The Great Counterexample

JOHN DANTE PREVEDINI listens to seventeenth century augenmusik

'... unusually imaginative ...'

Canone nel Nodo de Salamone ('Canon in Solomon's Knot') is the recent release from New Focus Recordings of the 1631 piece of the same name composed by Pier Francesco Valentini and performed by Ensemble Combinatoria under the direction of Erik Carlson. The digital release, which is part of the label's Olde Focus Recordings series, consists of a single fifty-one-minute performance of the composition in a version 'for 1024 parts'.

As Carlson's liner notes in the booklet explain, the piece is highly unusual in several ways. First, Valentini's original score - which is reproduced in full on the album's cover - is notated with the staves forming the shape of a knot. In this manner, the score simply shows a brief passage in one-to-one counterpoint for four voices with four notes in each part. In addition, the 'canon' in question consists of this brief chorale overlapping with itself by means of multiple 'choirs' performing the same passage. Furthermore, Valentini instructs that the number of voices can be doubled infinitely while doubling the repetitions of the chorale in canon proportionally. This means that, while Valentini envisions the possibility of an absolutely enormous ensemble size and performance duration, the raw musical content is conceptually very minimal. Using modern terminology that is admittedly somewhat anachronistic from the perspective of seventeenth-century Italian counterpoint theory from which Valentini himself was evidently working, this music consists simply of a prolonged and arpeggiated G-major chord. Interpreting this score as being suitable for an ensemble of open instrumentation, this performance repeats the notated chorale 256 times with 1024 individual parts being combined in the mix (one hundred musicians are credited by name in the booklet, though their instruments are not specified).

The resulting listening experience is one which is immersive, warm, glacial and - likely for many listeners - quite meditative. Compositional parameters idiomatic to Valentini's time and place like counterpoint, rhythm and texture recede into the background, leaving the fluctuating harmonic partials in the resulting prolonged mass of sound as a more audible phenomenon in the audio mix. Based on this listening experience alone without historical context, one might be forgiven for mistaking the piece as a work of modern avant-garde composition under the influence of minimalism or spectralism rather than the unusual example of seventeenth-century counterpoint and canon writing that it is. However, I believe experiencing the piece through hearing alone without context would be a mistake. I consider it essential to both see the album cover and read the booklet in order to fully understand why we are hearing what we are hearing and, thus, to avoid listening to it through a misleading 'lens'. Furthermore, I maintain that this album, when experienced fully, is a powerful and necessary testament to the limitations of musicological lenses in general.

Why do I say this? In almost every area of the broader Western 'classical' music field, musicians are trained to approach a given piece of repertoire - new or old - through a process of musicologically-informed lens application. We ask what era a piece is from so that we can interpret which historically-informed practices will be idiomatic to it, or so that we do not analyze the musical structure using an inappropriate theoretical analysis tool. We are trained to get into this habit as students so that we do not, for example, end up unironically playing Bach with rubato or analyzing Webern in terms of key signatures and Roman numerals, etc. This works well for us most of the time as musicians broadly speaking, and it usually helps us engage with our musical field in ways that make us feel and sound competent to ourselves and to our colleagues. Sometimes, however, the actual repertoire tests the limits of our pedagogical models and musicological lenses.

How does Valentini's piece do this? First, it is a work of Augenmusik ('eye music'). Specifically, I would categorize this canon as 'decorative' Augenmusik, since the knot shape is achieved by bending the staves on which the music is otherwise notated normally (this is opposed to what I would call 'structural' Augenmusik, in which the visual form would determine some audible aspect of the notated music itself). In any case, Augenmusik is sometimes dismissed by its critics as frivolous and a distraction from the supposedly exclusive priority of sound in competent music notation. This is unfortunate, because it ignores the value of Augenmusik overall as a tool that communicates insight into how composers intend to frame their music's perception and execution.

Second, despite the contrapuntal framework through which Valentini was evidently working, realizations of this piece at the scale of 1024 parts are likely to result in the individual lines audibly blending into each other, creating - again, using our modern terminology - a single prolonged chord having both harmonic and rhythmic stasis. Indeed, this is a potential way of listening that I hear as likely in response to the present recording.

Third, the sense of change and form in the resulting listening experience comes from very slow and gradual timbral and dynamic shifts which the standard models of informed listening to seventeenth-century Italian repertoire are admittedly ill-prepared to address. This is theoretically to be expected from very large realizations of Valentini's original instructions when so many acoustically distinct parts are slowly merging together into one composite sound structure, and it is concretely audible in this recording. Nonetheless, it otherwise defies what 'should' be expected from the compositional output of Valentini's time and place, at least according to conventional music theory pedagogy and historical musicology. Most of us can probably agree that such a listening paradigm would be appropriate for Feldman, Lucier or Glass, but who among us has been taught that this is appropriate for approaching a contemporary of Monteverdi?

None of this is to imply that Valentini was somehow in possession of miraculous insights into the future of music composition. Nor is it even to imply that he was somehow coincidentally foreshadowing or originating the techniques or conceptual frameworks of later centuries. Indeed, I see no evidence that Valentini was working with any compositional tools beyond the standard practices of counterpoint, imitative forms and music notation familiar to his own time and place. Nonetheless, we must deal with the fact that this unusually imaginative piece and others like it exist in the repertoire, even if the limitations of our own pedagogical and musicological tools render them analytically problematic after the fact. This is precisely why I consider this New Focus release to be so invaluable.

Canone nel Nodo de Salamone, particularly in Ensemble Combinatoria's realization, reminds us that the world of music - indeed, the world in general - is often more complex and nuanced than even our most expert models of understanding can anticipate and address. In an age when incessant social, technological and economic change makes us thirst for the semblance of stable knowledge, and more and more people risk becoming casualties of error-prone algorithmic judgment, art like this can act as a crucial provocateur of humility, playfulness and wonder. It can stand as a counterexample that exposes the limitations of our analytical frameworks and challenges us to either update them or, at least, renounce claims of their universal utility. At the very least, it is a reminder that, just like 'Solomon's Knot' itself, our approaches to musical tradition and precedent can have infinite permutations.

— John Dante Prevedini, 9.17.2025