The Francisco Valls’s Missa Scala Aretina controversy

Among the recent readings on Iberian music in the last decades of the seventeenth and early decades of the eighteenth century, one interesting aspect called my attention which is centred on the controversy around the Catalan composer Francisco Valls’s Missa Scala Aretina that developed during the first decades of the eighteenth century.

Francisco (or Francesc) Valls was probably born in Barcelona around 1665 and died in that city on 3 February 1747. In 1688 he was appointed as director of music at the Mataró parish. Later that year he was appointed as chapel master of Gerona Cathedral and in 1696 he moved to Santa María del Mar, Barcelona. In Barcelona he was appointed as the Cathedral in early 1696, first as substitute for Joan Barter (that had retired that year), and finally as titular on 18 February 1709. He retired from this post on 1726 but continued to write music for the Cathedral until at least 1741. Besides being a prolific composer with numerous works of sacred music and villancicos, Valls was also authored a musical treatise – the Mapa armónico práctico – dating from around 1741-42, that survives in manuscript.

Among Valls’ works, we find the Missa Scala Aretina, as the name suggests, was based on the Guidonian hexachord and must have been composed around 1702 since the manuscript preserved at Barcelona Cathedral has that year on its title page. The mass is scored for three vocal choirs: SAT (soloists), SSAT (soloists) and SATB (choir) with instrumental accompaniment of 2 oboes doubling 2 violins, 2 trumpets and violone. The first choir has harp continuo, the second and third choir separate organs, each with a doubling violone or bassoon.

The controversy erupted around an entry of the second Tiple in the “Miserere nobis” section of the Gloria, which forms an unprepared major ninth with the Tenor and Bassus, and an unprepared minor second with the Altus.

The controversy developed from a print published in 1716, with one of the most critical attacks against Valls written by Joaquín Martínez de la Roca, organist of Palencia Cathedral. It was followed by at least eighty opinions issued in Spain between 1716 and 1720 regarding the validity of this passage. Only about forty of these opinions were concluded with a definitive judgement, with the supporters of Valls slightly outnumbering his detractors. Among the supporters of Valls, we find the composer Pedro Vaz Rego (1673-1736), chapel master of Évora Cathedral and one of the two non-Spanish composers that participated, author of the a Defensa sobre a entrada da novena da Missa Scala Aretina, composta pelo Mestre Francisco Valls which is now lost. The other foreign composer that took part in this discussion was the Italian Alessandro Scarlatti that considered the work in a short essay on counterpoint. Although Scarlatti praises the expressiveness of Valls’ dissonant passage, he is in favour of the retention of traditional conservative dissonance treatment in sacred vocal polyphony.

When compared to the techniques from other Spanish music styles and other countries, this controversial dissonance in Valls’ mass is not particularly significant. It occurs in a metrically weak place of the measure and resolves down by whole step. Many of the arguments were conducted within the framework of traditional counterpoint theory. The discussion was directed towards the question of whether the rest preceding the polemic entry of the second Tiple could be interpreted as equivalent in function to a consonance (by theoretically substituting the G or Bb for the rest) which would reduce the pointed dissonance to a passing note status.

The arguments were in part overshadowing an important issue present in Spanish (and we can add also Portuguese) music which centred on whether the composer of sacred vocal polyphony could have on occasion the creative right to break the accepted rules of counterpoint in a consciously way to emphasise the text treated.