The sight of sound : resonances between music and painting in seventeenth-century Italy (2024)

Knowledge and debate in the field of sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Venetian music has greatly benefitted in recent decades from studies of major institutions, composers, repertories and sources, as also from investigations of the quantitative aspects of musical life in what was one of the largest, richest and most commercially oriented cities on the Italian peninsula: the Venetian musical phenomenon includes, on the one hand, regular or sporadic musical activities in the city’s many churches and private palaces (activities which provided significant earnings for large numbers of musicians, whether or not salaried members of the ducal cappella) and, on the other, the auxiliary trades of music printing and instrument making. The transmission of the musical repertories has also received notable attention: in particular, the contemporary and later reception of Venetian musical repertories in different political, linguistic and/or confessional areas. Central, too, have been questions of ‘sound’, both with regard to the particular interaction between musical composition, the spatial peculiarities and the specific liturgical and ceremonial traditions of the Venetian ducal chapel, and in the context of music-making at large.This collection of essays on the life, times and works of a composer who ranks among the most outstanding musical personalities of his day variously unites these strands in an albeit partial attempt to interpret Giovanni Gabrieli’s output and activities in their Venetian context and, at the same time, cast light on their broader historiographical significance: on the one hand Gabrieli as point of synthesis of a complex Venetian musical tradition, on the other his interaction with and impact on contemporary musical life, his influence on later generations of composers both at home and abroad, the rediscovery of his achievements by nineteenth- and twentieth-century historians and performers, the revisitations of his music by twentieth-century composers.Reviews:– Rivista Italiana di Musicologia 53 (2018), p. 285–291 (Michelangelo Gabbrielli)– Early Music 46 (2018), p. 167–169 (Eleanor Selfridge-Field); reply: Early Music 46 (2018), p. 367–368 – Renaissance Quarterly 71 (2018), p. 776–777 (Tim Shephard)– Music & Letters 100 (2019), p. 543–546 (Tim Carter)

In this paper I explore a topic at the intersection of three heterogeneous traditions: Monastic and mendicant cultures, studia humanitatis, and art music. Religious communities in the Florence of the late fifteenth century had their own special rituals, which prominently featured music, and had made the interest in the classical antiquity so pervasive in the city a part of their members' education. Individual orders and houses, however, connected these elements in different ways, producing starkly contrasting outcomes, which in turn generated religious and political conflict. In my presentation I sketch a general map of different communities living in the city and focus on a few case studies—Carmelites, Dominicans, and Servants of Mary. In particular, I connect the introduction of classicizing elements in the education of the novices and in the communities' self-representation and the increase of art music as elements of different (and sometimes divergent) attempts at responding to the city's obsession with new forms of decorum in public rituals.

Cognate Music Theories The Past and the Other in Musicology (Essays in Honor of John Walter Hill), 2024

The chapter explores the hermeneutics of music in the writings of Francesco Algarotti (1712–64), whose occupation with this field, his undoubted proficiency notwithstanding, is still confined to Saggio sopra l’opera in musica (1755). I aim to show that this savant’ discourse on music is much deeper integrated in his entire oeuvre, mirroring the wide-ranging intellectual interests in the Age of the Enlightenment. Extrapolated from his essays and correspondence, Algarotti’s concept of music comes to light through the “cognate” approach, as a conflation of adjacent/contiguous disciplinary angles.Algarotti’s narratives contain many penetrating observations regarding prominent musicians of his time, as well as of the preceding centuries, who “were equal to the noble task of conveying the chaste sights of Petrarch.” Although most of these statements refer to opera composers, the figure who occupies the largest physical presence in Algarotti’s prose, and the only professional with whom Algarotti maintained personal epistolary contacts, is the celebrated violinist Giuseppe Tartini (1692–1770). Both Tartini’s historical position and the reception of his legacy over time do not posit him as a seminal figure of his generation. Why precisely was Tartini singled out as the main agent of the entire field of contemporaneous culture? Algarotti’s references to Tartini’s music leans on a synergy of the broadly defined “insider” and “outsider” views conflated in the person/profile of the polymath himself: he conceptualizes music and its place in the fine arts by approaching from outside the discipline; as an informant, synchronized historically, he discerns in Tartini’s music some covert values that certainly were considered significant by his contemporaries but have been overlooked later. Such an approach has the advantage of direct contact with cultural agendas of its time through its debate between disciplines. Algarotti’s grasp of Tartini’s music allows us to better understand his own conception of culture, while the modes of his reception mirror mainstream European trends in this period.

Carlo Ambrogio Lonati (c.1645-post 1701), known as ‘Il gobbo della Regina’ (the hunchback of Queen Christine of Sweden) was a multifaced figure. He was a violinist, composer, and singer operating in Italy and elsewhere in Europe in the late seventeenth century, whose virtuoso violin music is considered among the most outstanding of the period. So far however, research has been limited to the study of only one collection of twelve sonatas, and lacks insight into his other violin pieces. Scholarship on Lonati’s violin music is thus in great need of a new integrated study of its stylistic features in relationship to performance practices.In this paper I will focus on newly discovered sources of Lonati’s violin music and demonstrate what performers can learn from it in terms of performance practice. The requirement of an enigmatic five-string instrument and the dazzling basso continuo writing, the extensive use of scordatura, chordal and polyphonic passages in double and triple stops, a fascination with arpeggios, bow vibratos, the appearance of pasticcio-sonatas are just some of the aspects I will take into consideration. Furthermore, my investigation — which will not be limited to the violin itself but also to other string and continuo instruments — will illustrate a wider approach to performance practices utilized in northern Italian areas, particularly in Bologna, Modena, Venice, and Milan at the turn of the eighteenth century. The methodological core of the paper lies in a strict relationship between (mainly manuscript) source study and performance practices with the purpose of showing how texts were handed down and how musical practice changed in time.

In this project I wish to establish a seventeenth century popular concept focusing on the lute in France between 1650 and 1700. By promoting a more culturally based understanding of French lute music, I try to unveil some of its functions as social phenomena. The argument takes a starting point in Robert Middleton's popular as presented in his book Studying popular music (1990), together with selected writings by Foucault; and from that I map different cultural groupings within the French society as to unveil how lute music was articulated. Following, I investigate how the construction of musician and music fits into and fulfill the conception of seventeenth century popular music that I propose. This study presents an internally contradictory concept of lute music that participates in dialogues between internal and external, self and other, individual and society.

Renaissance Studies, 2018

The subject of this article is a discussion of Emilio de' Cavalieri's early Baroque music drama, Rappresentatione di anima, et di corpo (The Play of Soul and Body), performed in Rome in 1600 with a particular focus on the ambivalence apparent in this work between the text's explicit pious plea for renouncing worldly pleasures on the one hand and, on the other hand, the theatrical, musical, and even textual means in the play intended to delight the audience, but also through this delight to bring about its religious message to the audience. This ambivalence may shed light on broader issues of cultural history connected to continuities and changes in Reform Catholicism in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Although seemingly influenced by a general pessimism of the time, the Catholic world could draw on a devotional, aesthetically resourceful, tradition providing ambiguous relief in contemporary pious culture, including Cavalieri's avant-garde music dramatic devotion.

In this project I wish to establish a seventeenth century popular concept focusing on the lute in France between 1650 and 1700. By promoting a more culturally based understanding of French lute music, I try to unveil some of its functions as social phenomena. The argument takes a starting point in Robert Middleton’s popular as presented in his book Studying popular music (1990), together with selected writings by Foucault; and from that I map different cultural groupings within the French society as to unveil how lute music was articulated. Following, I investigate how the construction of musician and music fits into and fulfill the conception of seventeenth century popular music that I propose. This study presents an internally contradictory concept of lute music that participates in dialogues between internal and external, self and other, individual and society.Key words: Popular music; seventeenth century; lute; French society; cultural studies; performance studies.

Early music, III/3, 1975

Journal of the American Musicological Society 67/2, 2014

Detailed payment records and notes preserved in the Archivio di Stato di Firenze allow us to reconstruct the relationship of music and space in the Florentine church of Santissima Annunziata. In the late fifteenth century different musical styles and repertories came to define ritually the composite space of the church, one of the main houses belonging to the mendicant order of the Servants of Mary.This special role of music came into focus in the early 1470s and even more in the 1480s, when subsequent priors increased the musical activities, possibly to negotiate the new spatial features of the church after a consequential remodeling. Music thus helped organize key areas that had undergone architectural transformations, linking each part of the building to the specific rituals performed there through special sounds directed at the likely participants. The remodeling also involved a shift in the balance of power, with private patrons coming to control the virtual totality of the church. Music helped address this problem as well, by acoustically marking and reclaiming certain spaces as the friars’ dedicated ritual sites, but also creating in its variety a nuanced representation of the community—both ordained and lay—that frequented the building.