Maestro Researching Vatican Music

Yahoo News ^ | May 13, 2006 | DAVID SHARP

[NYer]

Toshiyuki Shimada was looking for inspiration as his tenure at the Portland Symphony Orchestra came to a close. He has found it as a Yale University professor in pursuit of long-forgotten musical treasures at the Vatican.

The mild-mannered maestro believes that deep within the Vatican Library's archives are pieces of music that have not been heard in modern times.

Under a licensing agreement, Shimada hopes to bring some of this music to the masses through a series of compact discs carrying the library's seal.

"We know that there's a lot of music that has not seen the daylight," said Shimada, his eyes lighting up at the musical possibilities. "There's a certain amount of mysteriousness. It's a lot like a treasure hunt."

The 54-year-old Shimada is musical director and chief creative officer of Trinity Music Partners, which has a licensing agreement allowing Shimada to mine the Vatican Library's treasure trove of manuscripts and prints.

The library contains works ranging from Gregorian chants to symphonic music to choral arrangements to folk music to African drumming.

Some of the manuscripts, like those of Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, were created for Capella Giulia, the choir of the Basilica of St. Peter, and for the choir in the Sistine Chapel. Others are part of private collections donated to the library.

Already, Shimada has identified a manuscript by the late Italian composer Alessandro Scarlatti dating to the late 1600s.

The piece, written a capella for the Sistine Chapel choir, is documented in some scholarly works. But Shimada can find no evidence that it has been performed in modern times, providing a hope that he'll uncover long-hidden works.

The piece will be included on an Easter CD to be released next year, he said. Trinity's first release, of Christmas music, is due this fall.

The library, the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, next to the Sistine Chapel and the Vatican Museum, has no music department. Instead, manuscripts and printed music are contained in the various collections, or fondi, within the library.

"I was amazed when I saw for the first time the endless library stacks in the manuscript vault, and in the basement," Shimada said, recalling his first visit. "Within these stacks silently sleep thousands of musical scores, ready to be reawakened."

Sorting through it is a daunting task.

Researchers from University of Heidelberg spent more than six years cataloging the collection of the choir of the Sistine Chapel, which alone contains 4,500 works, said Thomas Schmidt-Beste, a former senior research fellow at the university.

Trinity would be hard-pressed to find manuscripts that have not been described or at least mentioned in scholarly literature. But that doesn't mean there aren't musical treasures that are, for practical purposes, hidden from the public.

"There are a number of pieces from the late 15th century and early 16th century that are what I would consider to be masterpieces but have never been publicly performed or recorded, as far as I can ascertain," said Schmidt-Beste, now a professor at the University of Wales, Bangor.

Richard Sherr, a musicologist at Smith College in Massachusetts, agrees that there's a wealth of music performed years ago and then tucked away.

"I'm sure there are things there that are nice pieces of music that have never been heard," Sherr said. "I'm positive of that."

Music and art always have been instrumental to the Roman Catholic Church, particularly in the days when few could read. And some of the 500-year-old library's music is believed to date back to the earliest days of Christianity, and even before.

Trinity Musical Partners has a contract with 1451 International and Second Renaissance, two California companies that serve as the U.S. licensing agents for the Vatican, according to the Rev. Laurence Spiteri of the Vatican Library's legal division.

The five-year agreement allows Trinity to produce classical CDs carrying the seal from the "Vatican Library Collection."

For Shimada, the possibilities are endless. "It's like riding a canoe in the Pacific Ocean and trying to catch fish," he said.

It's potentially big business. If just 1 percent of the world's 1 billion Catholics bought one CD for $15, that would amount to $1.5 billion in revenues, said Joe McNulty, a Portland accountant who brought together investors and helped to arrange the deal.

No one expects to make anywhere near that much money but the deal could be lucrative, as far as classical music goes. Under the arrangement, Trinity Music Partners will return a part of the proceeds to the Vatican Library.

Shimada, who already has 15 compact discs under his belt with labels including the Vienna Modern Masters, views the project as an adventure after 20 years at the Portland Symphony Orchestra. His last performance was May 2.

In addition, he has taken a job as conductor of the Yale University Symphony, and he plans to take the group on tour.

"I always wanted to do something more spectacular. When this came along, this was something I've been looking for," Shimada said.

[NYer]

Now this is positive and exciting!

[knittnmom]

Thanks for posting - I'll be looking for this at Christmas!

[Pontiac]

Shimada has identified a manuscript by the late Italian composer Alessandro Scarlatti dating to the late 1600s.

This piece is 400 years old some of the pieces in the library is 500 or more years old.

Just curious when did standard musical notation come in to use and how do you recreate music that predates standard notation?

[Nihil Obstat]

from wikipedia -

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_notation

By the middle of the 9th century, however, a form of notation began to develop in monasteries in Europe for Gregorian chant, using symbols known as neumes; the earliest surviving musical notation of this type is in the Musica disciplina of Aurelian of Réôme, from about 850.

[Pontiac]

Thanks

[AnAmericanMother]

The Gregorian chant has its own nutty notation. I just learned to read it when we paddling across the Tiber and joined a Catholic choir with a choirmaster who is well versed in such things.

It DOES make sense, in a loopy kind of way.

But once you get past the Gregorian notation, the staff notation is pretty much like it is today. What will throw you is (1) the handwriting, which is very different from a printed score; and (2) the different clefs - there were originally a whole slew of clefs for different vocal parts, not just the treble and bass clefs we use today. Our choirmaster dealt us out a Vittoria score last Thursday night with the alto part in an "altus" clef - it's an octave up from where you expect the alto to be, in other words the tenor part, if the tenor were reading a tenor clef. Drove all the altos nuts . . . I was just getting the hang of it when the section gave up. He's going to try to find a score with the more conventional notation . . .

I'm sure this fellow is ready for all those complications. I've seen a Scarlatti manuscript score (for keyboard), he was a very neat writer and it's perfectly legible.

[Pontiac]

I am really surprised that your choir is in performing works that are still in the original notation.

Must be a very unusual choir. Is it a professional or collegiate choir.

[Larry Lucido]

"The Maestro? A maestro tells you to but the balm on, and you put it on?"

< /end thread hijack >

[AnAmericanMother]

It's just an ordinary Catholic parish - well, maybe not completely ordinary because it is very orthodox and traditional in every way, not just the music. I heard recently that it's considered "the fashionable parish" - supposedly where the well-to-do Catholic is "supposed" to go. Dunno about that, we have folks from all walks of life, mostly middle class like us.

We have two male staff singers and several semi-pros - but it is primarily an amateur choir. I have sung in (Episcopal) church choirs since the age of six, and they may be a bunch of heretics but their musical standards are extremely high. I began at the Cathedral here, sang for my college, and spent the last 20 years in probably the best parish choir in the city, so I'm well trained. One other alto has a master's in music, and she is rock solid. There is one soprano who sings professionally, and a tenor who is majoring in music. Everybody else is more or less a pickup singer, although some of them have been singing for years. On a good day we can field 25.

We just have the Choirmaster from Heaven. He's got a doctorate from Juilliard and is a former professor there. He plays the organ like an angel (and can direct or hold a conversation with an usher or Monsignor while doing so) and he really understands singing technique and the performance of works in the style of their period. We are SO lucky to have him.