Musica reservata
Style of the late Renaissance with text-related refinement.
What it means
Musica reservata is a term from sixteenth-century sources whose exact meaning is not established. The testimonies allow several interpretations: a music that follows the text especially closely and interprets it with musical means; a music reserved for a circle of connoisseurs; or a particularly restrained, refined manner of execution. Scholarship has long discussed these interpretations without arriving at a uniform result.
Musical use
Independent of the question of the term, the sources describe a practice characteristic of the music of the late Renaissance: the composition follows the text closely in declamation, harmony, and expression, uses chromaticism and unusual turns at key points, and reckons with listeners who understand these devices. The term thus stands in the environment of what is also called Mannerism, and points ahead to the developments that lead to monody around 1600. For engagement with this music it is useful above all as a pointer to the importance of the text.
The term appears around 1550 and is connected with the music of Orlando di Lasso. Adrianus Petit Coclico used it first in 1552, as the title of his Nuremberg motet collection and in the preface to his Compendium musices; in 1555 Georg Seld, in a letter to Duke Albrecht V of Bavaria, praised Philippe de Monte as a composer “auf die new art und Musica reservata” (in the new manner and musica reservata). Altogether only about fifteen testimonies from some seventy years survive, and no significant music theory of the period explains the term.
Performance practice
In this music, always start from the text: translate it, speak it aloud, determine the key words, and check how the music reacts to them. Sing with moderate vibrato and in a transparent scoring, so that harmony and declamation remain audible. Practise chromatic passages slowly for intonation.
The term is interpreted differently in the literature and in programme texts easily promises more than can be substantiated: use it sparingly, name the uncertainty, and check which source an interpretation rests on.