Zarlino! It is so good to see you on CD at last. The major theorist of the renaissance, Gioseffo Zarlino's treatise Le istitutioni harmoniche (1558) served as a road map for composers such as Palestrina and Lassus, and students in the field of musicology cannot well expect to collect their diplomas without at least some passing familiarity with this work. Zarlino's work as a composer, however, is quite significant and of extremely high quality -- and never recorded. One would have to go way back to an obscure LP made in the ...
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Zarlino! It is so good to see you on CD at last. The major theorist of the renaissance, Gioseffo Zarlino's treatise Le istitutioni harmoniche (1558) served as a road map for composers such as Palestrina and Lassus, and students in the field of musicology cannot well expect to collect their diplomas without at least some passing familiarity with this work. Zarlino's work as a composer, however, is quite significant and of extremely high quality -- and never recorded. One would have to go way back to an obscure LP made in the mid-'70s by Alexander Blachly for the Collegium label to find another recording of anything by Zarlino. The reasons for this are manifold; the accepted notion, redacted by Zarlino's Grove's biographer, that his works are only of "secondary interest," and the idea that good theorists generally do not make for good composers. There is some basis for such opinion in reality -- the concern for creating material appropriate for use in teaching is something that is by its very nature...
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