The Tarantella del Gargano — I've been meaning to write about this for months. Sometime towards the end of winter I heard this on the radio:

Confraternità de' Musici

1.03am Anonymous (C.17th): Tarantella del Gargano
1.09am Frescobaldi, Girolamo (1583-1643): Se l'aura spira; Voi partite, mio sole; Vanne, o carta amorosa; Varie partite sopra passacaglia; Cosí mi disprezzate?
1.14am
1.16am Monteverdi, Claudio (1567-1643): Quel sguardo sdegnosetto
1.21am
1.33am Merula, Tarquinio (1594/5-1665): Su la cetra amorosa
1.42am

Broadcasts are available on the internet only for a week, and for the rest of that week I listened to nothing else. When the week was up I started looking for this music all over the place. I managed to track down "Su la cetra amorosa" and a piece called "Chiome d'oro" by Monteverdi, which uses the same melody as "Quel sguardo sdegnosetto." I was taken aback, months later, to hear a a piece for choir that had the same melody. "Beatus Vir, by Claudio Monteverdi," said the announcer. He must have really liked the melody to use it three times! But it doesn't work as sacred music; it's as secular as they come, as evinced by the two titles, "Golden locks," and "That disdainful glance" — "sdegnoso" with a suffix of affection. The texture of it is like hair, or metal, catching the light in a darkened room. I like the light, energetic, forceful rhythm of the violins and harpsichord, which the voices (two sopranos) go along with at first, and then slow down very suddenly, as if they'd discovered something fascinating — we must linger and look, and figure this out, and fall into it — and op! we're off again, violins and harpsichord leading the way (though it ends in slow, glimmering luxury).
And Tarquinio Merula! I'd never heard of him! He's a genius! Part of his thing is letting you think, or showing you, that up can be down, that seconds contain hours, and between this pitch and that there are a dozen fascinating microtones. He's always dropping the listener and catching her higher up, like a magician-acrobat. But that doesn't do justice to just how catchy, how hypnotizingly rhythmic, the music is. You just can't listen to it and sit still. At first the basso continuo is just a viola and a guitar, repeating a skipping, syncopated phrase that lasts all of five seconds but never gets tiresome, and then the mezzosoprano comes in, joined by a clarinet (?) and they perform acrobatics above the syncopated basso continuo. The mezzosoprano always seems to land in the wrong place, or on the wrong note, and she draws out that wrongness until one's discomfort becomes pleasure. And oh, a hundred other things happen: the clarinet goes back and forth between basso continuo and duet (with the soprano), and sometimes seems to be the soprano's partner, catching her and soaring up just when we worry that she might lose her footing; and a harpsichord joins the basso continuo, lending it a third dimension: if a harpsichord deigns to join something so small and single-minded, there must be a world in it. Thus encouraged, the guitar turns it upside down. It spreads like concentric circles on the surface of a pond, and the mezzosoprano is everywhere.

Nancy used to say that all music is either a song or a dance, or a puzzle — a combination of song and dance, or an abstraction. If there ever was a puzzle piece, this is it: it has the obsessiveness of thought, of a mind chasing down, teasing out an idea.

I found, along with the 8:30 minute long "Su la cetra amorosa," two other excellent little pieces by Merula: "Folle è ben chi si crede," and "Un bambin che va alla scola." But I meant to write about the Tarantella del Gargano. It's anonymous, meaning it's a folk tune, but the radio program gave the courtly version; it fit in with Monteverdi's and Merula's civilized, polished pieces. The version I found on the internet, by Daniele Sepe, is the raw untamed version. He has an androgynous, high tenor voice, and occasionally slips into a kind of rough yodel. In the background someone barks, someone else makes owl sounds, and when Sepe takes a break the instruments take center stage: tambourines, bagpipes, banjos, people stomping and clapping. Listen for yourself.

I wish I could find the Confraternità dei Musici's version: how did someone manage to tame such a wild animal?
The version I overheard at the Castel Sant'Angelo was halfway between the two extremes.

Chiome d'oro: Emma Kirkby, Judith Nelson, and the Consort of Musicke
Su la cetra amorosa: Montserrat Figueras, Jean-Pierre Canhac, Ton Koopman, Andrew Lawrence King, Rolf Lislevand, Lorenz Duftschmid, Jordi Saval