Gregorio Ballabene’s Forty-eight-part Mass for Twelve Choirs (1772) (Royal Musical Association Monographs) Hardcover – December 14, 2021 by Florian Bassani

Description

Author: Bassani Florian

Edition: 1

Package Dimensions: 0x0x788

Number Of Pages: 152

Release Date: 13-12-2021

Details: Product Description

Neither Spem in alium, the widely acclaimed ‘songe of fortie partes’ by Thomas Tallis, nor Alessandro Striggio’s forty-part Mass is the largest-scale counterpoint work in Western music. The secret winner is Gregorio Ballabene, a relatively unknown Roman maestro di cappella, a contemporary of Giovanni Paisiello, Joseph Haydn and Luigi Boccherini, who composed in forty-eight parts for twelve choirs. His Mass saw only a public rehearsal and was never performed in liturgy despite all of Ballabene’s efforts to promote it. On closer inspection, however, the work deserves special consideration as a piece of outstanding combinatory creativity – the product of a talent able to conceive, structure and realise a project of colossal dimensions. It might even be claimed that if Charles Burney had gained knowledge of it, all derogatory comments by nineteenth-century music historians would not have succeeded in extinguishing the interest of later generations. Ballabene’s Mass has remained completely unstudied until today, even though the score survives in prominent collections. This study offers, for the first time, a historical and analytical perspective on this overlooked manifestation of a very individual musical intelligence.

About the Author

Dr Florian Bassani is a Lecturer at the Institute of Musicology, University of Bern, Switzerland.