What do beauty and ugliness mean to you? 
Björn Schmelzer: “I think we are one of the few ensembles for whom most listeners intuitively think not only of beauty but also of ugliness. We have a more inclusive idea of beauty: for us, beauty is a far more elastic concept, in the sense that ugliness is part of it. We also don’t always choose standard Renaissance repertoire or composers who avoid dissonance at all costs. We often opt for pieces that are bizarre and that possess a kind of conceptual ugliness. Ugliness has always interested me—much more than beauty. I think ugliness is a particular, concrete articulation of beauty. What’s strange is that when we speak of beauty, it is something abstract, whereas when we speak of ugliness, it is always concrete. In terms of performance practice, most vocal ensembles are constantly trying to avoid ugliness: avoiding sliding too much into dissonances and making sure not to sing out of tune—singing out of tune is equated with slipping into ugliness.” 

You actually linger on the dissonances and emphasize them. 
Schmelzer: “Exactly. Ugliness has no real place in historical performance practice. You could say that most people who enjoy listening to early music do so because they are trying to avoid ugliness in their lives. There is this fantasy that before Romanticism there was no monstrosity, no ugliness, that dissonance was restrained. As E.T.A. Hoffmann once put it so beautifully: moving from third to third, from triad to triad. From the very beginning, our approach has been to categorically contradict that notion and to turn against the sclerotic, somewhat self-satisfied aesthetic monopoly that has entrenched itself in early music. I actually have very little to do with early music as such. The repertoire itself fascinates me enormously, just like Gothic architecture or the paintings of Tintoretto—not because they stand for some venerable, monumental Western culture, but because of their expressive and exploratory artistic potential.” 

Where does that exploratory element lie exactly? 
Schmelzer: “My hypothesis—and it is the starting point for almost all our concerts—is that the polyphonists were masters of what Dürer once called the Ungestalt. Ungestalt is the opposite of Gestalt, which is a closed form that can be contemplated in its completeness. Ungestalt, by contrast, is a form defined by deformation and change. Polyphony, in my view, is the exploration of changing form. That is why polyphony was already controversial from the very beginning in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. A Gregorian melody also changes over time, but it remains within a kind of orthodox form that everyone knows—it changes, but it is monophonic, so there is no real problem. In polyphony, however, you have continuous change along two axes, both successive and simultaneous. Polyphony is form as subversion. The polyphonists were masters of deformation, and that is my historical justification for being so preoccupied with ugliness.” 

And it is this ugliness that you aim to highlight? 
Schmelzer: “The concert Beauty’s Abyss seeks to dialecticize the duality between beauty and ugliness. I think that if you are fanatically obsessed with beauty, you will in fact mostly encounter ugliness. In the search for beauty, this duality reveals itself. The concert should demonstrate that there is beauty in ugliness—and that this idea was not invented by Baudelaire, but that thanks to Baudelaire and the nineteenth- and twentieth-century tradition of ugliness, we are able to return and see how such explorations were already taking place in the sixteenth century. 

Beauty is often, as many ensembles practice it, the avoidance of deformation—and that is precisely what we want to explore in this repertoire. In the concert you hear composers searching for ugliness and brushing up against something that no longer really has form, or that has been deformed. Much like Francis Bacon would do in the twentieth century with paintings by Titian: he starts from a pope and deforms him. The experience of that painting is truly the experience of deformation. In the twentieth century you have artists who present ugliness in a single image, which is much easier to digest than when an artist shows deformation. What fascinates me most are artists who reveal ugliness within beauty. Ugliness is never simply ugly, of course—it is always a mask of beauty, and beauty is always a mask of ugliness. You see this very clearly in Michelangelo, who inscribes himself into his own work as a kind of grotesque monster: in The Last Judgment as a flayed skin bearing his own face—his self-portrait is thus an ugly mask.” 

Is beauty within ugliness something you often encounter among Renaissance artists? 
Schmelzer: “Yes, and I’m not even referring yet to the Flemish painters of the time—who were probably much more explicit specialists of ugliness—but you find it among the Italians, who are often regarded as masters of idealized beauty. Take something like Michelangelo’s David. Even superficial studies usually point out that the statue’s head is far too large—it is completely disproportionate. This shows that beauty for Michelangelo is absolutely not a proportionalized beauty; deformations are often necessary to produce a certain effect of beauty. 

The same applies to perspective, for instance in anamorphosis, which is essentially a distortion of normal perspective. This usually works by pulling apart vanishing points, which creates deformations. In the late sixteenth century, artists began to play with this extensively. I think of Tintoretto, with his extreme distorted perspectives—it is essentially the pushing of perspective to its limit. One could say that every perspective is, at its core, anamorphic. And I would dare to say that all polyphony is, at its core, deformed and deforming. The polyphonists were truly masters of that open form, of form without form. Georges Bataille once called this l’informe, the formless.” 

The way you describe it almost makes me think of Morton Feldman, where small motifs follow one another in a kind of formlessness… 
Schmelzer: “Absolutely. In that sense, I think the discovery of early music is actually the discovery of our contemporaries. For me, people like Cipriano De Rore are my contemporaries. They were not really contemporaries of the people they lived among in the sixteenth century—they were marginal figures in their own time.” 

On your CD of De Rore madrigals, Portrait of the Artist as a Starved Dog (2017), you refer to a portrait of the composer. 
Schmelzer: “In that portrait, created together with the painter Hans Mielich, he presents himself as a kind of furious artist. I believe he shows his own ugliness—those strange moustaches, those large bulging eyes. It is a very expressionistic portrait. I justify this interpretation because the portrait is surrounded by drawings that refer to Michelangelo, the artist who displays his own terribilità. This is an expressionistic notion that goes beyond beauty: the artist is not searching for beauty, but for the sublime. I think Cipriano wanted to emulate Michelangelo and displayed his own terribilità in that portrait. For me, that portrait served as a kind of legitimation to say that De Rore was not someone in search of beauty, but of expression. When a composer presents himself self-consciously in this way, it represents a kind of paradigm shift. There is a change in how composers view themselves.” 

And also in how they are viewed? 
Schmelzer: “It’s fascinating how sixteenth-century composers suddenly begin to be associated with criminality. You have Gesualdo, but also figures like Clemens non Papa and Gombert. I’m not so interested in whether these stories are true, but in the fact that people begin to find it interesting to portray artists in a negative light. There is a break with the idea that a beautiful artwork is necessarily created by a beautiful artist, someone with a morally good soul. Suddenly the ‘good’ artist becomes the criminal artist, who creates art not so much oriented toward the good and the beautiful, but toward the sublime.” 

A very Romantic notion… 
Schmelzer: “I can imagine my colleagues and critics saying that I am romanticizing the sixteenth century, because one hears many resonances of Romantic artistic ideology. But one could also argue the opposite: the roots of nineteenth-century Romantic artistic thought lie in the sixteenth century—the thinking of ruins, landscape, sentimentality, the Romantic soul. It is as if these ideas were discovered in the sixteenth century, but it took the nineteenth century for history to become aware of them. It is as if the sixteenth century was not yet conscious of what it was doing.” 

During the concert you present a century of music: sixteenth-century madrigals. What is your starting point? 
Schmelzer: “Our concert begins with Nicolas Gombert, a composer just before Cipriano De Rore, and runs through to Gesualdo and Scipione Lacorcia, at the end of the sixteenth and beginning of the seventeenth century. All these composers, across different generations, explore the Ungestalt in different ways. With Gombert and his generation there is not yet an advanced chromaticism, but there is already a sensitivity to it. You find cross-relations between the voices: one voice sings an F-sharp and another a natural F, simultaneously or in close succession, creating a kind of dissonance. Because it often shifts from one voice to another, it is less immediately noticeable. Edward Lowinsky called this secret chromaticism. You already find this shifting chromaticism in Josquin as well.” 

And over time chromaticism is pushed further? 
Schmelzer: “Yes, chromaticism is of course a kind of revolution—it represents a completely different way of composing. We perform some early madrigals by De Rore from before he began writing chromatically, and these are still fully through-composed pieces. When he turns to chromaticism, however, you notice that he begins to write much more homophonically and declamatorily. That is a way of filtering out the polyphonic texture.” 

Was that to make it more digestible for his contemporaries? 
Schmelzer: “Probably also to allow the effect of chromaticism to come across more clearly, especially in its early phase. We also perform several works by Gesualdo and Scipione Lacorcia, where chromaticism disintegrates and you get duets, trios, complex textures, and then homophony again. You end up with a whole spectrum of possible effects. Ahi, tu piangi by Lacorcia is the most extreme piece we will perform. In its polyphonic texture you feel a kind of systemic crisis, a system that is disintegrating—almost like Wagner through to Schoenberg in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It is almost inevitable that such a development leads to a kind of regression, a simplification. 

We also perform a piece by Vicente Lusitano, a Portuguese composer of whom little music has survived, but who wrote a very interesting work—before Cipriano De Rore and Nicola Vicentino launched their Ferrarese chromatic experiments. Lusitano composed Heu me domine, a lamentation that is entirely through-composed in chromaticism. He has recently been rediscovered as the first Black composer in Western history, but what is fascinating is that he also composed one of the most chromatic works of the sixteenth century. You could say that he was, in fact, pulling the cart of Western avant-gardism.” 

Does the idea of ugliness also appear in the song texts? 
Schmelzer: “You notice that composers often choose texts that display ugliness. In the sixteenth century there was a kind of struggle in Italian poetry between the Petrarchists and the Danteans—between Petrarch’s ideal of beauty and Dante’s abyssal poetry. The first madrigal book of Cipriano De Rore is colored by poetry from sixteenth-century poets who were primarily inspired by Dante. We perform an early piece that describes a kind of ruined landscape—of the soul. 

We also include a piece by Claude Le Jeune: Qu’est devenu ce bel œil, a three-voice work with a text about what has become of a woman’s former beauty. Nothing ugly is said about her, but it is about the process of decay of her beauty. That process is articulated through a very acrid chromatic texture. Every chord is a kind of deformation, an aberrant distortion. It is a piece in which you truly hear ugliness, and in which it becomes clear that these composers were aware of the ugliness of the musical texture and of the deforming nature of chromaticism.” 

It sounds like a very plastic imagination of the theme. 
Schmelzer: “There is something plastic in the exploration and deformation of form. That word usually makes you think of a painter, but provocatively I would say that music is the most plastic art: the singer gives form, but at the same time is what receives the form. That is what makes music so fascinating—and also so fragile. It evaporates the moment you begin to sing, and unlike a painting, nothing remains. Leonardo da Vinci once said: ‘Music dies at the moment of its birth.’” 

Music is, in a sense, its own abyss. 
Schmelzer: “Yes, exactly. In displaying itself, it simultaneously digs its own grave. It is as if these composers were almost aware of this ontological structure of music, or as if it operated unconsciously in their work. Perhaps there is a kind of consciously unconscious way of engaging with it, which becomes tangible in all these material forms. In any case, I think it will be a fascinating journey—from Gombert to Lacorcia—and that audiences will discover a great deal of beauty within all that ugliness.” 

Cedric Feys

Alongside Graindelavoix (26 February), La Fonte Musica (2 June) focuses on De Rore’s influential madrigal Anchor che col partire, while the Fieri Consort (8 April) offers a female perspective on the theme of beauty.