It was the first June of the new millennium and we were in the northern Italian foothills of the Alps. The Italians call them the Prealpi, as if the rugged terrain makes for a collection of preludes to the snowcapped works of nature rising to the north.
We had been staying with one of our daughter’s godfathers in the northern industrial city of Brescia. Berretta, founded in the early 16th century and the oldest continuously operated firearms company in the world, still has its main factory there.
Brescians turned metal not only into guns and bullets but also into organs. The famed Antegnati family of organ builders lived and worked in the city from the 15th century into the 18th, during which time they supplied instruments across northern Italy, from the Piedmont to the Veneto. Amongst these masterpieces is that still in Brescia’s Old Cathedral, a circular Romanesque structure so ancient that you walk down from modern street level to enter. This monumental organ by Gian Giacomo Antegnati is from 1536, completed four hundred years after construction began on the cathedral. The organ is subterranean, perhaps a unique position for any King of Instruments.
We had our two daughters with us. The eldest was two-and-a-half. The younger had been born in the first days of January—a true millennial. In the cathedral and outside on the street and in shops and restaurants, old women would stop to marvel at the blonde bambine. There were many trendy shops with expensive baby clothes in the windows, yet we almost never saw any other babies. After decades of decline, the birth rate in Italy had stabilized just above one child per woman.
After a few days, we left Brescia and drove northeast up through the Prealpi to our friends’ summer house in a village called Binzago west of Lake Garda. The landscape was mostly wooded, the winding road popular with motorcyclists clad in colorful leathers and moving at dangerous speeds. Ducati screams rebounded off the hillsides. At the turn-off from the main road to the narrower by way snaking up towards the village, there was a dilapidated but still functioning iron factory.
We drove past farms and a few holiday houses and into Binzago with its terraced houses of light-brown stone. At the center of the village, the road made a slight jog around the church. At the fountain, a dark-skinned mother did her laundry with her five kids around her, the youngest in a collapsible stroller.
Our house was beyond and above the village on a steep hillside. The broad, tiled porch looked out over the narrow valley. In the early evening, a pair of cuckoos began calling to each other below.
We found haircutting scissors in the house and gave our five-month-old her first haircut on the porch. Her soft blond locks fell like hatchling’s feathers as the cuckoos continued their vesper antiphon.
The cuckoo population was—and still is—decreasing dramatically in northern Italy on account of, among other factors, the loss of habitat and the pesticides of industrial agriculture like that practiced in the vast Po Valley that spreads south and east from Brescia.
Cuckoos are brood parasites. They lay their eggs in the nests of other species, their young to be raised by their competitors. This biological outsourcing strategy has been imbued with allegorical resonance in many human cultures through tales told or sung of cuckolds, of foundlings of royal birth, of monarchical pretenders, and of deadly sibling rivalries.
The falling minor third of the cuckoo’s two-note call and the hollow timbre of their delivery of it have been drawn on for thematic content by many composers across centuries. This raw material evokes not only the rebirth in the springtime but also the origins of human music in nature. The birds sang first, on before people did.
The simplicity of the cuckoo’s call is both an inspiration and a challenge—assuming there’s a difference between the two—to human musicians. How to elaborate on the bird’s proto-melody while remaining true to it? Can a human musician prove to be as clever through art as the conniving cuckoo is in nature?
The next morning was Sunday and we walked to Santa Maria Annunciata, arriving as the mass was ending. The congregation was made up of a few old women singing a Lutheran hymn to Italian words. The old religious animosities over which European nations warred among themselves for centuries have mostly been forgotten or at least ignored. After the service was over, the young priest from El Salvador took us up to the small choir loft.
The organ was from 1726, not a sumptuous creation like those of the Antegnati, but a rough-and-ready model for a mountain village. The tarnished pipes sat in a simple wooden case with scrolled decorations painted in faded red.
The instrument was dirty and neglected, but, thanks to the maker’s craftsmanship, it still mostly worked and proved capable of singing out with characterful power and variety. Like most Italian organs of the baroque, it had just one manual and a scant octave of slanting pedals used for pastoral drones or to mark off cadences. There was no back panel on the case. Instead, the instrument had been set against the wall of the church. In the gap between the windchest with its pipes and the stone vaulting, pigeons had been nesting. Among the ranks of more forceful registers was a single flute stop that could be made to puff like a dove or a cuckoo.
The priest left us to stay and play for as long as we wanted.
We started with Girolamo Frescobaldi’s Capriccio sopra il Cucho, published in 1624 in a collection of characteristically ingenious and flamboyant contrapuntal keyboard works. The capriccio is a genre that paradoxically evinces both erudition and willful liberty, command of and adherence to the rules of composition while also indulging a fantastical freedom. Frescobaldi had his collection printed in the open score, that is, with a separate staff for each of the four voices described by analogy to vocal music as soprano, alto, tenor, and bass. In this format, his command of counterpoint could more plainly be seen on the page, even if it was more difficult for lesser keyboardists to play from.
From the beginning to the end of the six-minute piece, the soprano voice has only two notes: a minor third descending from D to B-natural. Below this continual call, the composer weaves a fabulous tapestry of contrapuntal motives in an ever-changing combination. These are interspersed with occasional flashes of figuration and enlivened through rhythmic variation. Harmonic feints constantly reframe the unchanging melody above. Moments of poised reflection are interrupted, as if spontaneously, by flights of fancy, all as the cuckoo calls with obstinate simplicity from its perch atop the array of voices. Frescobaldi’s is a daring, self-conscious display of self-imposed limitations that paradoxically do not constrict his imagination but spur it.
What lessons are to be learned from this ingenious piece? Should limits be respected or ignored, embraced or rejected? Does art “improve” on nature or is art a cage? Or both? Should we be delighted or dismayed—or both—by Frescobaldi’s capricious cuckoo? Is the cuckoo doomed to disappear from the world, the capriccio to become the bird’s mournful echo?
After an hour of music, we left the church. Outside, another woman with her children was at the spring doing laundry. As we walked back to our house on the hillside track, the cuckoos began calling again.
(David Yearsley is a long-time contributor to CounterPunch and the Anderson Valley Advertiser. His latest recording is Handel’s Organ Banquet. He can be reached at dgyearsley@gmail.com.)
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