raggionimenti
Academici (1567), which includes a list of active keyboard players in which the harpsichord dominates. Segni is
said to play beautifully on the organ, but to be “worth far more” on quilled instruments. Bartoli tells two stories
of important political conferences, one of them involving Pope Clement VII, where Segni’s quiet background
music on the harpsichord caused the pressing subjects at hand to be dropped, and those involved to wander
over to the instrument and listen, spellbound. The harpsichord is specified in the source, but an organ, with its
accompanying inconvenience and indiscretion of a bellows-blower, would be in any case inconceivable in such
situations.
Bartoli also has one of his speakers tell of hearing “il Moschino” (the nickname of the Florentine Baccio
Moschini) play alone on the harpsichord for an hour “for his own pleasure and study”, causing his listener to be
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cleansed of all bitterness and anger. He played the whole while “in contrabattuta”, in which style he is said to
be unrivaled; I take this to mean what was later called “senza battuta” or “con discrezione”, in which case we
may have here the earliest reference to free preluding on the harpsichord.
The Venetian envoy to the Papal court reports as follows on a 65-course dinner given by Cardinal Francesco
Cornaro, the dedicatee of Marco Antonio Cavazzoni’s epochal publication of 1523 which is the focus of our
recording, on the occasion of Isabella d’Este’s visit to Rome: “At the end of the meal we rose from the table…
deafened by the continual concert, carried on both within and without the hall and proceeding from every
instrument that Rome could produce—fifes, harpsichords and four-stringed lutes in addition to the voices of
hired singers.”
A letter from Antonfranceso Doni to the sculptor Giovanni Angelo refers to Claudio Veggio, composer of a few
brilliant ricercars preserved at Castell’Arquato, as a harpsichordist. (Both Doni and Veggio were from
Piancenza, members of the local Academy of Gardeners dedicated to the garden-fertility god Priapus, which
was disbanded by the authorities for bad behavior. Veggio makes a rare personal appearance in Antonfrancesco
Doni’s Dialogo della Musica (1554) as a feisty young fellow trying to interrupt the loose talk and get on with
music-making; he is also jealous of the attention which the multi-talented Girolamo Parabosco (Segni’s
succesor as first organist at San Marco) is getting.
Vincenzo Galilei (the astronomer’s father), in a critique of contrapuntal music found in his famous Dialogo
(1581), criticizes composers for using extremely long notes, which render their performance on lute and
harpsichord, “those noble instruments”, impossible unless “the experienced performer” re-strikes them.

These are some of the results of a couple of winter evenings’ trolling of the internet; I feel certain they could easily be
multiplied by a more diligent researcher than I.

***

Why is this bias in favor of the organ—which has slowly become as irritating to me as all those Urtext editions of Bach
for “Piano” or Klavier—so powerful? I think it is mostly because of the massive presence of these formidable and
dangerously powerful instruments in churches all over the world, under which the fragile remains of 16th-century
harpsichords, largely mute and untouchable in museums, are simply crushed. Then there is the Roman Catholic
Church itself, housing so many magnificent organs, with its tremendous influence on society at large, then and now.
Nothing could be published in 16th-century Italy without her blessing. Even such a raucous gathering as that
described in Doni’s Dialogo had to begin with the singing of motets to the Virgin. The harpsichord was a private
instrument; for personal delectation, gatherings of friends or “Academies”, small concerts and entertainment during
potentates’ meals, and for purposes of learning the keyboardist’s art at home.

There is also considerable confusion regarding the term “organo” itself, perhaps best illustrated by Antico’s cover
mentioned above. The full title includes “per sonare organi”, which has to include the harpsichord, given the picture of
Antico playing one on the cover. The literal German translation of the original Greco-Latin word “organon/organum”,
Instrument, is an extreme example of this conflation in that it quite simply means “harpsichord”, as mentioned above.
The most influential theorist of the period, Zarlino, says the term organo covers “any man-made instrument”, the
original usage that goes back to the ancient Greeks. The invention of the instrument we now call the organ of course
goes back to Alexandria in the third century BC, and the term slowly shifted in later languages to apply, at least in
music, to that complicated apparatus, without ever quite losing the original senses, which included “tool” and “sensory
organ”. When the clavichord and harpsichord were invented in the 14th century, the fact of their having keys like their
predecessor nudged them into the same general category.

Particular confusion has been caused for centuries by the Psalmist’s exhortation to praise God in organis, which simply
means “with instruments”, and has nothing whatsoever to do with the modern organ, which had yet to be invented
when the original Hebrew was composed (although St. Jerome, who wrote the Latin Vulgate translation quoted here
certainly knew the organ).

The term “intavolatura d’organo”, meaning a keyboard score, is similarly ambiguous. The emphasis should be on
“intavolatura”, the making of a “table” of many notes, not on “organo”; it just happened that organists were already
looking for ways to notate their music before the younger instruments came along and took it over. It is telling in this
respect that some of the earliest mentions of the clavichord, in its earliest form called the chekker, say that it is
“played like” or “resembles the organ”. There are numerous examples of harpsichord music in sources described as
being notated in “intavolatura d’organo”. The old, somewhat oxymoronic Spanish term canto de organo—“organ (or
instrumental?) song”—is a similar case; it means “mensural music”, as opposed to canto llano—plainchant. Here
again, a term was taken from what was conveniently nearby, although in this case proximity concerned the location of
choir and organ, not a similarity of mechanism.

This association of organ and harpsichord is borne out by the extraordinary prevalence of the combined instruments
called claviorgana in the 16th century, which culminated in the monstrosity containing a harpsichord and three
separate spinets built in the 17th century for Palazzo Verospi Vitelleschi in Rome. Inventories from several countries
cite dozens of them. A notable example is famous the portrait of Paul Hofhaimer in the “Triumph of Emperor
Maximilian”, where he is shown sitting at a positive organ. But on the camel-drawn mythical float, a claviorganum
(with “Baldachinorgel” and upright harpsichord elements) and a clavicytherium (upright harpsichord) in their
protective cases are also clearly visible. In 1585 at Palazzo Pitti in Florence, Claudio Merulo played a particularly
elaborate one, with a register that initiated a mock naval battle on its top, to the astonishment of four Japanese boys
who had been sent by the Jesuits to Europe to illustrate their success in training the people of that otherwise stubborn
nation.

***

Italian keyboard music of the 16th century centers on the dance, on arrangements of vocal music, but especially on
the ricercar. The form began its life, as far as we know, as an improvisatory prelude on the lute, but the term came to
mean almost anything (dances and variations excepted) played on solo instruments which involved no text. Eventually
it developed into the most complex form of contrapuntal music.

This lost art of polyphony—the simultaneous interweaving of more than one melodic line—was once the glory and
pinnacle of Western music. As it was practiced in Flanders and Italy during the early 16th century, it had the
straightforward, muscular beauty of ancient Greek, and is now equally as dead to a world drowning in ephemera. Its
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Mannerist late flowering in the 17th and 18th centuries, the fugue, still echoes faintly, thanks largely to the
harpsichord works of J.S. Bach (and his three-part ricercar in the Musical Offering returns the circle to improvisation).
But the foundation upon which that last great master of polyphony built his edifices—the Italian ricercare for
instrumental ensemble or keyboard—has been consigned, if anywhere, to university classrooms, where one imagines
reluctant students of music history yawning as they consult their social media. Musica Nova represented the decisive
shift in the form from something reflecting the word’s literal meaning (“to search out”), which evolved into the
toccata, to the sober counterpoint that challenged composers to exercise their craft to the highest degree.

There are a very few examples of a type of ricercar which fits neither the category “improvised prelude”, nor that of
“strict counterpoint”. A distinguished Canadian musicologist, Warren Kirkendale, has called the former “Aristotelian”
and the latter “Ciceronian”, citing the Stagirite’s descriptions of extemporaneous exordia, and contrasting them with
Cicero’s recommendations for careful preparation, as propagated by Cavazzoni’s friend and patron, Cardinal Bembo.
This discursive, in-between type might, by the same token, be called “Epicurian”, since I think they were composed for
gatherings of friends, which in the philosophy of Epicurus represent the highest form of pleasure. The prime examples
of this third type are the two which appear in Marco Antonio Cavazzoni’s print of 1523, which forms the centerpiece of
the recording for which this essay provides some background, and which since they were first discussed (Jeppensen,
1943) and published have been called “organ music”. There is, however, strong internal evidence that they represent
Cavazzoni’s work as a harpsichordist, which is strongly documented:

We know of his youthful service at the court of Urbino because of letters from Duchess Eleonora in 1512 which
call him “mio musico”; this implies work as a chamber musician, which could involve small organs, but more
likely stringed instruments. Some years ago I saw, in the Museo Nazionale located in the palace where he
played, a drawing of a small group of people around a harpsichordist marked “15th-16th century”. I made a
mental note at the time and thought no more about it. In spite of my best efforts to date, and those of curators
at the museum, I have not been able to trace what may be a picture of Cavazzoni performing in a gathering
similar to those described in Castigione’s famous Cortegiano, which dates from a few years before Cavazzoni’s
arrival. The frottolist Marco Cara and a few other musicians are mentioned there, but an accident of timing has
robbed us of a description of Marco Antonio d’Urbino role in intimate gatherings at the most refined court in the
world.
A Venetian ambassador to the Papal court writes that Leo X kept Cavazzoni “dal gravicembalo” “very close to
him”.
The dedication of a 1523 edition of Petrarch refers to Cavazzoni’s service with the Pope, and calls him in this
connection the world’s greatest master of the harpsichord.
The salary records of the papal Curia refer to him only as harpsichordist.
A papal singer reports back to Ferrara that Cavazzoni performed feats on the harpsichord at a concert for the
Pope which were “miraculous, not to say which might resurrect the dead.”
Pietro Aretino, besides addressing two of his famous letters to Cavazzoni, mentions him alongside Giulio da
Modena in his comedy Il Marescalco as players of the “cimbalis bene sonantibus”, a Biblical reference which
puns on “cembalo”.

***

The book of 1523, entitled Recerchari Motetti Canzoni Libro Primo, contains no reference to any specific instrument
whatsoever; there is only a standard mention in the printing privilege, granted in the name of Pope Adrian VI, to the
praise of God in organis, as explained above. It is divided into two parts of four pieces each, for a total of eight, then
considered a perfect number. The first part is sacred, the second, secular; domains which are usually assigned to the
organ and harpsichord respectively. That division can be easily affirmed for part two, heavily-ornamented
arrangements of four chansons, which, while certainly playable on a chamber organ, rely to an extraordinary degree
on long written-out trills. This points rather clearly to primacy of the harpsichord. So does the fact that (judging by
their titles) the lost originals, efforts by Cavazzoni in the fashionable French-language form, are eminently of this
world, not the next.

The first part, consisting of two ricercars each followed by an arrangement of a motet in the same key, requires
considerably more comment. I hope to show that they, too, are conceived for the stringed instrument.

There can be no objection to playing Cavazzoni’s two motet arrangements on the harpsichord; all the harpsichord
collections mentioned at the beginning of this essay contain sacred music, as do several dance sources. In France,
three collections published by Attaingnant in 1531 containing ONLY music for the liturgy are presented for “organ,
harpsichord or clavichord”. Private devotion, general keyboard study, and even performance in religious houses that
had no organ are some of the reasons which can be given for this practice. Restricting such music to the organ on
pious grounds cannot be justified.

Having liberated Cavazzoni’s part one from the organ monopoly, we must next sever it from the organ and from the
church altogether. The main reasons for this are found within the two ricercars themselves. They are threefold.

First, range: The first ricercar uses the range G-e’’’, the second goes even farther, to F-f’’’. This is beyond the range of
Italian organs of the time. In the 15th century this was fairly standardized at F-f’’. Larger “doppio” organs extended
this down an octave, to cover pull-down pedal range. By Cavazzoni’s time extensions up to a’’, and down to C or CC
were becoming common. It was the harpsichord and spinet which went up as far as f’’’. It is sometimes asked what
was played up that high; these are the only pieces I know of that answer that question, with one exception, a set of
mass versets by “Jaches” in Castell’Arquato, which goes up to d’’’. This piece looks texturally like harpsichord music,
and I would suggest it is just such a work for such small chapels with no organ as I mentioned a couple of paragraphs
back. Of course, it could also have been intended for a small organ with a higher range; such did exist, but not in
sufficient numbers to justify an expensive publication such as Cavazzoni’s, assuming he ever had the organ in mind for
it.

I am aware that organists like to claim an historical right to transpose an octave higher or lower at will if their
instrument allows it. Both these ricercars could be played an octave lower on, say, the large organ at San Petronio in
Bologna, but that only leads to a confused growling in the nether regions of the pipework, even if the principal
registers are not drawn. Such an expedient is unnecessary in any case when there is such a clear historical

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alternative: harpsichords and spinets with C-f’’’ (or F to f’’’, which fits Cavazzoni to perfection) ranges. There is no
need whatsoever to change the pitches notated in the source.

Secondly, the very texture of the two ricercars points clearly to the harpsichord. All music of the period which is
definitely for the organ respects the flowing, connected lines which the instrument’s sustained sound requires. By
contrast, the melodies in our two ricercars leap around wildly, and often break off suddenly, even at leading notes.The
number of voices is also subject to constant and often sudden changes, as is the general Affekt. These pieces are
floods of sudden inspirations; they manipulate a small number of motifs and modulate violently in a way never before
seen in music history, fairly careening from one end of the emotional spectrum to the other and back again. All this is
typical for the chameleon-like, thrust-and-parry character of the harpsichord, and is utterly foreign to the early organ
literature.

In addition, the frequent parallel fifths and octaves in left-hand chords, which resemble the octave and quint registers
of an organ, are also characteristic of the harpsichord’s wonderful dance literature, and are very rarely found in organ
music, simply because they are redundant there. And to me, at least, the dissonant parallel thirds in the left hand
against the repeated chords in the right at the beginning of the Recercare primo sound simply awful on the organ,
whereas the transparency of the harpsichord renders them delightful. This is not Gothic music, as this instance, as
well as some of the many errors in the print (if taken as they stand) might cause one to suspect. (Initial repeated
chords like these are found in organ music as far away as Poland, and are not, as might be thought, indicative of the
quickly diminishing sound of the harpsichord.)

Thirdly, both pieces are inconceivable in the liturgy because of their extreme length. All sources instruct organists to
be brief; these two ricercars compare in duration with the massive ricercars of Jacques Buus. The Roman Catholic
church was at this time under great pressure from the Reformation to simplify its ceremonials, and came within a hair
of eliminating all church music except Gregorian chant a few year later at the Council of Trent.

The only clearly liturgical pieces which can match the 1523 ricercars in length come more than a century later, in
Frescobaldi’s Fiori Musicali, which contain very long ricercars. But he supplies many cadences where, as he tells us,
the organist can break off when necessary; and anyway, I think he was just showing off his latest masterpieces in
print.

Cavazzoni’s pieces are not for the church; they are distant mirrors of the long improvisations on chamber organs and
harpsichords which made Paul Hofhaimer, keyboardist to the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I, famous all over
Europe. This might seem far-fetched, but it must be remembered that the Venetian Dionisio Memmo, another widely-
travelled virtuoso, studied with Hofhaimer, and worshipped him as a demi-god. I think it can be assumed that
Cavazzoni, as a young man in Bologna, heard and knew Memmo, and possibly even studied with him. Hofhaimer, who
constantly sought out the companionship of humanists to supplement his poor education, was working at the time of
his death in 1537 on a setting of Latin poetry which is purest Renaissance. His four surviving organ pieces are Gothic,
and must be much earlier. I am reminded by this contrast of two adjacent bishops’ tombstones by Tilman
Riemenschneider in the cathedral of Würzburg, where I live; one late Gothic, the other early Renaissance. And let me
say again that the much younger Cavazzoni was emphatically on the later side of that divide.

So much for the internal evidence; but there is one more objection to performance of Cavazzoni and other ricercarists
on organs. The way the ranks of the Italian church organ are built up weighs them heavily to the treble. There are no
mixtures to balance the bass (although smaller registers break back when their pipes become too small). Large organs
even sometimes have additional ranks of principal pipes in the discant. This shows, to my mind, that their main
function was the harmonization of choral melodies (falso bordone). Recordings, as well as my own experiences as
performer and listener, confirm that lower contrapuntal voices come through poorly. This, however, is a general
problem with all big organs, as noted by Arnold Schlick in his Spiegel as early as 1511, which the Germans tried to
solve by adding independent pedal divisions. It is no problem at all on the harpsichord, which is why I, for one, will
always prefer it for polyphony. In addition to this difficulty, there are many passages in Cavazzoni’s ricercars where all
the voices cluster in the lower range. These are reduced to mud on any organ.

The word “ricercar” first appears in a church context in 1531, in the report of a competition for the organist’s post in
Treviso. It refers there to improvised music (preludes, postludes, responses, elevations) with no cantus firmus. The
three preludes in the three Attaingnant collections mentioned previously (which rather surprisingly contain some organ
music as advanced as anything from Italy) provide a sensible example of what a good organist might have provided:
highly expressive, but stable, clear, mostly three-part textures.

Cavazzoni himself provides us with one ricercar which can be seen as suitable for the church, his only work not
preserved in print, but rather in the priceless manuscripts at Castell’Arquato. It is of a suitable length; it stays within
the organ’s range; the lines, while sometimes virtuosic, do not leap around; and the fugal sections are short and clear.
It leads directly to the toccatas of the later Venetian school, and the contrast to the two pieces under discussion is
striking.

Marco Antonio Cavazzoni, close friend of Cardinal Bembo, Pietro Aretino and Titian, was very much part of the artistic
and literary life of Venice during its most famous flowering. Music often lags behind the other arts, because of its
cumbersome, arcane burden of theory and the difficulty of achieving its practice at the highest level. In these two
ricercars we see a brief flash of congruence, perhaps even of a leading edge of some kind. They are so far in advance
of their musical neighbors that one must seek the source of their inspiration in the improvising mind of a genius who
watched Raphael and Michelangelo at work in the Vatican, and who could have observed Titian while he painted one of
his portraits of Eleonora née Gonzaga, Cavazzoni’s early patroness, in whose service the composer earned the
sobriquet “d’Urbino”. Who knows, he might have even helped to inspire them by his playing on the sober little
instrument from 1516 shown on our cover, formerly the property of Leo X, which happens to be the oldest harpsichord
to have survived the havoc of the intervening centuries. This project celebrates the 500th anniversary of its existence.

In Greek mythology, the satyr Marsyas challenged Apollo to a contest: his panpipe vs. the god’s lyre. The defeat of the
impudent creature is invoked in Renaissance literary discussions of the relative merits of wind and stringed
instruments, in which strings obviously come out on top. I am not suggesting that organists who play Cavazzoni and
other early ricercars should be flayed alive, as poor Marsyas was; but a little less presumption would be in order.

Glen Wilson
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2018. 11. 6. CAVAZZONI, M.A.: Works (Complete) / Italian Ricercars (G. Wilson)

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