Think of the last time a movie soundtrack made
your palms sweat. Oh yeah, that instant tension.
Right, like your heart starts racing, your jaw
clenches, and you have this inescapable sense
of anxiety. Yeah, your whole body just reacts
to it. Exactly. And, you know, we tend to think
of that physical reaction as a modern Hollywood
trick. We just accept it as a given that a composer
with a synthesizer and a heavy string section
can basically manipulate our nervous system on
demand. Like they're just pushing buttons in
a control room, yeah. Right. But what if I told
you that the actual literal sheet music designed
to hack your body and induce pure anxiety was
engineered nearly 400 years ago? It's wild to
think about. It really is. Welcome to the Deep
Dive. Today, we are looking at an incredibly
fascinating encyclopedia entry and a stack of
historical notes on a concept called Steele Concertato,
or in its original Italian, Generè Concertato.
Which translates beautifully to the agitated
style. The agitated style. I love that. And our
mission today is to explore how one single Baroque
composer looked at the entire musical landscape,
realized human anger was completely missing from
it, and and just decided to invent a brand new
musical language to trigger our deepest fight
or flight instincts. Yeah, he basically built
the blueprint for musical anxiety. OK, let's
unpack this. Because to really understand the
solution this composer came up with, we first
have to understand the massive psychological
void he was trying to fill, right? Absolutely.
And the scope of that void is really what makes
this history so compelling. So the composer we're
following today is Claudio Monteverdi. And to
really grasp his ambition here, we are zeroing
in on a specific public of his from 1638. It
was his eighth book of madrigals, famously titled
Madrigale Guerrieri et Amorosi. Which means madrigals
of war and love. Exactly. The two absolute extremes
of the human condition. Right, which is a very
deliberate framing on his part because the earliest
most comprehensive description we have of this
agitated style, it comes straight from the foreword
Monteverdi wrote for this specific book. He didn't
just write the music, he wrote the manifesto.
Yeah, he doesn't just introduce new music, he
lays out an entire psychological theory. He writes
that he spent time deeply reflecting on the human
mind, and he concludes that we are governed by
three principle passions, or affections. And
those three passions, according to his notes,
are anger, moderation, and humility. which I
think he also categorizes as supplication, right?
Yes, exactly. So you have the fiery rage of anger,
the steady baseline of moderation, and then this
gentle yielding of humility. Right. And he takes
those three human psychological states and maps
them directly onto what he sees as their musical
equivalence. He argues that the art of music
naturally possesses these three gears. You have
concertato, which is the agitated or warlike
style. You have temperato, the moderate style.
And you have mole, which translates to the soft
style. So he builds this perfectly symmetrical
framework. Anger pairs with the agitated style,
moderation pairs with the moderate style, and
humility pairs with the soft style. Exactly.
It's very neat. It is. But here is the monumental
claim he makes in that 1638 forward, which I
find is so incredibly audacious. So bold. Right.
He writes that he has studied all the works of
the former composers who came before him, all
of them. And he found a massive abundance of
the soft music. He found plenty of the moderate
music. But he claims to have never, in all of
his studies, found a single example of the agitated
style. Yeah, it's a sweeping indictment of his
entire artistic heritage. It really is. He is
essentially looking back at the whole history
of Western music up to the year 1638 and telling
his peers, you know, you missed a spot, a profoundly
important spot. Right. I keep picturing this
through an analogy. Like, imagine Monteverdi
is a master painter walking through the Louvre
looking at centuries of masterpieces. Right,
taking it all in. Yeah. and he suddenly stops
and realizes that every single artist before
him has only been painting with blue and yellow.
Oh, that's a great way to put it. Like, they
have painted beautiful oceans and bright suns,
but they have completely, utterly ignored the
existence of the color red. Yeah, just completely
left it off the palette. They've just been pretending
that blood and fire and rage aren't part of the
visible spectrum. So... What does this all mean
for how people experienced music before this?
I mean, if a third of the human emotional spectrum
was just missing from the art form. What's fascinating
here is that this observation reveals a fundamental
shift in what music was actually supposed to
do. How so? Well, if we look at the eras before
Monteverdi's realization, music was heavily weighted
toward the pleasing, the harmonious, you know,
the spiritually uplifting or or the sad but beautiful.
Amali in the Temperata. Right, exactly. Its primary
functions were to soothe the listener, to express
religious devotion, or to just provide pleasant
courtly entertainment. It was polite. Very polite.
But Monteverdi is stepping in and demanding that
music serve as a mirror to the complete human
psychological experience. He's arguing that if
the human mind is capable of violent, destructive,
warlike anger, then our art is fundamentally
failing us if it refuses to reflect that reality.
He didn't want music to merely sound pretty anymore.
He wanted it to be fiercely, sometimes uncomfortably,
true to the darkest parts of our psychology.
So he identifies the problem, which is brilliant.
He sees that nobody is painting with the musical
equivalent of the color red. but identifying
a gap in the market is only half the battle.
Now he actually has to figure out the mechanics
of it. I mean, how do you take the abstract internal
feeling of pure bellicose anger and translate
that into literal ink on sheet music? It's an
engineering problem at that point. Exactly. How
do you write down agitation so a violinist can
play it and a listener could actually feel it
in their gut? Well, we find the answer in the
specific mechanical notes of the Steele Concertato.
According to the sources, Monteverdi deployed
very specific sonic effects as symbols of this
warlike agitation. Okay, what were they? The
defining feature, the real engine of the style,
was the rapid repetition of notes. Specifically,
he demanded rapid repeated sixteenth notes from
the string section. Oh wow, just hammering the
same note. Exactly. And alongside that, he utilized
extended, really aggressive trills. The timeline
of when he figured this out is actually quite
surprising, too, because while he published his
grand sweeping theory about the three passions
in that 1638 forward, the sources point to a
piece he wrote much earlier as the first true
laboratory test of this style. Right. He was
experimenting way before he published the theory.
Yeah. It's a piece called Il Combattimento di
Tancredi e Clorinda. The Combat of Tancredi and
Clorinda. He wrote it in 1624, which is 14 years
before he formally announced his theory to the
world. 14 years of just keeping it in his back
pocket. Right. And the researchers highlight
a very specific moment in that piece, measures
172 to 173. That is the exact pinpoint where
this rapid repetition of 16th notes just bursts
onto the scene. It's a historic musical moment.
It is. But. I have to push back a little on the
mechanics here. OK, go for it. Is simply playing
the same note really fast actually enough to
make a human being feel angry? I mean, is this
a brilliant psychological trigger, or was it
just a neat musical gimmick? I can imagine the
composer thinking, well, swords swing fast in
a battle, so I'll just write fast notes. It's
a fair question. But if we connect this to the
bigger picture of human biology, we can see why
it is far more than just a cheap parlor trick.
OK. Consider what happens to your physical body
when you experience sudden, intense rage or panic.
Your autonomic nervous system completely takes
over. Your heart rate violently spikes. Oh, right.
Your muscles tense up. Your breathing becomes
shallow and erratic. And your body actually starts
physically trembling as it floods with adrenaline.
So you're literally vibrating. Yes. And what
Monteverdi engineered with those rapid 16th notes,
and especially those extended vibrating trills,
was a direct sonic mimic. of the human nervous
system in distress. It is biological resonance.
That's incredible. So when you hear a string
section violently scrubbing the exact same note
over and over at a frantic speed, your brain
subconsciously recognizes that rhythm. It sounds
like a racing heartbeat. Precisely the effect.
I mean, the sheer friction of a bow sawing back
and forth on a string at that speed, it creates
a sense of physical friction in the room. feel
it in your chest. Yeah, he was bypassing the
listener's intellect entirely. You don't have
to sit there and think, ah, the composer wishes
to convey warfare. Right, he's not analyzing
it. Exactly. Your body hears the rapid vibration
and physically reacts to it. He was giving his
musicians the sheet music to induce an adrenaline
rush. So he was essentially mapping the human
nervous system. onto the musical staff. I mean,
that elevates it entirely from a gimmick to a
piece of psychological engineering. It really
does. It forces the listener out of that comfortable,
moderate state of mind and drags them into the
panic of the moment. Whether they want to be
there or not. Right. But here is the wrench in
Monteverdi's PR machine. Oh, the controversy.
Yes. Yeah. Because he claims he is the absolute
sole inventor of this. Like we said, he looked
at all former composers, found zero examples
of the educated style, and then generously bestowed
style concertado upon the world. Very humble
of him. Right. But when we look at the scholars
in our sources, they start pointing out precedents
that seriously complicate his claim of absolute
originality. I was looking at the notes from
scholar Kate Van Orden, and she points directly
to a piece of music by the composer Clamor Shonikin.
Right, yes. And the piece is literally called
Ligere the War. And Janikin wrote it in 1528.
That is almost a full century before Monteverdi
wrote Tancredi e Clorinda in 1624. It is a massive
chronological gap. I mean, a hundred years. And
Janeykin's Laguerre is a clear example of an
earlier composer attempting to capture the chaos,
the clamor and the agitation of a battlefield
long before Mondo Verdi supposedly pulled the
concept out of thin air. Here's where it gets
really interesting, though, because it reminds
me of how technology companies operate today.
Oh, how so? Well, think of a modern tech CEO
standing on a stage claiming they have completely
invented the concept of the smartphone. Right,
yes. They talk about their grand revolutionary
vision and they gracefully ignore the fact that
other companies had released clunky early touch
devices a full decade earlier. That is a perfect
analogy. Right, yes. Jenkin's 1528 piece might
have been more of a literal sound effect imitation
of battle rather than a grand psychological ecosystem,
but the core attempt to sound agitated was undeniably
there. It feels like Monteverdi is doing the
ultimate PR spin for his own legacy. He's controlling
the narrative. Exactly. He didn't just invent
a product. He invented the marketing for it.
This raises an important question, though. What
does it actually mean to invent an artistic style?
Is it being the first person to ever attempt
the sound, or is it being the person who builds
the underlying theory that makes it a universal
tool? That's a great distinction. Because another
scholar in our sources, Agatha Sewer, brings
up a fascinating layer to this debate. She points
out the deep similarities and the historical
ambiguities between Monteverdi's musical generia
concertato and the style concertato that had
already existed for centuries in the realms of
rhetoric and poetry. That blew my mind when I
read it. The agitated style wasn't even strictly
a musical invention to begin with. No, not at
all. It was a spoken word technique. Exactly.
Rhetoric. the classical art of public speaking
and persuasion, had long established highly formalized
methods for conveying deep agitation to a crowd.
Right. If you think about a great orator delivering
a furious warlike speech or a poet reciting a
tale of violent revenge, they do not speak in
smooth flowing melodic paragraph. No, they would
speak in aggressive staccato bursts. I imagine
it almost like a modern rap artist using rhythm
and sharp consonants to create tension. That's
a really good Like if you are angry, you use
close -up sounds, you repeat syllables, your
pacing gets erratic and fast. And that is exactly
Agatha Suhr's observation. Her work suggests
that Monteverdi might not have invented the concept
of agitation from a blank slate. Instead, he
was an incredibly astute observer of human communication.
He took the agitated cadences, the rapid fire
syllables, and the aggressive repetitions that
already existed in spoken poetry and angry rhetorical
speech, and he mathematically translated those
exact rhythmic patterns into a formal musical
system. Wow. So he essentially transcribed an
angry rand into 16th notes. That's exactly what
he did. That makes so much sense. I mean, Jane
Eakin's Ligere in 1528 might have been a brilliant
one -off attempt to imitate swords clashing,
but Monteverdi was the one who actually codified
the psychology behind it. Yes. He wrote the developer
manual. He took the physiological reality of
an angry speaker, turned it into a specific arrangement
of strings and trills, and basically said to
the musical world, here is the exact formula.
Here is the framework for anxiety. He provided
both the theoretical justification with his essay
on the three passions and the practical toolkit
for how to execute it. And regardless of whether
he was truly the first to play a fast note, there
is no denying that Monteverdi's codification
was a triumph. The manual he wrote worked perfectly.
It caught on, and it permanently altered the
trajectory of Western music. So if Monteverdi
has essentially codified the musical operating
system for human agitation, how long does it
take for the rest of the artistic world to download
the update? I mean, it didn't just stop with
that one combat piece in 1624. Oh, no. The spread
was both rapid and profound. Monteverbi himself
knew he had struck gold, and he continued to
deploy the stale concertato in his later heavily
influential operas. He kept using it. Yeah. We
see it utilized in 1639 in Il ritorno di Lice
in Patria, the return of Ulysses to his homeland.
We see it again in 1642 in L 'incarnazione di
Poppea, the coronation of Poppea. Right. By weaving
it into these major works, he proved that this
rapid fire agitation wasn't just a novelty trick
for a specific magic goal about a sword fight.
It was a fundamental structural tool for high
dramatic art. And then he hands the toolkit off
to the next generation of composers. Because
the notes highlight Giacomo Carissimi using this
exact style in a piece called Jeff Day. Charismy's
timeline is 1605 to 1674, so he is operating
directly in the wake of Monteverdi's massive
cultural footprint. He's right there picking
up the baton. Yeah. But there is another example
in our stack of sources that I think is the most
compelling piece of this entire story. Oh, the
Stratzi piece. Yes. The composer Barbara Stratzi,
who lived from 1619 to 1677, utilized this exact
agitated style in a piece titled Trattamento.
Now, I really want to pause and look at that
title. Tridento translates to betrayal. Right.
When Monteverdi first unleashed these rapid 16th
notes in Tancredi e Clorinda, it was to depict
literal physical combat, a battlefield, two warriors
clashing armor. Very external. Yes. But betrayal
is an entirely different landscape. How do you
view that evolution from the external violence
of a battlefield to the internal concept of betrayal?
The shift from physical warfare to emotional
warfare is where the style reaches its true potential.
Wow. When you analyze Stratzi's use of it in
Tradimento, you realize the style concertato
has fully transcended its origins as literal
sound effect music. Betrayal is, in its own devastating
way, an internal combat. It really is. It is
the profound emotional violence of discovering
that someone you trusted has turned against you.
And the physiological reaction is identical.
I mean, when you find out you've been deeply
betrayed, your heart races. You tremble. You
get that same flush of adrenaline and panic that
you would if someone literally swung a sword
at you. Exactly the same biological response.
The racing heartbeat and the trembling body that
Monteverdi's rapid notes mimic. They are triggered
by physical danger on a battlefield, absolutely,
but they are also triggered the exact second
your reality shatters from a betrayal. But taking
Monteverdi's strict musical code for physical
warfare and applying it to a story of intimate
emotional betrayal, composers like Stracci were
proving just how versatile and profoundly human
this musical language really was. It wasn't just
about war anymore. It was about the war inside
our own heads. It became a shared universal code
for all composers in the Baroque era. They finally
had the color red on their palette, as you put
it earlier, and they were using it to paint the
complete, terrifying, violent spectrum of the
human soul. That's incredible. They could express
the darkest interior emotions with a precision
that simply didn't exist a generation prior.
It's just brilliant psychological engineering.
So bringing all these threads together, We started
with Claudio Monteverdi looking back at the vast
history of music and realizing that an entire
third of the human experience, the anger, the
agitation, the fight or flight response, was
completely missing from the sheet music. Right.
We explored how we engineered a mechanical solution
utilizing rapid 16th notes and extended trills
to literally bypass the intellect and mimic the
biological reality of a racing heart. The adrenaline
rush. Exactly. And then we unpack the controversy
of his ego. the fact that he likely borrowed
from earlier attempts like Jenneken's 1528 piece,
and that he brilliantly translated the educated
rhythms of spoken poetry and rhetoric into a
formal musical system. The PR spin. Yeah. And
finally, we saw how that system evolved. It started
as a way to mimic a literal battlefield and grew
into a profound tool for composers like Barbra
Stratzi to express the internal devastation of
betrayal. It's a massive, enduring legacy. It
really is. Honestly, Understanding the mechanics
of this completely changes how I will listen
to media from now on. I mean, the next time you
are sitting in a theater watching a modern thriller
and the villain is slowly creeping up and the
string section starts violently sawing back and
forth on a single, rapid, repetitive note to
make you feel anxious. Remember, you are hearing
the direct cultural descendants of Monteverdi
-style concertato. Yes. You are experiencing
a centuries old biological hack designed specifically
to manipulate your nervous system. Leaving us
with a very compelling reflection regarding our
own modern era. What's that? Well, if Monteverdi
realized in 1638 that the art of his time was
completely missing the notes for human anger,
what complex human emotions are we currently
missing the notes for today? As our modern lives
generate entirely new psychological states, like
the unique paralyzing anxiety of digital information
overload or the strange buzzing isolation of
being constantly connected to a screen, is there
a new undiscovered style concertato waiting to
be invented to capture exactly how that modern
agitation feels? That is a wild thought to leave
on, the idea that there are entirely new colors
of anxiety waiting to be painted. We will leave
you to ponder what the accurate soundtrack to
your own modern digital anxiety should actually
sound like. Thank you so much for joining us
for this deep dive into the agitated style. We
will see you next time.