The Lamentações para a Semana Santa by José Joaquim dos Santos and Luciano Xavier dos Santos and the music for two violas, voices concertate and low instruments
(2017)
author(s): Enrico Ruggieri
published in: KC Research Portal
Name: Enrico Ruggieri
Main Subject: Choral Conducting
Research Supervisors: Charles Toet, Ricardo Bernardes
Title of Research: The Lamentações para a Semana Santa by José Joaquim dos Santos and Luciano Xavier dos Santos and the music for two violas, voices concertate and low instruments
Research Question:
What are the main features of the viola in this specific repertoire and consequently, what becomes its main function?
Summary of Results:
In 18th-century Portugal, a particular instrumental setting was used in the music composed for a specific Roman Catholic rite called the officium tenebrarum, performed during the Holy Week. This particular instrumentation consists of a standard vocal ensemble, 4 voices concertate, accompanied by a group of string instruments: 2 violas, a cello (or 2 celli) and a double bass. José Joquim dos Santos and Luciano Xavier dos Santos are the composers who exploited this instrumentation best, covering all the needs for music in the Officium tenebrarum. An analysis of two Lamentations by José Joaquim dos Santos and Luciano Xavier dos Santos explores the relation between music and rhetorical tools and how the viola relates to them. Besides being a precious rhetorical tool itself, the analysis discloses that the violas and the low string instruments become a practical replacement for the harmonic instruments. In a liturgy where the organ was officially forbidden there is a need for an instrument or several instruments that could absolve that crucial function. Thanks to his ability in blending with and supporting the voices and, at the same time, respecting the solemnity and the sobriety of the liturgy, the viola became the best organ replacement.
Biography:
Enrico Ruggieri was born in 1982, graduated in piano, studying with Paolo Russo and Rachele Marchegiani. After a Bachelor in Architecture, there followed a Bachelor degree in Choir Conducting from Pescara Conservatory, a Master degree in Choral Music and Choir Conducting in Bologna Conservatory and a Bachelor degree in Choral Conducting from the Royal Conservatoire, The Hague. He has attended masterclasses with many different musicians specialising in choral conducting and Early Music, such as: Tonu Kalijuste, Peter Phillips, David Lawrence, Julian Wilkins, Walter Marzilli, Marco Berrini, Annibale Cetrangolo, Maurizio Less, and vocal technique with: Ghislaine Morgan, Sandro Naglia, Elisa Turlà (Voicecraft), Federica Fedele (Alexander Technique). He has conducted many amateur choirs with varied repertoire: church music, folk music, early music, mixed choral repertoire. Presently, he is conducting “Lassus Consort” an Early Music vocal ensemble in Amsterdam and the “Quod Libet Kamerkoor” in The Hague.
The Collective Archive
(last edited: 2017)
author(s): Ana de Almeida
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
The Collective Archive project starts from the personal photo collection of José Alberto Vidal de Almeida, my father, a Portuguese stipend student in former Czechoslovakia between 1978 and 1987 – an archive originally stored inside a shoe box.
Whilst this photo collection contents extensive documentation of a mix of both personal and historical events, the research conducted around this archive allows a parallel following of the final years of the communist regime in Czechoslovakia, before the 1989 Velvet Revolution, and the first years after the left wing Carnation Revolution in Portugal that allowed the end of 48 years of fascist regime, as well as the end of the Portuguese Colonial War in April 1974.
Forming a network of complex and indelible relations between personal and national histories as well as between local and global history, my father's photographs are the substrate upon which I seek to research about what meant the group of happenings for both countries and at the same time to investigate how the individual awareness of the witnessed events was formed, hence aiming to address the question of how are actually defined and transmitted important historical marks.
One cannot dispose of the collocation of the individual understanding in the building of an historical narrative, emphasizing the individual position clarifies history’s arbitrary character. Each individual act of image production is an act of significance.
What follows is the transformation of the shoe box as a depository of photos into an archive and the articulation of the lived and of the transmitted (inscribed) experience with the macro-political and historical processes.
Opening the box will necessarily means, in a first instance, to give a voice to my father, which means the transformation of the essay into a gradual quest for finding more voices within the archive.
The theoretical and the artistic thought must be problematized, made distinct and at the same time entangled, and importantly they must be taken to their limits in order to re-establish them. The future becomes the issue of the archive and the voice that should be finally found is the one of a collective practice.