For music scholars, Claudio Monteverdi’s Vespers of 1610—presented by Early Music Vancouver at the Chan Centre for the Performing Arts on August 12 as part of this year’s MusicFest Vancouver—is an enigmatic and even controversial work, and the hottest debate is over the composer’s intentions.

Was this kaleidoscopic masterpiece, dedicated to the Virgin Mary, meant to be a liturgical entity? Or did the worldly Italian, famous for his madrigals and early operas, create its innovative and varied mix of vocal and instrumental music as a kind of portfolio, to be sent to church authorities in Rome and Venice in the hope of landing a well-paid position as maestro di cappella?

Herbert Myers of Bay Area instrumental ensemble the Whole Noyse—which, along with 10 solo singers and Early Music Vancouver’s Baroque Festival Players, performs the work at the Chan—inclines toward the more pragmatic interpretation. “The latest I’ve read on all this is an article by British musicologist Roger Bowers, who marshals various different reasons to think it was not a liturgical whole. He’s trying to redress the opposite direction a lot of people had taken.

“It all seems to come down to what you want to see in the Vespers,” continues Myers, reached at his home near California’s Stanford University, where he teaches and is curator of instruments. “Bowers points out that it looks like the kind of thing Monteverdi would have assembled to hawk his own wares. You can also see it as a nice list of pieces that, in the published order, make a lot of sense as an evening’s entertainment.”

The contrasting styles and musical forms in Vespers of 1610 are powerful. “The thing that strikes me most about the Vespers is the diversity of ways in which it’s instrumented,” Myers says. “It’s not like [Johann Sebastian] Bach’s Mass in B Minor, where you have a consistent orchestra. It has all the earmarks of representing variety in performance on the part of Monteverdi himself. There are just five movements that specify the use of instruments, and only three of these indicate the instruments themselves.”

At the Chan, the members of the Whole Noyse will be playing the sackbut, an early trombone; the cornett, a woodwind with a brass mouthpiece; the curtal, an ancestor of the bassoon; and a range of recorders and keyless Renaissance flutes. Early Music Vancouver’s Baroque Festival Players will mainly perform on stringed instruments, and keyboardist Alexander Weimann is music director for the evening. (The Whole Noyse also appears on August 10, as part of the Vancouver Early Music Festival, in a show dubbed Venice and the Chapel of the Doge: Music at San Marco, at the UBC School of Music.)

The richly varied Vespers of 1610 includes a sonata, motets, psalms, a hymn, and several antiphons. “Antiphons are chants sung by choirs, responding to each other,” Myers explains. “They set up and comment on the psalms, which are Old Testament readings put into a New Testament context. So it’s a Christian perspective on these ancient texts. But apparently, in performance, it was common in northern Italy to follow the psalm with an instrumental or choral piece based on it.

“The motets between the psalms grow in number and size from solo to a duet, to a trio, and so on,” he continues. “The idea, I guess, was that if the priest was in a corner saying the right words, something could be put in for the public. In certain places, the vespers service became, in a sense, a concert. It was a celebration.”

While we’ll likely never know what led Monteverdi to compose his masterwork of 1610, it’s interesting to note that three years later he was appointed maestro di cappella for the Basilica of St. Mark in Venice. Living there offered some additional rewards.

“Venice was the main place for music publishing in Italy, and the world,” Myers says. “Not many other cities would have had religious establishments able to make use of a work such as the Vespers—in addition to all the instruments, the vocal techniques that Monteverdi required of his singers for the ornamentation are quite demanding. They [Venetians] were very much up-to-date as far as pushing the envelope of music in his time.”