Download PDF | (Brill's Companions to the Musical Culture of Medieval and Early Modern Europe, 2) Katelijne Schiltz (ed.) - A Companion to Music in Sixteenth-Century Venice-Brill (2018).
578 Pages
Introduction
Mapping Musical Life in Cinquecento Venice Katelijne Schiltz Only few European cities have attracted so much scholarly attention as Venice. As a powerful trading city with an exceptional political structure and a strong sense of self-confidence, Venice has been inspiring generations of historians, social and economic historians, art historians, literary historians, linguists— and musicologists.1 Attention has been drawn to the city’s government, to its social, religious, and intellectual life, to its cultural achievements in the fields of writing and publishing, architecture, painting, sculpture, and fashion. Many of these perspectives also find their way into the present volume. For it will become clear that music cannot and should not be considered an isolated phenomenon, but is deeply rooted in and connected with its environment. The eighteen chapters of this book all take up this basic assumption and comment upon it each in its own way. In the various chapters, music is discussed against the background of broader developments that concern Venetian society in general and its citizens, sestiere, and myriad institutions in particular.
In traditional historiography, music and musical life at the Basilica di San Marco have long been at the centre of attention.2 Not only is it the bestdocumented institution, which—especially after the arrival of Adrian Willaert (c. 1490-1562)—had an international reputation that could rival the standards of famous Italian courts. But it is also the institution that had its own liturgy (the so-called patriarchino)3 and that was at the centre of many religious and political events, a fact that is also due to the basilica being the private chapel of the Doge as well as to its unique location.4 Together with the Palazzo Ducale, the Biblioteca Marciana, and the Loggetta situated around the Piazza, San Marco was part of a complex of buildings with a highly symbolic value, both for Venetians and the city’s many visitors. For several decades, however, musicological scholarship has also turned its attention to other institutions. This major step was necessary in order to complement the picture of religious and secular musical life in the city and to grasp its complex soundscape. Work on confraternities, churches, academies, and salons has also revealed dynamics of these institutions and their role in Venetian society, while at the same time showing the close interaction between them on various occasions. Given the central role of these institutions in organising daily life in general and musical life in particular, the first block of chapters in this Companion seeks to map their musical activities and organisation. For obvious reasons, San Marco takes pride of place.
The volume opens with a contribution by Giulio M. Ongaro, who is the author of a major study on the chapel in the sixteenth century (especially under the direction of maestro Adrian Willaert) and of many other publications relating to music in Cinquecento Venice.5 The roots of music-making at San Marco can be traced back to the early fifteenth century, but a major expansion of the chapel took place at the end of that century, only to increase—and internationalise—further in the course of the sixteenth century. Ongaro shows that both the political and economic circumstances were propitious, and he investigates the evolution of the size and the composition of the chapel. Especially during the dogeship of Andrea Gritti, the deliberate advancement of music at San Marco was part of a more general renovatio urbis that also affected other arts. It is to Jonathan Glixon that we owe a whole range of fundamental studies on music in the confraternities—the so-called scuole grandi and scuole piccole. These lay confraternities played a crucial role in the city’s social network, as they took care of their members both in devotional and religious matters (e.g. by organising funeral and memorial masses for deceased members) and by providing financial assistance. Furthermore, many of them were patrons of the arts. Glixon has contributed a chapter that not only includes the confraternities, but also the numerous parish, monastic, and nunnery churches.6 Parish and monastic churches are also at the centre of Elena Quaranta’s chapter. Her monograph with the telling title Oltre San Marco has radically changed our view of music making in Cinquecento Venice insofar as it turns the spotlight on the activities of the many ‘other’ churches in Venice, which she was able to investigate thanks to extensive archival research.7 Although the topic of both Glixon’s and Quaranta’s chapter overlap to a certain extent, their essays can be read as complementary studies. At the same time, they show exemplarily how one subject can be approached from different perspectives and with different methodologies. Glixon intends to map the daily, weekly, monthly, and annual musical activities of the confraternities and churches against the background of the available resources, which could vary significantly from one institution to another.
Their repertoire includes both monophonic and polyphonic music, both vocal and instrumental pieces. Quaranta for her part focuses on the range of archival documents in order to discuss the stability and continuity that characterizes musical life at the parish and monastic churches. She shows that especially tax returns are a ‘homogenous body of documentation on music-making’. Generally speaking, a certain amount of overlap between chapters is not only inevitable—the reader is also guided by cross-references in the footnotes, which act as signposts and as an invitation for drawing connections—but also a sign of the compact network of people and institutions, whose paths crossed regularly on various occasions. Indeed, this complex maze of interactions marks every aspect of musical life in Cinquecento Venice. In some cases, however, it is necessary to look beyond the borders of the city on the wooden piles. Indeed, although most chapters deal with people and institutions in Venice itself, the scope of this book is not limited to the city itself, but also takes into account the broader context of the Serenissima Repubblica di Venezia. A discussion of the intellectual and cultural network in general and the catalyzing role of academies in particular, for example, necessarily has to include the Veneto as well. According to Scipione Bargagli, author of a panegyric on a ademies, these institutions not only had an important intellectual function, but an educational and political role as well.8 It is here that music, which was a vital constituent of the liberal arts, was to play a crucial role: the harmony it creates and the proportions of the intervals on which it is based became a powerful image for a well-balanced state.
In Chapter 4, Iain Fenlon traces the activities of three academies in the Venetian mainland. The city of Padua, famous for its university, hosted several academies such as the influential Infiammati (which had strong connections with the Sienese Accademia degli Intronati), the Costanti (which had Francesco Portinaro as maestro di musica), the Eterei, and the Elevati (to whose members Portinaro, in 1560, dedicated his fourth book of madrigals, of which some of the texts may have been written by the academicians themselves). A strong interest in the connection between music and theatre on the one hand and a close collaboration with other local institutions on the other, can be seen using the example of the Accademia Olimpica in Vincenza. Especially in 1585, when the Teatro Olimpico was inaugurated, a close connection developed between the academy and one of the most famous Venetian composers of that time, Andrea Gabrieli, who wrote music for the performance of Edipo Tiranno. A major institution where music, apart from literature and sciences, formed the backbone of the academy’s activities, is the (still extant) Accademia Filarmonica of Verona, founded in 1543. An inventory, which mentions both a considerable number of music instruments and a whole series of manuscripts and prints from established and local composers alike, testifies to the rich musical life of this academy, which was also promoted and kept up to date by well-known maestri such as Giovanni Nasco and Vincenzo Ruffo.
Above all, a number of prints dedicated to the Academy shows its reputation stretched far beyond the city boundaries. Compared to the vibrant musical practice at the Filarmonica, music was first and foremost studied on a theoretical level at the Accademia Venetiana della Fama. This Venetian academy, carefully divided into four departments, has attracted considerable attention from scholars despite its short lifespan. Music was part of the mathematical stanza and thus considered in its quadrivial origin. This is also reflected in the academy’s ambitious publication programme—called Summa librorum (1558-59)—which (though never realised) foresaw the edition of ancient and contemporary treatises.
This part of the programme clearly carries Gioseffo Zarlino’s thumbprint. Zarlino, whose monumental treatise Le istitutioni harmoniche appeared in 1558, was a member of the academy and well-known for his encyclopaedic knowledge.9 As Fenlon writes, it is especially through the transfer of the academy’s seat from the house of its founder, Federico Badoer, to the Biblioteca Marciana, built with the aim of re-modelling the Piazza San Marco as part of a large-scale renovatio urbis (see above) that its connection to the state becomes apparent. This neat amalgamation of cultural-intellectual activities and political intentions also characterizes much of public musical life in the city. It is to this complex and multilayered interweaving that Chapter 5 is devoted. At the same time, this chapter is part of a second block: after a mapping of the numerous institutions where music was made, this block, though closely related to the first, seeks to transcend the local level of institutions and investigates musicmaking both in public and private contexts. Venice, proud of its unconquered (and thus, as some writers observe, quasi virgin-like) state, is famous for its ceremonial life, that typically mixes liturgical and civic rituals.10 While such ceremonies usually took place around the Piazza di San Marco, the involvement of processions—organised according to specific hierarchical arrangements and including numerous dignitaries and institutions—meant these rituals extended towards other corners of the city. Major feasts in the annual liturgical calendar were intertwined with important events in the history of the Republic. Through the coupling of the feast days of Saint Mark with powerful images such as the foundation myth of Venice, the city was propagated as the new Rome. Other feast days also offered welcome opportunities for reminding the Venetians (as well as the city’s visitors) of important political events or for highlighting Venice’s strengths. Famous is the sposalizio del mare, i.e. the marriage of Venice and the sea, on Ascension day (or Festa della Sensa, as it is still called today). This day, celebrated with a boat procession, a wedding ceremony—with the Doge throwing a ring into the sea—, and a mass at San Nicolò del Lido symbolically cemented the city’s dominance of the Adriatic. It is easy to imagine works on a grand scale by San Marco’s composers were sung on this day.
A major event in the history of Venice undoubtedly was its victory in the battle of Lepanto in 1571. This military triumph was eternalised not only in paintings, poems, and sculptures, but also in music by composers such as Andrea Gabrieli, Giovanni Bassano, and Giovanni Croce. In short, Venice was a city that knew how to celebrate. And it also knew how to impress its guests. Fenlon discusses the famous visit of the French King Henry III in 1574, a few years after the battle of Lepanto. As one can also read in the various accounts of this visit, the city spared neither trouble nor expense to welcome the King. Sounds of all kind must have been omnipresent: the signals of trumpets and drums, the ringing of church bells, but also music that was composed specifically for this occasion. Whereas music made for and performed in institutions and public places is quite well documented, one tends easily to overlook the more private forms of music making, especially the private patronage that took place in salons and so-called ridotti. Because of their less formalised character, they are by definition much more difficult to map. But as Rodolfo Baroncini convincingly shows in Chapter 6, it is not impossible.
On the contrary, he has unearthed a vast body of archival material, which had been largely ignored by musicologists, i.e. baptismal and marriage registers. As they mention the names of godparents, these sources not only reveal a web of social relationships, but they can also help to explain why composers—both familiar and lesser-known names—chose specific dedicatees for their prints. Thanks to an innovative methodology, Baroncini is thus able to disclose an incredibly rich network of patrons from both the patriciate and the citizen class. It becomes clear that it is here, in the homes of state officials and merchants (both Venetians and foreigners), that new repertoires were promoted. Especially interesting is the presence of musicians from San Marco: in some cases, as Baroncini shows, their activities at ridotti and salons seem to have had an impact on appointments within the basilica’s musical staff. After all, the worlds of public and private patronage were not always too distant. A third block of this book is devoted to the activities of various groups of people for whom music was their daily bread.
This section maps people performing (singing as well as playing), directing, and printing music as well as those writing about music and building instruments. In Chapter 7, Francesco Passadore investigates the responsibilities and activities of chapel masters, both at San Marco and in other churches, such as Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari and Santi Giovanni e Paolo (or Zanipolo, as the Venetians say). The situation at San Marco is especially interesting, as the church—and, as we have seen above, at the same time the private chapel of the Doge—was governed by three Procurators, which once again shows the amount of political interest that was at stake here. Especially the arrival of Adrian Willaert in 1527 boosted both the size, the quality, and the renown of the chapel. Passadore traces the history of San Marco’s chapel masters from the time of Alberto francese and Pietro de Fossis to Adrian Willaert, Cipriano de Rore, and Gioseffo Zarlino to Baldassare Donato and Giovanni Croce, the latter two marking the transition to the seventeenth century. Paolo Da Col (Chapter 8) opens up a fascinating panorama of singing activities in sixteenth-century Venice, including both men and women, choruses and soloists as well as singer lutenists. He traces the paths of professional singers in churches, confraternities, convents, and ridotti, and discusses both the organisation of singers in compagnie and private singing schools. How were singers trained? What subjects did they learn? How were singers selected? Especially in the case of San Marco, sources inform us about the process from announcing a vacant position to the selection to the various tests during the audition. Da Col addresses the role of singing teachers at San Marco and other churches, but also at ospedali and in the context of private lessons. As far as San Marco is concerned, from 1580 onwards the job of instructing the clerics in the practice of polyphony was often given to future chapel masters, underlining the importance the Procurators attached to this position. Furthermore, Da Col surveys the rich vocabulary used for describing vocal qualities and timbral components.
That these were not always judged positively, goes from the various criticisms one comes across: singers could be blamed (apart from moral and financial problems) for all kinds of reasons: their bad intonation, but also their age and even their imitating animals or actors who recite comedies. Instruments too were firmly established in the Venetian soundscape, whether played indoor (in churches, confraternities or private houses) or outdoor (in processions and in the streets), for public or private occasions (weddings, banquets etc.), performed by professionals or lay people.11 Bonnie J. Blackburn and Jeffrey Kurtzman (Chapters 9 and 10) discuss the activities of both instrumentalists and instrument makers before and after 1550 respectively. Venice was indeed a hub city for manufacturing, repairing, tuning, and exporting instruments. Lute making was a specialty of Germans, who settled in Venice and for whom the Fondaco dei Tedeschi (the German trading centre, situated near the Rialto) must have been a major meeting point. Whereas their role is well documented for the second half of the Cinquecento—with the Unverdorbens, the Malers, and Tieffenbruckers as the most prominent family dynasties—Bonnie Blackburn shows there already existed a network of German lute makers in the first half of the century. Kurtzman has found evidence that people also earned their money not only by building whole lutes (both high-quality instruments and cheap lutes), but also by producing lute parts, which could then be exported to other cities and countries. Later in the century, Venice also became a centre for building archlutes and vihuelas, which were popular both in Italy and in Spain. Bowed string instruments were produced by lireri in various sizes and for various playing techniques. Whereas trumpets and trombones—played among others by the famous Pifferi dei Doge, a group of musicians with international renown, as they can also be admired on Matteo Pagan’s famous engraving of a procession in the Piazza San Marco—were usually imported from Germany, the manufacturing of wood instruments seems to have been firmly in the hands of the Bassano family, whose instruments were famous well across the borders of the city; the Accademia Filarmonica of Verona (see above) possessed many of them. In the field of keyboard instruments, Lorenzo da Pavia seems to have been almost unrivalled as a builder of organs, harpsichords, and clavichords at the beginning of the sixteenth century; later on in the century, there were a number of manufacturers of strung keyboards, whereas considerably less is known about organ builders. Venice was not only a city where music was performed—indeed, as Eleanor Selfridge-Field writes in her contribution, ‘there was no such thing as a nonmusical space in Venice’—it was also a leading centre for music printing and publishing (as it was for printing in general).
The expansion of the Venetian printing sector from the beginning to the end of sixteenth century is the subject of Sherri Bishop’s contribution (Chapter 11). It was in this city that in 1498, Ottaviano Petrucci obtained a twenty-year privilege to print polyphonic and instrumental music, which would revolutionise the market, as it meant that music was now accessible for a larger public of institutions, amateurs, and collectors.12 After Harmonice musices odhecaton A, a collection of chansons issued in 1501, many more prints were to follow. Petrucci indeed covered almost all existing genres, from chansons and frottole to motets, laude and masses (the latter mostly in volumes dedicated to a single composer) to lute intabulations. Whereas Petrucci operated with the so-called multiple-impression technique (meaning the staves, the music, and the text were each printed in a separate phase), it was the Paris-based printer Pierre Attaingnant who in the late 1520s successfully developed the single impression technique, so that music could now be printed faster and cheaper.
From the end of the 1530s onwards, two firms were to dominate the world of music printers and publishers, both in Venice and throughout Italy: Girolamo Scotto was a member of a real dynasty of printers (his predecessors had published books on classical authors, philosophy, theology, medicine, and law) and near the end of his life he even became leader of the Venetian Guild of printers and booksellers, a very prestigious and honorable accolade; Antonio Gardano seems to have had good contacts with the ‘Willaert circle’ as soon as he, a Frenchman, arrived in Venice.13 Though the repertoire of both printers overlapped to a considerable extent, research has shown their relationship should be considered not as rivals, but rather as cooperative. During the decades of Scotto’s and Gardano’s activities, a number of other printers were active in Venice, such as Francesco Rampazetto, Claudio Merulo (who, as an organist at San Marco, must have had excellent access to the work of his colleagues), and Giulio Bonagiunta, whose output was considerably smaller. The last chapter in this block on ‘musical actors’ is dedicated to the rich legacy of music theorists active in the Serenissima.
In Chapter 12, Rebecca Edwards starts with the group of contributors to the so-called Correspondence, Giovanni Spataro, Pietro Aaron, and Giovanni Del Lago (to whose activity as collectors we owe the survival of many of the letters).14 Their lively correspondence tackles a plethora of theoretical issues (often on the basis of existing compositions, some of which would otherwise be unknown), such as counterpoint, tuning, the use of consonances and dissonances, mensuration signs, puzzle canons etc. and is spiced with criticisms and attacks directed both between the protagonists and towards other colleagues—things one would not otherwise read in the published writings of these persons.
The leading theorist of the Cinquecento undoubtedly was Gioseffo Zarlino, a native of Chioggia. His encyclopaedic training finds a reflection in his monumental Istitutioni harmoniche from 1558, a synthesis of musica speculativa and musica prattica, which—though not unchallenged by other theorists—was to have an influence on music thinking for a long time. Above all, especially in the books on counterpoint and mode, the importance of music printing can be shown, as Zarlino demonstrates his theories with polyphonic exempla of which many were taken from existing printed works.15 Near the end of his life, all his writings (apart from his music treatises Le istitutioni harmoniche, Dimostrationi harmoniche, and Sopplimenti musicali including texts on the order of the Capuchin friars, on the calendar system, and on patience), were brought together in the multi-volume Tutte l’opere. Judging from his lively writing style, Lodovico Zacconi must have been a colourful figure. His two-part Prattica di musica (1592 and 1622) benefits from his years of activity and experience as a singer in various chapels. His treatise is a goldmine for vocal theory and performance practice, especially in the field of ornamentation (passaggi). Treatises and manuals on performance practice allow a link with Eleanor Selfridge-Field’s contribution (Chapter 15) on instrumental music in Cinquecento Venice, which is part of a final block on ‘Genres, Styles, and Cross-Cultural Traditions’, both religious and secular, intimately linked to the Venetian dominion.16 She distinguishes the existing genres—ricercar, canzone, toccata, and balli—in terms of their stylistic characteristics and discusses the venues, the most prominent composers, and collections of instrumental music. The level of music making can also be glimpsed from a number of manuals on the tuning and playing techniques of specific instruments. For the first half of the sixteenth century, we have Silvestro Ganassi’s works Opera intitulata Fontegara (1535) and Regola Rubertina / Lettione seconda (1542-43) on the recorder and bowed strings respectively; Girolamo Dalla Casa’s Il vero modo di diminuir con tutte le sorti di stromenti di fiato, & corda, & di voce humana (1584) teaches how to improvise passaggi on the viola da gamba. Near the end of the century, Girolamo Diruta’s Il Transilvano: Il vero modo di sonar organi e istromenti da penna (1597) offers a compendium of organ playing in the form of a dialogue. David Bryant (Chapter 13) tackles a topic about which there has been much confusion in musicological literature: double-choir music in general and cori spezzati (which can be traced in musical sources until well into the eighteenth century) in particular. Any study of this performative practice—which is not, as one often used to read (and, unfortunately, still reads in [non]specialist books), an exclusively Venetian tradition, but also existed in other cities of the Veneto—needs to take into account a whole range of factors, such as liturgical and ceremonial traditions, compositional practices, and the architectural space for which this music was composed. Through a fruitful combination of various types of sources (archival documents, rubrics in liturgical and ceremonial books, descriptions etc.), Bryant can present a very differentiated picture of this practice.
Double-choir music was performed on very solemn occasions, mostly for psalms at Vespers and sometimes at Compline, but sources reveal the practice occurs also in connection with other texts. There has equally been much confusion about the location from which this music was performed, though it now seems safe to say that the floor of the choir, the pulpitum novum lectionum, and the pulpitum magnum cantorum (to the left and right of the iconostasis respectively) were the most likely positions. Belonging to another stylistic tradition are the polychoral concerti and sa - crae symphoniae from the later sixteenth century onwards. These usually set texts for different parts of the liturgy, and the number of vocal and instrumental groups, located at various possible positions in the church, is sometimes expanded to three and even four, with the choirs rapidly alternating between each other. Whereas these practices are relatively well documented for San Marco, Bryant shows that for other churches in Venice as well we have archival and musical sources that testify to double-choir performances on festive occasions. Daniel Donnelly combines literary and musical analysis in his chapter on Venetian-language polyphony (Chapter 16).
Being at the crossroads of trading routes, Venice absorbed influences from the many merchants of various nationalities that populated the city. Or, as the German-American musicologist Alfred Einstein once put it: ‘North and South, Orient and Occident meet on the Rialto’.17 This exchange not only brought prosperity in economic terms, but also had a profound cultural impact. The mix of languages one could hear daily on the street must have been a strong source of inspiration for composers. It even led the poet, actor, and musician Antonio Molino to the creation of the lingua greghesca, which combines Greek words with the Venetian language, but also resulted in a reflection about the musical possibilities of the Venetian language itself. Donnelly untangles the web of genres with a focus on the 1560s and 1570s and tries to pinpoint what characterizes their venezianità: the comic Giustiniana, the villotta-like Canzon ‘alla venetiana’, the stylistically varied greghesca, and a number of ‘Bizzarre rime’ (set by a Ferrarese composer!) on texts by the famous poet and playwright Andrea Calmo. On a methodological level, Donnelly shows that a division of the corpus according to musical style can produce more fruitful results than text-oriented generic categories with which scholars usually operate. More particularly, such an approach cannot only reveal stylistic links between genres otherwise treated separately, but also connect the works’ characteristics with older Venetian performing traditions. A broadening of the geographical perspective is necessary when discussing the frottola.
Giovanni Zanovello (Chapter 14) sets out by discussing the ambiguous position occupied by the Veneto in the music historiography of the frottola: as scholars had considered it a genre which was associated with court culture, it was difficult to find a place for the Veneto in this picture. This stands in marked contrast to the fact that many frottola composers came from or worked in cities of the Veneto, such as Verona, Padua, Treviso, and Venice itself. Geographical criteria even seem to have determined the order of the first books in Petrucci’s series of frottole-anthologies—between 1504 and 1514, he issued no less than eleven books. Zanovello brings to light stylistic differences within the frottola repertoire: whereas many of them are largely homophonic, others show contrapuntal features, which can probably be linked to the composers’ training under Franco-Flemish teachers. In his chapter on Jewish music too, Don Harrán chose to widen the scope to other Italian cities, especially Mantua and Ferrara.
As a matter of fact, it is only in the later sixteenth century that clear traces of Jewish Renaissance composers can be found. Interestingly, most of them mainly wrote secular music. Davide Sacerdote, for example, published a book of six-voice madrigals, which apart from being dedicated to marquis Alfonso del Vasto contains several madrigals for members of the Gonzaga family and noble women. From the work of Davit Civita and Allegro Porto that survives, we only have collections with secular music. An exception is Salamone Rossi, who was a violist and composer at the court of Mantua. Rossi only published sacred works for use in the synagogue. His reluctance to do so comes from the strong opposition against art music in the synagogue among rabbis. But Leon Modena, who was a cantor at the Italian synagogue in Venice, had a different opinion. It is he who encouraged Rossi to print an edition with polyphonic music for use in the synagogue and provided it with a number of paratexts in support of this project.
Although Rossi’s initiative did not set an example, Harrán shows that a manuscript now in the Hebrew Union College, although incomplete, might have a connection with Modena’s ideas. In Venice, Modena founded an academy that must have been a vibrant centre of multi-cultural music-making. As sources testify, they performed vocal and instrumental music that attracted both Jews from various nations and non-Jewish men and women living in the city. In the last chapter, Ivano Cavallini draws attention to the rich panorama of musical life at the ‘other coastal area’. Istria and Dalmatia, which had been part of the Republic of Venice since the beginning of the fifteenth century, not only offered important economic opportunities, but were also centres of extra ordinary intellectual activity and cultural creativity.
(In order to facilitate the reader’s geographical orientation, a map of the Venetian territories—including the colonies at the Adriatic sea—can be found after this Introduction.) The influences were mutual: both the architecture and the poetry in the coastal cities show clear signs of the Venetian realm, and as Cavallini shows, even today Slovenian and Croatian dialects contain a whole range of Venetianisms. A number of well-known musicians, such as Andrea Antico, Jacques Moderne, and Francesco Sponga Usper, were able to find employment and make names abroad as publishers, printers, and/or composers. Others, such as Julije Skjavetić and Andrija Patricij published collections of madrigals and motets, with their works also appearing in collected editions printed in Venice. Furthermore, a number of manuscripts and choirbooks that are kept in Koper and Split testify to the musical life of these chapels. Cavallini also discusses the influences of the Reformation, the ways in which people tried to evangelize using the medium of print, as well as the reactions of the Catholic church and how this is reflected both in dedications to printed works and in the music itself. Especially noteworthy are the activities of two academies, a topic that complements Chapter 4 of this book: whereas members of the Accademia dei Concordi in Dubrovnik were in close contact with leading figures of Venice’s cultural and intellectual elite, the members of the Accademia Palladia in Koper, which was founded around 1567 and with which Gabriello Puliti had connections, led discussions about the harmony of the spheres, ancient Greek modes etc.
The reader will notice various spellings for some names and places. I have chosen to leave it up to the authors whether to use Venetian or standard Italian spelling. Finally, the comprehensive bibliography at the end of this book lists the most important literature on music in Cinquecento Venice. Divided into eight categories, which are partially congruent with the general structure of the book, they offer solid directions for further reading. Together with the eighteen chapters, the secondary literature listed here testifies to the ongoing, vibrant state of scholarship on Cinquecento Venice, while at the same time offering a panorama—for musicologists and non-musicologists alike—of the rich musical life during one of the Serenissima’s most productive centuries.
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