How Monteverdi Engineered the Sound of Anxiety

0:00This is Byard Winthrop, founder of American Giant. We make all our clothing right here in the US with American cotton and American workers. Get 20% off your first order when you use code giant20 at american-giant.com. 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, 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

1:00encyclopedia entry and a stack of historical notes on a concept called steel conchitato or in its original Italian generate conchitato. 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 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. Okay, 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 publication of his from 1638. It was his eighth book of madrigals, famously titled

2:02Madrigale Guerriere at Amarose. 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 forward Monteverdi wrote for this specific book. He did 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 principal passions or affections. And those three passions, according to his notes, are anger, moderation, and humility. Which I think he also categorizes his application, 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

3:02these three gears. You have Conzi Topo, which is the agitated or warlike style. You have Temporato, the moderate style. And you have Mule, 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. 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. 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.

4:04Like 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 errors before Monteverdi's realization, music was heavily weighted toward the pleasing, the harmonious, you know, the spiritually uplifting or the sad, but beautiful. Amole in the Temperata. Right, exactly.

5:04Its primary functions were to sue 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, war-like anger, then our art is fundamentally failing us if it refuses to reflect that reality. Wow. 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 violinists can play it

6:06and a listener can actually feel it in their gut? Well, we find the answer in the specific mechanical notes of the steel conchitato. According to the sources, Monteverdi deployed very specific sonic effects as symbols of this war-like agitation. OK, well, where are they? The defining feature, the real engine of the style, was the rapid repetition of notes. Specifically, he demanded rapid, repeated 16th 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 iklorinda, the combat of Tancredi in Clorinda. He wrote it in 1624, which is 14 years

7:07before he formally announced his theory to the world. 14 years of just keeping it in his back pocket. Right. And the researcher has highlighted 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. It's 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? Yeah. I can imagine the composer thinking, well, sword 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.

8:09Your 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 mimicry 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. You feel it in your chest. Yeah. He was bypassing the listeners' 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

9:10to 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 soul inventor of this. Like we said, he looked at all former composers, found zero examples of the educated style, and then generously bestowed style concitato 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, Klamashanikan. Right. Yes. And the piece is literally called Lagerre the War. And Janikin wrote it in 1528. That is almost a full century before Monteverdi wrote,

10:13Tancreti Eklarenda in 1624. It is a massive chronological gap. I mean, a hundred years. And Janikin's Lagerre is a clear example of an earlier composer attempting to capture the chaos, the clamor, and the agitation of a battlefield long before Monteverdi 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. Janikin'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 spend for his own legacy.

11:14He'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 Suer, brings up a fascinating layer to this debate. She points out the deep similarities and the historical ambiguities between Monteverdi's musical generic concitato and the style concitato 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 that. There 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.

12:14If you think about a great order 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'm imagining it almost like a modern rap artist using rhythm and sharp consonants to create tension. That's a really good comparison. Like if you are angry, you use close-up sounds, you repeat syllables, your pacing gets erratic and fast. And that is exactly Agatha Suer's observation. Yeah. Her work suggests that Monteverdi might not have invented the concept of agitation from a blank slate. Instead, he was an incredibly dispute 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 rant into 16th notes. That's exactly what he did. That makes so much sense.

13:14I mean, Janikin's LaGare 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 without one combat piece in 1624. Oh, no.

14:14The spread was both rapid and profound. Monteverdi 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 Routorno di Lise and Patria, the return of Ulysses to his homeland. We see it again in 1642 in Lincornazione di Pupe, the coronation of Pupe. Right. By weaving it into these major works, he proved that this rapid fire agitation wasn't just a novelty trick for a specific magical about a sword fight. It was a fundamental structural tool for hydromatic art. And then he heads the tool kit off to the next generation of composers. Exactly. Because the notes highlight jicomo charisumi, using this exact style in a piece called Jeff Day. Charisumi'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 Stratsy piece. Yes. The composer Barbara Stratsy,

15:16who lived from 1619 to 1677, utilized this exact agitated style in a piece titled Tradimento. Now I really want to pause and look at that title. Tradimento translates to betrayal. Right. When Monteverdi first unleashed these rapid 16th notes in Tancreti, E. Clarinda, 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 Stratsy's use of it in Tradimento, you realize the style contentado has fully transcended its origins as literal sound effect music. Betrayal is in its own devastating way and 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.

16:16I 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 the 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 Stratsy 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

17:16with 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 erasing heart. The adrenaline rush. Exactly. And then we unpack the controversy of his ego, the fact that he likely borrowed from earlier attempts like Janikin'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 Barbara Strautsi to express the internal devastation of betrayal.

18:19It'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 this single, rapid, repetitive note to make you feel anxious. Remember, you are hearing the direct cultural descendants of Monteverdi-style conciutto. 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. Oh, 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

19:19of being constantly connected to a screen, is there a new undiscovered style conciutto 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. Finding great candidates to hire can be like, well, trying to find a needle in a haystack. Sure, you can post your job to some job board, but then all you can do is hope the right person comes along, which is why you should try Zippercruder for free. At zippercruder.com slash zip. Zippercruder doesn't depend on candidates finding you. It finds them for you. It's powerful technology identifies people with the right experience and actively invites them to apply to your job. You get qualified candidates fast. So while other companies might deliver a lot of, hey, Zippercruder, find you what you're looking for.

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