Musica Franca

Twenty-four essays attest to D'Accone's wide interests and influence on several generations of musicologists. The first three sections-- on the Florentine Renaissance, archival studies, and madrigal and carnival song--deal with subjects central to his research. Subsequent contributions deal with various aspects of Italian opera, performance practice, manuscript studies, and music and image. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Between 1941 and 1963, Aaron Copland made four government-sponsored tours of Latin America that drew extensive attention at home and abroad. Interviews with eyewitnesses, previously untapped Latin American press accounts, and Copland’s diaries inform Carol A. Hess’s in-depth examination of the composer’s approach to cultural diplomacy. As Hess shows, Copland’s tours facilitated an exchange of music and ideas with Latin American composers while capturing the tenor of United States diplomatic efforts at various points in history. In Latin America, Copland’s introduced works by U.S. composers (including himself) through lectures, radio broadcasts, live performance, and conversations. Back at home, he used his celebrity to draw attention to regional composers he admired. Hess’s focus on Latin America’s reception of Copland provides a variety of outside perspectives on the composer and his mission. She also teases out the broader meanings behind reviews of Copland and examines his critics in the context of their backgrounds, training, aesthetics, and politics.

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.

Musical culture in Jewish communities in early modern Italy was much more diverse than researchers originally thought. An interdisciplinary reassessment, Music and Jewish Culture in Early Modern Italy evaluates the social, cultural, political, economic, and religious circumstances that shaped this community, especially in light of the need to recognize individual experiences within minority populations. Contributors draw from rich materials, topics, and approaches as they explore the inherently diverse understandings of music in daily life, the many ways that Jewish communities conceived of music, and the reception of and responses to Jewish musical culture. Highlighting the multifaceted experience of music within Jewish communities, Music and Jewish Culture in Early Modern Italy sheds new light on the place of music in complex, previously misunderstood environments.

The relationship between music and painting in the Early Modern period is the focus of this collection of essays by an international group of distinguished art historians and musicologists. Each writer takes a multidisciplinary approach as he or she explores the interface between music performance and painting, or between music and art theory. The essays reflect a variety and range of approaches and offer methodologies which might usefully be employed in future research in this field. The volume is dedicated to the memory of Franca Trinchieri Camiz, an art historian who worked extensively on topics related to art and music, and who participated in some of the conference panels from which many of these essays originate. Three of Professor Camiz's own essays are included in the final section of this volume, together with a bibliography of her writings in this field. They are preceded by two thematic groups of essays covering aspects of musical imagery in portraits, issues in iconography and theory, and the relationship between music and art in religious imagery.

"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"--

What does it mean to author a piece of music? What transforms the performance scripts written down by musicians into authored books? In this fascinating cultural history of Western musicÕs adaptation to print, Kate van Orden looks at how musical authorship first developed through the medium of printing. When music printing began in the sixteenth century, publication did not always involve the composer: printers used the names of famous composers to market books that might include little or none of their music. Publishing sacred music could be career-building for a composer, while some types of popular song proved too light to support a reputation in print, no matter how quickly they sold. Van Orden addresses the complexities that arose for music and musicians in the burgeoning cultures of print, concluding that authoring books of polyphony gained only uneven cultural traction across a century in which composers were still first and foremost performers.

New articles on du Fay and Desprez, on sacred and secular music, and reception history, form a fitting tribute to one of the field's foremost scholars. This volume celebrates the work of David Fallows, one of the most influential scholars in the field of medieval and Renaissance music. It draws together articles by scholars from around the world, focusing on key topics to which Fallows has contributed significantly: the life and works of Guillaume Du Fay and of Josquin Desprez, archival studies and biography, sacred and secular music of the late mediaeval and Renaissance period, and reception history. Studies include major archival discoveries concerning the identity of the composer Fremin Caron; a reconsideration of the authorship of works within the Josquin canon, notably Mille regretz and Absalon fili mi; a freshlook at key works from Du Fay's youth and early maturity; accounts of newly discovered sources and works; and an appraisal of David Fallows' contribution to the early music performance movement by Christopher Page, former directorof Gothic Voices. The collection also includes two newly published compositions dedicated to the honorand. Fabrice Fitch teaches at the Royal Northern College of Music; Jacobijn Kiel is an independent scholar. Contributors: Rob C. Wegman, Jane Alden, Bonnie J. Blackburn, Honey Meconi, Gianluca D'Agostino, Andrew Kirkman, Jaap van Benthem, Margaret Bent, James Haar, Alenjandro Enrique Planchart, Jesse Rodin, Lorenz Welker, Kinuho Endo, Joshua Rifkin, Thomas Schmidt-Beste, Richard Sherr, Peter Wright, Fabrice Fitch, Tess Knighton, Warwick Edwards, Adam Knight Gilbert, Markus Jans, Oliver Neighbour, Anthony Rooley, Keith Polk, John Milsom, Jeffrey J. Dean, EricJas, Peter Gülke, Iain Fenlon, Barbara Haggh, Dagmar Hoffmann-Axthelm, Leofranc Holford-Strevens, Andrea Lindmayr-Brandl, Esperanza Rodríguez-García, Eugeen Schreurs, Reinhard Strohm