Artists

Julie Rivest, violin
Étienne Asselin, cornetto
Maximilien Brisson, trombone
Christophe Gauthier, harpsichord

Programme

This program is a musical journey to the Italy of early baroque composers Claudio Monteverdi, Alessandro Grandi and Dario Castello. In an era bubbling with new ideas and aesthetics, a fresh style of music emerges, rich with surprise and great contrasts.

In vocal music, this modern style articulates itself around the text, with an aim to very closely follow the words in both their sound and meaning, leading to exaggerated contrasts and sudden changes in the musical discourse and texture. Chief among the many innovations of this modern style is the emergence of monody and small-scale concerted music with mandatory basso continuo played by one or more harmonic instruments.

Many of the same innovations naturally find their way into instrumental writing. The absence of text however, offers even more freedom to purely instrumental music. This gives rise to the Stylus phantasticus, described by Athanasius Kircher in 1650, as “the most free and unfettered method of composition, bound to nothing, neither to words, nor to a harmonious subject” and “organized with regard to manifest invention, the hidden reason of harmony, and an ingenious, skilled connection of harmonic phrases and fugues.”