Ineluctable Modality

HARVARD'S NEWEST and smallest vocal group may be nuovi, but it isn't dilettantish. Its members have chosen to specialize in music of the Renaissance--music which demands prodigious energy and concentration from the performers--and none of the shortcomings of their concert debut last week at Lowell House could hide a near-professional sensitivity to nuance and detail.

If dilettantism implies inconsistency, though, I Dilettanti have some claim to the title. The six vocalists, all graduates of one or another of F. John Adams's schools of choral singing, presented a mixed program of sacred and secular music, not all of which was entirely suited to their voices. A set of madrigals early in the program came off particularly well, with good diction and full, robust tone, and a remarkable set composed by Carlo Gesualdo, a madman, was nearly as successful. The bizarre chromaticism of Gesualdo's music may reflect the turbulence of his even more unconventional private life--at age 30 he murdered his wife and her lover, and then finished off his infant daughter as well, on account of her uncertain paternity.

In any case, the sextet navigated Gesualdo's twisting harmonies with usually precise intonation. The pitch problems that did crop up from time to time were invariably failures of individual singers to sustain difficult lines. Unfortunately, the sacred motets that opened the program suffered from exactly this type of difficulty, as did William Byrd's Mass for five voices. With only a single voice for each elaborate contrapuntal line, I Dilettanti were simply unable to maintain the warm blended tone they brought to the simpler, chordal passages.

Three centuries of tonality have led the modern listener to expect certain familiar kinds of progressive harmonies, but masses and motets written in the old church modes presuppose a different set of expectations. Just as the modal fabric of Renaissance music is foreign to the twentieth century ear, the context of modern music--a permanent background of muzak in supermarkets, television soundtracks and the stereo next door--bears no resemblance to the silence that Byrd and Gesualdo labored to fill. There are no grand gestures in this music, nothing simple for the listener or the performer to grab onto. If I Dilettanti Nuovi failed to provide the kind of pure sustained sound that can make the Byrd Mass compelling, their performance revealed a welcome insight into this work's majesty and depth.