University of Navarra Choir Concert

MUSIC OF THE GOLDEN CENTURY

The Renaissance was, without a doubt, a fundamental period for the development of vocal and choral music in particular. It was then when the four-voice vocal polyphony that has survived until today became generalized. Between the reign of the Catholic Monarchs and Philip III, Spanish music lived perhaps, the moment of greatest flowering of its history in which shine with a special light the three composers that the poet Bartolomé de Figueiroa described around 1602 as:

"that Hispanic terno/ of Morales, Guerrero and Victoria/ who seem in their flight/ to have learned music in the sky."

BAROQUE: MUSIC AND WORDS

The Baroque period falls between the birth of opera, with Monteverdi's "Orfeo" (1607), and the death of J.S. Bach (1750) and G.F. Handel (1759). Monteverdi's "Lamento della ninfa" does not belong to any opera, but it contains elements of it and even of Greek tragedy, which was the source of inspiration for the Camerata Fiorentina. Especially in the idea of recitative singing from which operatic music would emerge and in the use of male voices as if it were a Greek "chorus". Handel's "Messiah" is the pinnacle of the oratorio, a composition similar to opera but without staging and with a religious theme.

NEGRO SPIRITUALS... AND WHITE

It is known as "negro spirituals" to those religious songs performed by the African-American community at the end of the 19th century. Many of these melodies were of European origin that the English, Scottish and Irish colonists brought to the new world. The African-American community adopted and transformed those songs, giving them an expressiveness and depth born of the uprooting and suffering experienced in the cotton fields. Once again, cultural crossbreeding resulted in a music that leaves no one indifferent.