Artemisia Editions     Catalogue     Convent Music     Order     

Artemisia Editions » Catalogue » Convents » Donati: Beatus vir (MR-04)

Ignazio Donati occupied the post of maestro di cappella between 1596 and his death in 1638 in an impressive series of cities both large and small, including Urbino Pesaro, Fano, Ferrara, Novara, and Lodi, finally crowning his career at Milan Cathedral. His compositions demonstrate extraordinary skill in the full range of sacred styles in fashion in the first decades of the century, extending in scale from solo motets to polychoral concertato works with instrumental obbligati.

An example of this latter genre is the remarkable collection of Salmi Boscarecci (Venice, 1623): a collection of concertato Psalms for six voices, with the addition (if desired) of six other voices which complete the ensemble and serve as a double ripieno for polychoral performance. Donati provides detailed and fascinating instructions on six alternative ways to perform these pieces, adapting them to forces ranging from 6 to more than 24 parts, and arranged in anything from one to five choirs.

Donati’s travels brought him in contact with a great variety of musical situations, including evidently the musical chapels of the convents. In the instructions which accompany this collection, he suggests that nuns, whose chapels obviously lacked male voices, could sing bass parts up an octave (doubling the part, if necessary, by an instrument at the lower octave if chordal inversions would otherwise occur). In our edition for female voices, we have also chosen to transpose the tenor parts up an octave in order to put all the parts within the vocal ranges of any normal womenÕs choir. Though Donati himself does not specifically indicate this tenor transposition in his preface, he does allow for the opposite situation (singing the soprano part down an octave by a tenor voice), and so we feel justified in suggesting this means of performance.