Music And Culture In Late Renaissance Italy

Explores the role of music in the cultural, religious, and political upheavals of late Renaissance Italy, revealing how musical activity of all kinds was instrumentalized by those in power. Italian culture did not lose its vigour after 1530, but underwent a transformation.

This book proposes new ways of exploring vocal and instrumental music in northern and central Italy in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The text focuses on the consolidation of the 'High Renaissance' style of Josquin Desprez and his contemporaries, and the subsequent transformation of this style under the pressure of new aesthetic and functional demands made upon music, and of shifting social, political and cultural circumstances as Italy moved into the period of the Counter-Reformation, and the arts moved through Mannerism into the Baroque. The effects of these changing contexts upon such masters as Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina and Claudio Monteverdi are fully documented here, but this is less a 'great composer' book than a study of secular, sacred and theatrical styles and genres, both within the musical market-place and in relation to music's sister arts. The author also attempts to view music, and indeed all the arts, as essentially political phenomena, conditioned by (but also conditioning) social and cultural constraints. There are copious music examples and an extensive bibliography; considerable space is also devoted to extracts from contemporary documents in translation to allow the reader first-hand experience of one of the most exciting periods in music history.

The chapters in this volume explore the relationship between music and art in Italy across the long sixteenth century, considering an era when music-making was both a subject of Italian painting and a central metaphor in treatises on the arts. Beginning in the fifteenth century, transformations emerge in the depiction of music within visual arts, the conceptualization of music in ethics and poetics, and in the practice of musical harmony. This book brings together contributors from across musicology and art history to consider the trajectories of these changes and the connections between them, both in theory and in the practices of everyday life. In sixteen chapters, the contributors blend iconographic analysis with a wider range of approaches, investigate the discourse surrounding the arts, and draw on both social art history and the material turn in Renaissance studies. They address not only paintings and sculpture, but also a wide range of visual media and domestic objects, from instruments to tableware, to reveal a rich, varied, and sometimes tumultuous exchange among musical and visual arts and ideas. Enriching our understanding of the subtle intersections between visual, material, and musical arts across the long Renaissance, this book offers new insights for scholars of music, art, and cultural history. Chapter 15 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

The first detailed survey of the representation of music in the art of Renaissance Italy, opening up new vistas within the social and culture history of Italian music and art in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.

Leonora Bernardi (1559-1616), a gentlewoman of Lucca, was a highly regarded poet, dramatist and singer. She was active in the brilliant courts of Ferrara and Florence at a time when creative women enjoyed exceptional visibility in Italy. Like many such figures, she has since suffered historical neglect. Drama, Poetry and Music in Late-Renaissance Italy presents the first ever study of Bernardi’s life, and modern edition of her recently discovered literary corpus, which mostly exists in manuscript. Her writings appear in the original Italian with new English translations, scholarly notes, critical essays and contributions by Eric Nicholson, Eugenio Refini and Davide Daolmi. Based on new archival research, the substantial opening section reconstructs Bernardi’s unusually colourful life. Bernardi’s works reveal her connections with some of the most pioneering poets, dramatists and musicians of the day, including her mentor Angelo Grillo and the first opera librettist Ottavio Rinuccini. The second major section presents her pastoral tragicomedy Clorilli, one of the earliest secular dramatic works by a woman. It was apparently performed in the early 1590s at a Medici villa near Florence, before Grandduke Ferdinando I de’ Medici, and his consort Christine of Lorraine, but now exists in an enigmatic Venetian manuscript. The third section presents Bernardi’s secular and religious verse, which engaged with new trends in lyric and poetry for music, and was set by various key composers across Italy.

Based on extensive documentary and archival research, Music in Renaissance Ferrara is a documentary history of music for one of the most important city-states of the Italian Renaissance. Lockwood shows how patrons and musicians created a musical center over the course of the fifteenth-century, tracing the growth of music and musical life in rich detail. It also sheds new light on the careers of such important composers as Dufay, Martini, Obrecht, and Josquin Desprez. This paperback edition features a new preface that re-introduces the book and reflects on its contribution to our modern knowledge of music in the culture of the Italian Renaissance.

In this illustrated study, Iain Fenlon examines the impact of the spread of printing on the publication of music in early sixteenth-century Italy, the place where the first collections of polyphonic music were printed and where the market for those books was originally created. Music, Print and Culture in Early Sixteenth-Century Italy is the published record of the tenth series of Panizzi Lectures, delivered at The British Library by Dr Iain Fenlon in autumn 1994.