VOTD 01/10/2025

 Carlo Gesualdo da Venoas: Sacred Music, Volume 1 (MHS)

Purchased at Jerry's Records from the Duquesne University collection

I've made a blog post about Gesualdo before, so no doubt I've shared the more salacious story of murdering his wife and her lover. I probably stated something about how these things mean less over long periods of time, seeing as there's nobody alive to recall firsthand what he did over four hundred years ago.

I was instead thinking about the purpose of music. I didn't want to put something on heavy, again looking for music that was smoother, less barbed I suppose. The local classical radio station would promote itself by telling the listener how "soothing" it is. The cellist I used to play with would get incensed about this: "Classical music isn't soothing! It's EXCITING!" Likewise, someone in my past, probably a teacher, said with self-assurance that the purpose of music was not to relax or fall asleep to it. 

I will ceaselessly push again anyone making such definitive statements. Of course you can fall asleep to music. My sleep aid for some months now has been to bring up a drone or ambient streaming radio station on my phone and play if quietly next to me in bed. 

A college professor once said that the purpose of music was expression. Well, no, I don't agree with that, or at least that's not the complete story. If anything, I sometimes push against performers trying to be expressive. Maybe I want the notes, the sounds, to lie flat so to speak. To just breathe, not to "express" anything. 

I guess it's fair to say Gesualdo is considered to be one of the "weirder" Renaissance composers. Some could be highly chromatic; Orlando di Lassus went through a dramatically chromatic era. At times here, Gesualdo sounds like a standard period composer, with an occasional glimpse of that unpredictable chromaticism that marks his music. 

Truth is, all Renaissance vocal music sounds strange to me. I don't find Gesualdo any more or less radical or unpredictable than many other composers of the general era. I think the issue of whether he "knew what he was doing" or not is old and boring. Accept him or don't, as one might accept Satie or not. 

But I admit, even at its most radical, I still find this music calming.