Monteverdi & mitochondria

My friend forwarded this to me a while ago. It's 90 minutes of Trinity Wall Street performing Monteverdi's Vespers in its entirety, complete with period instruments, concluding with 5 minutes of applause. This occurred in NY on some random Tuesday night in January. It amazes me to think that a work of this magnitude is offered mid-week. I suppose there are other pressing performances which take up the coveted Friday and Saturday night slots. The vocal soloists are fantastic and the little continuo organ is perfect for that setting.

What would prompt Monteverdi to write such a lengthy muscial offering? Without doing any research on the piece in order to approach it with pure-mind, I wonder about the story behind the Vespers. My analytical side screams "a commissioned work! so he can eat and pay rent! it has nothing to do with God! just smile and write the music!" Or, on a less greedy sense, "I must write what the people want to hear" (here, the Catholic church is implied to be the "people"). I'm not a full-on paid church musician but have 18 years' experience in that area, and I can tell you even today's priests don't care much for lenghty musical works. Perhaps it's one of many pieces Monteverdi wrote that he didn't get to hear in his lifetime. Maybe his mental footnote on the Vespers was "more power to the souls who undertake such a grand work."

Or maybe, just maybe, Monteverdi actually wrote this beautiful, complex, difficult, mysterious work to honor a God that he thought equally beautiful, complex, difficult and mysterious.

At the same time I was listening to the Vespers, and yes, I did watch/listen to the whole performance, my DH was studying for his anatomy class. We talked about the different organelles and their functions. Taken individually, it's not hard to remember what each of them do. There is always a little cartoon drawing of what the smooth endoplastic reticulum looks like, as well as all of the others. It's easy to memorize these things. But more difficult to grasp the matrices which make up the human body. It is a daily task for me to appreciate the interconnectedness of life. How everybody looks the same on the inside. How many trillions of mitochondria I have inside, powering my limbs to move. How the eye can transmit light into images for my brain. How electrons cannot be in one place at any given time, but that we are all made of electrons coming into and going out of existence.

Then I wonder how long Monteverdi's Vespers would be if he knew about mitochondria.