Photography courtesy of The Frick Collection. Credit: Cris Sunwoo © 2026
SECRETS
by Gregory Spears
Weinfield and Spears in the Frick's Stephen A. Schwarzman Auditorium. Photo curtesy of the artists.
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.