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This second selection of studies by Frank D’Accone, again based principally on the documentary evidence, follows the development through the mid 16th century of musical chapels at the Cathedral and the Baptistery of Florence and of musical establishments at the Santissima Annunziata and San Lorenzo. The lives, careers and works of composers associated with these churches are illustrated and their works analyzed, particularly the theoretical treatise by Fra Mauro, the madrigals of Mauro Matti and the ambitiously conceived canzone cycle of Mattia Rampollini. The final studies, moving into the 17th century, look at the music for Holy Week, and the unprecedented programme of performances at Santa Maria Novella.
Up to now the theme of the artist in the service of Italian courts has been examined in various studies focused mostly on the High Renaissance, as though the phenomenon was relevant only to the XV and XVI centuries. It actually lasted much longer, spanning the whole longue durée of the lives of the courts of the ancient regime. The present volume intends to fill this gap, presenting for the first time a comprehensive examination of the subject of the court artist from sixteenth to seventeenth century and the transformations of this role. “Court artist” is here defined as one who received a regular salary, and was therefore attached to the court by a more or less exclusive service relationship. The book is divided in six chapters: each of them examines the position of the court artist in the service of the most important ruling families in Italy (the Savoy in Turin, the Gonzaga in Mantua, the Este in Modena, the Della Rovere in Pesaro and Urbino, the Medici in Florence) and in papal Rome, a particular and unique center of power.
A contemporary of Shakespeare and Monteverdi, and a colleague of Galileo and Artemisia Gentileschi at the Medici court, Francesca Caccini was a dominant musical figure there for thirty years. Dazzling listeners with the transformative power of her performances and the sparkling wit of the music she composed for more than a dozen court theatricals, Caccini is best remembered today as the first woman to have composed opera. Francesca Caccini at the Medici Court reveals for the first time how this multitalented composer established a fully professional musical career at a time when virtually no other women were able to achieve comparable success. Suzanne G. Cusick argues that Caccini’s career depended on the usefulness of her talents to the political agenda of Grand Duchess Christine de Lorraine, Tuscany’s de facto regent from 1606 to 1636. Drawing on Classical and feminist theory, Cusick shows how the music Caccini made for the Medici court sustained the culture that enabled Christine’s power, thereby also supporting the sexual and political aims of its women. In bringing Caccini’s surprising story so vividly to life, Cusick ultimately illuminates how music making functioned in early modern Italy as a significant medium for the circulation of power.
Equestrian ballets (balletti a cavallo) emerged as valued dramatic entertainments in early modern Europe, demonstrating the wealth and magnificence of the patrons who commissioned them as well as the horsemanship and military skills of the noblemen who rode in them. Author Kelley Harness undertakes the first comprehensive study of seventeenth-century Florentine horse ballets and shows how the balletto a cavallo played a crucial role in self-fashioning by the Medici family during the period. Horse ballets also provided participating noblemen a venue for demonstrating critical markers of masculine nobility and confirming their family's relationship to the Medici.
Harness argues very convincingly that through their patronage of the figurative arts, musical theater, and early opera, the Medici women reinforced their position and their image as powerful women and capable rulers.
"The fourth edition incorporates new scholarship that traces the most important developments in the evolution of musical drama. After surveying anticipations of the operatic form in the lyric theater of the Greeks, medieval dramatic music, and other forerunners, the book reveals the genre's beginnings in the seventeenth century and follows its progress to the present day."--Jacket.
Regarded by his contemporaries as the leading madrigal composer of his time, Luca Marenzio was an important figure in sixteenth-century Italian music, and also highly esteemed in England, Flanders and Poland. This English translation of Marco Bizzarini's study of the life and work of Marenzio provides valuable insights into the composer's influence and place in history, and features an extensive, up-to-date bibliography and the first published list of archival sources containing references to Marenzio. Women play a decisive role as dedicatees of Marenzio's madrigals and in influencing the way in which they were performed. Bizzarini examines in detail the influence of both female and male patrons and performers on Marenzio's music and career, including his connections with the confraternity of SS Trinit nd other institutions. Dedications were also a political tool, as the book reveals. Many of Marenzio's dedications were made at the request of his employer Cardinal d'Este who wanted to please his French allies. Bizzarini examines these extra-musical dimensions to Marenzio's work and discusses the composer's new musical directions under the more austere administration of Pope Clement VIII.
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.