SECRETS by Gregory Spears

SECRET Music

featuring "Secrets" by Gregory Spears

"Exceptional... the curated collection of short pieces retained an air of intense privacy and deep feeling... Spears' Secrets vividly imagines moral desolation... intense religious devotion, and finally the transcendence of love in the face of mortality... Intelligent, sensitive writing."
— Adrian Dimanlig, Interludes

We have recorded Spears' "Secrets!" GET NOTIFIED about the release.

Weinfield and Spears in the Frick's Stephen A. Schwarzman Auditorium. Photo curtesy of the artists.

Note on the Program

In 1606, at the end of his life, composer Luzzasco Luzzaschi sent a gift of eleven volumes of music to Vincenzo Gonzaga, the Duke of Mantua. The gift, of nearly 300 pieces of music, was to be kept a secret. Luzzaschi requested no reward, only the assurance that the repertoire would be performed by musicians of sufficient caliber who would honor its quality. Luzzaschi had been the director of a concerto delle donne in Ferrara, an elite ensemble of virtuosic female musicians who performed musica secreta, or secret music, private concerts for only the most important guests at court. While the music performed by the concerto delle donne has only recently become subject to scrutiny, we do know that the prevalence of ornamentation in these pieces (much of which was improvised), as well as the technical agility and expressive range the women displayed, made the experience of hearing musica secreta an exclusive event. Rival ensembles cropped up throughout the Italian citystates in the second half of the 16th century, thus it is fair to say the presence of the concerto delle donne significantly contributed to the cultural economy of the early modern Italian citystates as it transformed the possibilities for women musicians.

Maddalena Casulana is the first woman known to have published her music in her lifetime. She dedicated her publications to her patron, Isabella de Medici, to “show to the world (to the degree that it is granted to me in this profession of music) the foolish error of men, who so greatly believe themselves to be masters of high intellectual gifts which cannot, it seems to them, be equally common among women.” Settimia Caccini, daughter of Giulio Caccini (one of the forerunners of opera) and sister of Francesca Caccini (the first woman we know of to have written an opera), was a member of her father’s concerto delle donne at the Medici court in Florence and performed during the marriage festivities of Marie de Medici to Henri IV of France. Barbara Strozzi’s secular cantatas inherited the concerto’s dramatic intensity. Her Lagrime mie, while conventionally set to a text from the male perspective, would have been performed by Strozzi, herself, at private salon gatherings known as “Academies” at her home in Venice. Styled as a lament, or song of sadness, the work laments the loss of a beloved, locked away in her father’s castle. To highlight the exceptionality of these women composers and musicians, we juxtapose these works with festive dances from the most public of Renaissance Italian spectacles, the intermedio; Cristofani Malvezzi’s Sinfonie were written for La Pellegrina, celebrating the marriage of Ferdinando I de Medici to Christine of Lorraine, in Florence in 1589.

When Gregory Spears and I first viewed The Frick’s stunning Portrait of a Woman by Giovanni Battista Moroni (1520/24–1579/80) together over a year ago, we were struck by the image’s immediacy, and felt we were alone with her, listening, as though to a singer in a concert. I told Gregory about Luzzaschi’s gift of music and his musica secreta, and the rest, as they say, was history. I like to think we are carrying forth a promise of our own to Luzzaschi’s ladies, as we continue living with the lost tradition of the concerto delle donne alongside Gregory’s newly commissioned piece, Secrets.

—Elizabeth Weinfield

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SECRETS - PROGRAM NOTE
By Gregory Spears
New York City, 2026

Secrets is inspired by the portraiture of Giovanni Battista Moroni, including the Portrait of a Woman (1575) from the Frick Collection. The work was written for the New York-based period instrument group Sonnambula — The Frick’s ensemble-in-residence — and vocal trio ModernMedieval Voices, utilizing Renaissance viols, a theorbo, piano, harpsichord, and positive organ. Written in a five-movement modified arch form, the piece fuses musical styles from the Renaissance to the 21st century.

Fusing the past and the present into a singular cryptic gaze is a specialty of Giovanni Battista Moroni (ca. 1520–78). His sitters have a strikingly contemporary look, where two conflicting moods are caught in a single moment: a sitter might appear both sensual and guarded, another confrontational yet knowing, yet another trusting and suspicious. This duality gives their look a powerful intimacy that confronts our own stare while leaving much unsaid. This dimension of Moroni’s sensibility, which transcends the frame and extends across time, has inspired this piece.

Moroni often used text fragments in his portraits, along with complex symbols surrounding his sitters that hint at narrative. My piece also makes use of text fragments from Moroni's world. Movements two and four use texts by two of his sitters, Lucia Albani and Isotta Brembati, both poets who were members of rival families caught in a bloody feud in Moroni’s mid-16th century Bergamo. The first and final movements employ the verse of poet Torquato Tasso, whose cousin sat for Moroni. The title, Secrets, refers to both the cryptic gazes encountered in the paintings themselves, the intrigue-driven world of the Brembati-Albani feud as well as Tasso’s religious and social paranoia that would turn pathological toward the end of his life. The work’s centerpiece, movement three, is a Latin setting of the Litany of Saints, an homage to Moroni’s religious works (a practice begun during his stay in Trent during the counter-reformation council of the 1550s, and a subject to which he returned at the end of his life in Albino). The title of the work might also bring to mind prayers (the Secrets) whispered sotto voce by a priest during the Tridentine Mass (the liturgical form standardized after the Council of Trent). The final two movements of the piece explore how fragments of text, gaping silences, and repetitive gestures might hint at larger mysteries and unknowable narratives of devotion, love, and even vengeance, hidden both within Moroni’s work and the artifacts of music history.

The piano, the only modern instrument onstage (though in the case of the world premiere, the Frick’s rebuilt 19th-century model), begins the piece with a series of bell tolls contrasting the world of wood and gut strings that characterize Sonnambula’s 16th-century sound. When visiting Moroni’s Bergamo, I learned that the bell tower in the upper city would clang 100 times each evening alerting citizens that they had until the hundredth toll to return to the town gates before the walls were locked for the night — a metal on metal clang that must have been both comforting and ominous as it resounded across the countryside. In Secrets, the period instruments slowly emerge out of the resonance of the initial crashing chords of the piano (also 100), peaking through the din of modernity, as if from another time.

By presenting this work in an art museum, performers will bring the event of live performance into a space where viewers routinely confront the past through visual art; our aim is explore how sound can also amplify the quiet communion between the contemporary viewer and the historical figures who gaze back at them. The gaze of Moroni’s sitters embodies the very puzzle of history, which seems to draw us in, yet remain elusive, inviting us to attempt to divine its secrets. A similar aporia sits at the center of our fascination with old instruments. Can the performer ever know exactly how these artifacts were used centuries ago? Using fragments of scores and treatises, can we confidently recreate the sensibilities of those who came before us? What happens when we sit in their place and perform or write entirely new music for their instruments?

What is certain is that the inner life of Moroni’s sitters, like the artifacts of music history, will always draw us closer, precisely because they keep their secrets, and seem to know ours. I am profoundly grateful to Elizabeth Weinfield, artistic director of Sonnambula, who asked me to write this work in celebration of their inaugural season as the Frick’s ensemble in residence. Her ideas and insight have greatly shaped this piece — particularly through our many inspiring conversations this past year concerning new music for early instruments and the role music might play in a museum space. I would also like to thank Prof. Mauro Calcagno, University of Pennsylvania, for his assistance with the Italian and English translations of the text.

MOVEMENTS

I. The Beginning (10’)
II. Allegro (5’)
III. Litany of the Saints (10’)
IV. Allegro (5’)
V. The End (10’)

TEXTS

I. The Beginning

Torquato Tasso: fragment from "Vita de la mia vita":
E se mi segui o fuggi
Soavemente mi consumi e struggi.

II. Allegro

Lucia Albani, fragment from Sonnet XVI:
Da questo pien d’errori secol rio,
Secol di ferro, anzi di fango vile,
E si sbandita ogni opera gentile,
E ogni antica virtù posta in oblio

Lucia Albani, fragment from Sonnet XV:
Questa mia frale vita, anzi mia morte,
Sembra proprio in gran mar senza governo
Nave, che errando vada a mezzo il verno,
Spinta dal vento, e da contraria sorte...

Lucia Albani, fragment from Sonnet I:
Si colmo vive di tormenti il cuore,
E tanti in lui martir fanno ricetto.
Che dal noglioso affano egli è costretto
A disfogar in carte il suo dolore...

III. Litany of the Saints

Kyrie, eleison…
Christe, eleison…
Kyrie, eleison…

Sancta Dei Genetrix,
ora pro nobis.
Sancta Virgo virginum,
ora pro nobis.
Sancta Michael Gabriel et Raphael
orate pro nobis…

IV. Allegro

Lucia Albani, fragment from Sonnet XX:
O de la patria nostra eterno onore,
Donna gentil, per cui le superbe onde
Il Brembo innalza, et cuopre ambe le sponde
Di vaghi fior, lieto d’un tal splendore...

Isotta Brembati, fragment from "L'alto pensier":
L’alto pensier, ch’ogn altro mio pensiero
dal cor mi sgombra ogn’hor, come far suole
oscura nube chiaro ardente Sole
di gir’ al Ciel mi mostra il camin vero.

V. The End

Torquato Tasso, fragment from "Amatemi, ben mio"
V’amerò, se m’amate,
né men de la mia vita
l’amor fia lungo e fia con lui finita.

​​SECRET Music​featuring "Secrets" by Gregory Spears

SECRET Music

featuring "Secrets" by Gregory Spears