Rodrigo Calveyra, cornetto and recorders

Davide Pozzi, organ and harpsichord

Since the origins of Western music tradition, sound was considered as merely a tool to emphasize the meaning of a text. We could even say that music was essentially a device of semantic amplification. That is why human voice was always considered to be an ideal instrument, as it was the carrier of text.  At the end of the medieval period instruments started to be independent from voice. In this new,     strictly instrumental style, other tools had to be used to “tell the story”. In the treatise Fontegara, pubished by Silvestro Ganassi in 1535, he presented a term suonare artificioso, inviting instruments to employ many different resources to express emotions of musical discourse. Among these resources, such as articulation, rubato, sound effects, ornaments and others, diminution could be considered as the most emblematic – it is the art of embellishing music by dividing a long note into many shorter ones. The program presents the most important Italian masters of diminution of the XVI and XVII centuries, relying on the most important historical sources such as Silvestro Ganassi La Fontegara, Venice, 1535, Diego Ortiz Tratado de glosas, Rome, 1553, Girolamo Dalla Casa Il vero modo di diminuir, Venice, 1584, Giovanni Battista Bovicelli Regole, passagi di musica, Venice 1594, Francesco Rognoni Selva di varri passaggi, Milan, 1620, and others. The program Dolce Ricordo invites us to remember the times, when the essence of music was poetry.