Renaissance in Focus, Concert-Lecture

Renaissance and Reformation 45, no. 1, 2022

Music in the Art of Renaissance Italy addresses the prevalence of musical images in the Italian Renaissance, whether in churches, palaces, streetscapes, domestic interiors, or the pages of books and manuscripts. It is one of very few books to provide such an integrated survey of music in Italian Renaissance art, and as such, is a helpful companion for the study of music in the art of this period.

Music in the Art of Renaissance Italy 1420-1540 (London: Harvey Miller), 2020

Visual representations of music were ubiquitous in Renaissance Italy. Church interiors were enlivened by altarpieces representing biblical and heavenly musicians, placed in conjunction with the ritual song of the liturgy. The interior spaces of palaces and private houses, in which musical recreations were routine, were adorned with paintings depicting musical characters and myths of the ancient world, and with scenes of contemporary festivity in which music played a central role. Musical luminaries and dilettantes commissioned portraits symbolising their personal and social investment in musical expertise and skill. Such visual representations of music both reflected and sustained a musical culture. The strategies adopted by visual artists when depicting music in any guise betray period understandings of music shared by artists and their clients. At the same time, Renaissance Italians experienced music within a visual environment that prompted them to think about music in particular ways. This book offers the first detailed survey of the representation of music in the art of Renaissance Italy, and in the process opens up new vistas within the social and cultural history of Italian Renaissance music and art.

Vassilis Vavoulis, Brio: Journal of the UK branch of the International association of music libraries, Volume 52, Number 1, pp 38-40

In the Italian musical historiography of the nineteenth century the concept of Renaissance passed through several elaborative steps. This slow process was deeply influenced by the ideological positions connected to the developing political conditions of the country and by changing attitudes in history writing. The historians concerned with civil life, the figurative arts, and literature described the Renaissance as a typical Italian phenomenon that began in the early fourteenth century and lasted 200 years, but the historians of music were unable to detect a correspondence in music during that period, mainly because of the preeminence that Flemish music and musicians were given in Italy. This led to the recognition of the characteristics of the Renaissance in the later music of Palestrina, particularly in the Missa Papae Marcelli. That composition was thought responsible for introducing the modern tonal system, which discarded medieval counterpoint, and for stating a genuine national aesthetic principle—that of the melody, which is better realized in singing. This vision was delivered by Girolamo Alessandro Biaggi, who benefitted from Giuseppe Baini's famous study on Palestrina's life and works. This vision is exclusively concerned with sacred music, as every secular genre—the madrigal, for instance—was considered the result of the Flemish occupation. In the second half of the nineteenth century Oscar Chilesotti contributed to a more extended definition of the Italian musical Renaissance. Many of his studies are devoted to the so-called melodia popolare, which in his opinion was the spontaneous manifestation of the Italian folk emerging mainly from the practice of solo singing with the lute. The melodia popolare enabled Chilesotti to antedate the beginning of the musical Renaissance and to define it as an event pertaining the secular realm of music. In the late fifteenth century the melodia popolare merged with the Flemish compositional technique and originated the typical Italian genres of the frottola and villanella, which through the madrigal developed into seventeenth century opera. By the end of the century the more up-to-date image of the Renaissance was offered by Alfredo Untersteiner, an amateur musicologist who was conscious of the contemporary musicological literature, especially in German. His Renaissance had a first start in the Italian ars nova, a short artistic experience that deeply influenced the Flemish composers from Dufay and underwent a continuous technical refinement until Willaert, who gave up the artifices of the Flemish school and adopted the typical Italian style.

Early Musc (February, 1987), 79-82

Early Music 15/1 (February, 1987), 79-82

Collecting Music in Europe in the Second Half of the Seventeenth Century, 2023

Andrea Garavaglia and Nicola Usula, curators for the conference "Collecting Music in Europe in the Second Half of the Seventeenth Century," Faculté des Lettres, Université de Fribourg, October 20-21 2023, SNSF project "L’opera italiana oltre le Alpi: la collezione di partiture e libretti di Leopoldo I a Vienna (1640-1705)" (2021-2023, n. 100016_197560) The Department of Musicology at the University of Fribourg is pleased to present the two-day international conference "Collecting Music in Europe in the Second Half of the Seventeenth Century" on October 20 and 21, 2023. Different practices of 17th-century European music collecting are at the core of this international conference, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) as an outcome of the research project launched in 2021 in the Department of Musicology at the University of Fribourg: "L'opera italiana oltre le Alpi: la collezione di partiture e libretti di Leopoldo I a Vienna (1640-1705)." In their papers fifteen speakers address various aspects of music collecting in the seventeenth century, in Italy, France, Scandinavia and the Holy Roman Empire, focusing on this phenomenon as a symptom (and trigger) of a wide process of dissemination, exchange and hybridisation of different European musical traditions. At the link is the two-day program and booklet with abstracts.

The Museum of Renaissance Music: A History in 100 Exhibits, ed. Vincenzo Borghetti and Tim Shephard (Turnhout: Brepols, 2023), 2023

This book collates 100 exhibits with accompanying essays as an imaginary museum dedicated to the musical cultures of Renaissance Europe, at home and in its global horizons. It is a history through artefacts—materials, tools, instruments, art objects, images, texts, and spaces—and their witness to the priorities and activities of people in the past as they addressed their world through music. The result is a history by collage, revealing overlapping musical practices and meanings—not only those of the elite, but reflecting the everyday cacophony of a diverse culture and its musics. Through the lens of its exhibits, this museum surveys music’s central role in culture and lived experience in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Europe, offering interest and insights well beyond the strictly musicological field.

The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Music, 2005

For church and chamber 487 The sonata 489 Ensembles 497 The sonata da camera and the 'proper exercises of nobles' 501 The sonata da chiesa and the 'consideration of the divine' 504 Topoi, tonality and the churchly 507 Concerto and concerto grosso 513 The sonata abroad 516 The German sonata and suite 518 Purcell 522 The stylus phantasticus 524 Appendix I • Chronology 533 stephen rose Appendix II • Places and institutions 547 stephen rose Appendix III • Personalia 556 stephen rose Index 572

13-15 June 2019 Humanities Research Institute, University of Sheffield https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/music/research/conferences/music_and_visual_culture_in_renaissance_italy/index