“From Sign to Sound”:
From bows to the phrasing of singers in the recordings of the Choir of the Cappella Sistina
Walter Marzilli
Abstract
We are naturally unable to know exactly how Renaissance choirs sang: neither the phrasing they used, nor which performance practices they applied. The ligaturae, for example, are still a mystery… But to be unable to hear them today would seem our own good fortune: we would shudder, to judge from that which we read in testimonies of the time.
To try to find information we must take a step backwards. We can find help in a noted law of the academic world which carries the name of the “law of the peripheral areas”. I owe the knowledge of this principle to professor Giacomo Baroffio, from when he was my teacher of Gregorian chant. The law says that from the place where a certain tradition is born – in our case concerning the performance practice and phrasing of Renaissance singers – it will expand into peripheral areas, and here it will be preserved for a long time, well after it has disappeared from its area of origin.
