This Baroque Composer Created Insane Polytonality!

A hundred years before Mozart was born, Heinrich Biber was a court musician in Salzburg, and was considered the leading violin virtuoso of his day. Biber wrote his Battalia à 10 in 1673. It is a programmatic suite for string orchestra, depicting an army preparing for war, getting drunk, marching, and fighting a battle. It ends with a ’lament for wounded musketeers’. The second movement is a quodlibet, a type of 17th century drinking song, during which different singers would bring different folk songs and sing them simultaneously and raucously. Biber titled his second movement, Die liederliche gesellschaft von allerley Humor (“The lusty society of all types of humor”) and, in it, he mixed together Slovak, Bohemian, Austrian and German tunes. In the second violin part, Biber noted, in Latin, “hic dissonat ubique nam ebrii sic diversis Cantilenis clamare solent.” (“Here it is dissonant everywhere, for thus are drunkards accustomed to bellow with different songs.”) Biber creates, for about a minute,