Musicologists are increasingly focusing upon less formal private "institutions" and traditions of patronage: informal acad. and soc, the activities of individuals, and convivial aristocratic co. Early 16th-cent. Florence was characterized by the practices of a series of these vital institutions. Such informal institutions had considerable virtues as agents of patronage; their less routinized practices freed them to engage in experimentation that the more formal institutions would not support. This study reconstructs the memberships, cultural activities, and musical exper. of these informal Florentine institutions and relates them to the emergence of the madrigal, the foremost musical genre of early-modern Europe. Richly illus. with visual materials and musical examples.
The Madrigal: A Research and Information Guide is the first comprehensive annotated bibliography of scholarship on virtually all aspects of madrigal composition, production, and consumption. It contains 1,237 entries for items in English, French, German, and Italian. Scholars, students, teachers, librarians, and performers now have access to this rich literature in a single volume.
"In this bold, highly original book, Mauro Calcagno ventures into areas where no other scholar has tread. He explores the Petrarchian view of the self over a century-long arc from the early madrigal to the beginnings of opera, with Monteverdi's masterpieces taking center stage. A brilliant tour de force, From Madrigal to Opera proffers a remarkable new way to look at music, performance, and reception that rings true not only for the early modern period but also for our own age. A must read for scholars, performers, and lovers of early music."—Jane A. Bernstein, author of Print Culture and Music in Sixteenth-Century Venice "The mini-renaissance of early modern music studies continues apace, and Mauro Calcagno's From Madrigal to Opera is its latest, particularly impressive installment. Drawing on methodological impulses from a variety of sources—linguistics, phenomenology, narratology, and, above all, performance studies—Calcagno pays close attention to the interplay of the abstract text and live performance in both early opera and late madrigal. Common strategies, rooted in Petrarch's poetic practice, indeed united the two genres. This book will shape the discussion of early modern vocal music in the coming years."—Karol Berger is the author of Bach's Cycle, Mozart's Arrow: An Essay on the Origins of Musical Modernity. "In this pathbreaking study, Calcagno offers a new and dynamic interpretation of the relationship between Monteverdi's madrigals and operas based on perceptions of subjectivity expressed in Renaissance literature—the poetry of Petrarch in particular. Calcagno interprets Monteverdi's work as realizing a Petrarchan notion of the dialogical self, a concept that extends well beyond the early modern period to illuminate and enrich our own experience of virtually any vocal work in performance. This book should be required reading not only for those interested in music and text of the Early Modern period, but for anyone involved in performance studies."—Ellen Rosand, author of Monteverdi's Last Operas: A Venetian Trilogy.
Manuscript Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Magliabechiana XIX, 164-167 (FlorBN Magl. 164-7) has been the subject of considerable scholarly attention. The prevailing assumption had been that it was a Florentine source of the early sixteenth century. More recently, it has been argued that its provenance is not as easily determined as it first appears, and that there are Roman connections suggested by one of its codicological features. This monograph provides as full a bibliographical and codicological report on FlorBN Magl. 164-7 as is currently possible. Such evidence suggests that the earlier thesis is more likely to be correct: the manuscript was copied in Florence c.1520. After a review of the evidence for provenance and date, the repertory of the manuscript is placed in its historical and cultural context. Florence of the early sixteenth century is shown to have an organized cultural life that was characterized by the activities of such institutions as the Sacred Academy of the Medici, the famous group that met in the garden of the Rucellai, and others. FlorBN Magl. 164-7 is an exceedingly interesting and important source; an eclectic repository not only of compositionally advanced settings of Petrarchan verse by Rucellai-group intimate Bernardo Pisano but also of sharply contrasting works, popular in character. It is almost a manifesto of the sensibilities of preeminent Florentine cultural figures of the sort who frequented the garden of the Rucellai and as such is a revealing document of Florentine musical taste during those crucial years that witnessed the emergence of the new secular genre we know as the Italian madrigal.
Henricus Isaac gehört zu jenen frankoflämischen Komponisten, die durch ihr Wirken an zentralen musikalischen Institutionen Europas die Musik um 1500 maßgeblich beeinflussten. Seine Tätigkeit u. a. für Kaiser Maximilian I. brachte ihn in Kontakt mit verschiedenen kompositorischen Traditionen, Musizierpraktikten und Repertoires, was sich auch in der Art und Stilhöhe der Kompositionen niederschlägt. Der vorliegende Band präsentiert Beiträge, die anlässlich des 500. Todesjahres Isaacs im Jahr 2017 entstanden sind und die unterschiedlichsten Bereiche von dessen Wirken berücksichtigen. Schwerpunkte bilden Untersuchungen zu seinen Wirkungsstätten, Fragen der Quellenüberlieferung und die Auseinandersetzung mit der instrumentalen Rezeption und Aufführungspraxis seiner Werke.
"Florence is justly celebrated as one of the world's most important cities. It enjoys mythic status and occupies an enviable place in the historical imagination. But its music-historical importance is less well understood than it should be. If Florence was the city of Dante, Michelangelo, and Galileo, it was also the birthplace of the madrigal, opera, and the piano. This is the only book of its kind, a comprehensive account of music in Florence from the late Middle Ages until the end of the Medici dynasty in the mid-eighteenth century. It recounts the principal developments in the history of Florence's contributions to music and how music was heard and cultivated in the city, from civic and religious institutions to private patronage and the academies. Scholars from sister disciplines and a general readership interested in the history and culture of Florence will find this book an invaluable complement to studies of the art, literature, and political thought of the late-medieval and early-modern eras and the quasi-legendary figures in the Florentine cultural pantheon"--
The emergence of music printing and publishing in the early 16th century radically changed how music was circulated, and how the musical source (printed or manuscript) was perceived, and used in performance. This series of close studies of the structure and content of 16th-century and early 17th-century editions (and some manuscripts) of music draws conclusions in a number of areas - printing techniques for music; the habits of different type-setters and scribes, and their view of performing practice; publishers' approaches to the musical market and its abilities and interests; apparent changes of plan in preparing editions; questions of authorship; evidence in editions and manuscripts for interpreting different levels of notation; ways in which scribes could influence performers' decisions, and others by which composers could exploit unusual sonorities.
Secular music of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries encompasses an extraordinarily wide range of works and practices: courtly love songs, music for civic festivities, instrumental music, entertainments provided by minstrels, the unwritten traditions of solo singing, and much else. This collection of essays addresses many of these practices, with a focus on polyphonic settings of vernacular texts, examining their historical and stylistic contexts, their transmission in written and printed sources, questions of performance, and composers? approaches to text setting. Essays have been selected to reflect the wide range of topics that have occupied scholars in recent decades, and taken together, they point to the more general significance of secular music within a broad complex of cultural practices and institutions.
The love song is timeless. From its beginnings, it has been shaped by bohemians and renegades, slaves and oppressed minorities, prostitutes, immigrants and other excluded groups. But what do we really know about the origins of these intimate expressions of the heart? And how have our changing perceptions about topics such as sexuality and gender roles changed our attitudes towards these songs? In Love Songs: The Hidden History, Ted Gioia uncovers the unexplored story of the love song for the first time. Drawing on two decades of research, Gioia presents the full range of love songs, from the fertility rites of ancient cultures to the sexualized YouTube videos of the present day. The book traces the battles over each new insurgency in the music of love--whether spurred by wandering scholars of medieval days or by four lads from Liverpool in more recent times. In these pages, Gioia reveals that the tenderest music has, in different eras, driven many of the most heated cultural conflicts, and how the humble love song has played a key role in expanding the sphere of individualism and personal autonomy in societies around the world. Gioia forefronts the conflicts, controversies, and the battles over censorship and suppression spurred by such music, revealing the outsiders and marginalized groups that have played a decisive role in shaping our songs of romance and courtship, and the ways their innovations have led to reprisals and strife. And he describes the surprising paths by which the love song has triumphed over these obstacles, and emerged as the dominant form of musical expression in modern society.
