La Nuova Pratica is a One Microphone Recording DSD EP that offers a journey through early 17th-century Italian vocal music, a period of profound transformation in which the relationship between words and music took on a new expressive dimension.

The works of Claudio Monteverdi, Giulio Caccini, Marco Antonio Ziani and other composers offer an insight into the aesthetic world of the ‘seconda pratica’, where poetic discourse, rhetoric and the expression of emotions take center stage.

Through a variety of texts, the program explores different manifestations of love: maternal tenderness, desire, absence, contemplation and the spiritual dimension of the experience of love. The music thus ceases to be a mere embellishment of the text and becomes its sensory extension, following its inflections, its silences and its emotional charge.

One of the program’s central pieces is Claudio Monteverdi’s Ego flos campi, based on the Song of Songs. In this work, the sensuality of biblical language coexists with its spiritual interpretation, giving rise to one of the most evocative expressions of the union between the profane and the sacred in seventeenth-century music.

The performance by Miguel Ulla (countertenor) and Rafael Arjona (archlute) seeks to recapture the intimacy inherent in this repertoire: a voice that recites and sings, supported by a flexible and deeply expressive basso continuo. The result is an interpretation in which rhetoric, vocal color and freedom of expression become key elements

Rather than a chronological journey, the EP offers an immersion in an aesthetic in which words become music and music becomes emotion.

Miguel Ulla, Countertenor
Rafael Arjona, Archlute