Abstracts
Keynote Lectures
Daniele V. Filippi, Fachhochschule Nordwestschweiz (Schola Cantorum Basiliensis) -The Soundscape of Italian Catholicism, c.1600
Whereas devotion and liturgy have often been regarded by musicologists as distinct fields of enquiry, recent interdisciplinary developments encourage us rather to consider them as interactive parts of a continuum. In an even wider perspective, I will reflect in this keynote speech on how the topic of the present conference might be reframed within the larger endeavour of reconstructing the soundscape of Italian Catholicism around 1600. Such an enterprise entails working on different levels and with different cultural layers, situating the products of high culture in a wider range of artefacts, and balancing the perspective of the elites with that of larger communities. It requires a shift in attitude from compiling an abstract taxonomy of genres to mapping concrete musical practices, and from aiming at an evolutionary history of style, almost exclusively focused on progressive elements, to accounting for a sonic experience largely shaped by continuity. By surveying recent scholarship (and performance practice) and by discussing micro case studies, I will show how music and sound from this period embodied essential traits of Italian Catholicism, and how communities of Catholic listeners negotiated the not always straightforward interaction between real and virtual soundscapes.
Noel O’Regan (The University of Edinburgh) - Between Liturgy and Devotion: Roman Confraternity Oratories and their Music around 1600
Roman confraternity oratories developed during the sixteenth century as liminal spaces whose activities fell somewhere between public liturgy and private devotion. Some were simple meeting halls; others were designed as small churches but laid out in the manner of monastic choirs. They hosted a variety of activities from electing officials to chanting the divine office, from welcoming pilgrims to mounting Gospel dialogues and proto oratorios during Lent. The music heard in them ranged from chant, through falsobordone and simple laude, to polychoral settings, monody and instrumentalsinfonie. This keynote paper will survey the information we have about oratories’ musical activities (in the broadest sense), including evidence for the purchase and copying of music, the hiring of musicians and the mechanisms by which they were organised and paid for.
Papers
Jeffrey Kurtzman (Washington University in St. Louis) - Sacred Music in Italy 1580-1615: What the Published Repertoire Tells us about Trends, Use, and Change in the Performance of the Liturgy
Published sacred music probably represents far less than 10% of the music written for the liturgy in the period 1580-1615. Nevertheless, published music itself inevitably represents the character, the influences, and the expectations for liturgical music since every publisher had to guage accurately the demand for his offerings and sufficiently meet that demand to sell enough of his production to make a profit, either for himself or for his investors.
My paper, based on the complete catalogue by Anne Schnoebelen and myself of Music for the Mass, Office and Holy Week published in Italy 1516-1770, available online in JSCM Instrumenta, will trace the changes and trends in the repertoire as well as the way composers and publishers organized their prints from the beginning of this repertoire’s rapid expansion in the 1580s (especially in the hands of Gianmatteo Asola) through the remarkable stylistic developments in the first 15 years of the 17th century that diversified dramatically the character of music performed in the Church, setting the stage for the developments of the remainder of the century.
The published liturgical repertoire reveals the role of instruments in the liturgy, the development of the concertato style, the addition of the basso continuo, the role of monody and few-voiced textures, the dramatic expansion of polychorality, the declining influence of psalm tones and Magnificat tones, the continued use of pre-existing secular, as well as sacred, compositions as the basis of new liturgical music, the gradual rejection of the restraints of the Catholic reform movement and the Caeremoniale Episcoporum, and the move toward variety and splendor in response to the Church’s pastorale mission. The repertoire also reflects the vocal and instrumental forces secular churches, monasteries, chapels and confraternities were willing to employ in order to perform such music on many feasts throughout the liturgical calendar.
Marianne C.E. Gillion (Universität Salzburg) - Iuxta ritum Missalis novi, ex decreto Sacrosancti Concilii Tridentini restituti: ‘Tridentine’ Revisions to Italian Printed Graduals, 1572–1586
On 4 December 1563, during the 25th and final session of the Council of Trent, Pope Pius IV was asked to oversee the revision of several liturgical books, including the missal. A ‘restored’ Missale Romanum, the work on which was supervised by Cardinal Guglielmo Sirleto, was issued in 1570 during the reign of Pius V. The bull of promulgation required that missal’s adoption be universal, unless institutions or regions could prove the use of rite for over 200 years. The revisions made to the contents of the missal would necessitate that commensurate revisions be made to the contents of graduals, which contained the plainchant used in the celebration of the Mass. The modifications to the Calendar of the Saints in particular could require that entire propers and their music be amended, added, or removed. The first printed editions of the Graduale Romanum published in Italy after the promulgation of the revised Missale Romanum were issued by the Venetian firms of Giunta and Varisco in 1572. In these prints, the required alterations are gathered into lists that preface the volumes. In subsequent years the modifications would be integrated into into the bodies of printed graduals, where they would undergo a further process of adaptation. An examination of the incorporation of liturgical amendments in graduals issued by Liechtenstein, Giunta, and Varisco between 1572 and 1586 will provide insight into a key component of the changing experience of worship in late sixteenth century Italy.
Rosemarie Darby (The University of Manchester) - Some Early Masses and Motets by Giovanni Animuccia from the Music Library of the Chiesa Nuova, Rome
During the years around 1600 the Chiesa Nuova in Rome, the mother house of the newly-founded Congregation of the Oratory, acquired a reputation for the magnificence of its liturgical performances. The founder, Filippo Neri, recognised the value of splendid liturgical music as a tool for evangelisation and he attracted the best professional musicians in Rome. Some chose to become priests of the Oratory and others offered their services as performers or composers whilst continuing to work in other prestigious institutions. One of the earliest composers to be associated with the Oratory was Giovanni Animuccia (c.1520-1571) who, like Fillippo Neri, was from Florence. He attended Neri's Oratory gatherings from the early 1550s and continued his association with the Oratory after his appointment as maestro of the Cappella Giulia in 1555, a post which he retained until his death.
Whilst Animuccia's composition of laude for the Oratory is well documented, evidence of his liturgical music specifically linked to the Oratory has not been fully examined. The earliest surviving inventory of music held at the Chiesa Nuova dated to 1608 lists a set of partbooks titled Mottetti dell’Animuccia in 5 tomi, dedicated to Cardinal Guido Ascanio Sforza (1518-64). Four of these partbooks now survive in the collection of manuscript music from the Chiesa Nuova that is housed in the Biblioteca Nazionale in Rome.
These volumes provide the only known source of some of Animuccia's earliest works, including a number of antiphons and two Masses, as well being possibly the oldest collection of manuscript partbooks from the Chiesa Nuova. They provide a fascinating example of Florentine contribution to liturgical music in Rome during the latter part of the sixteenth century.
Emanuel Signer (Queens’ College, University of Cambridge) - “ad Honorem Sanctae Ceciliae” – The Veneration of Female Saints in Italian Mass Ordinaries around 1600
From its emergence in the late fifteenth century until well into the seventeenth century, parody (or imitation) was the most prominent technique for the composition of mass ordinary settings in Italy. Parody allowed composers to engage with earlier polyphonic repertoires such as motets and madrigals or, sometimes, cantus firmi in the musical texture, which meant that settings of mass ordinary could assume a referential character, indicating a relationship with earlier repertoires, composers, or liturgical or secular texts. This allows these mass settings to be considered as part of historiographical networks of smaller traditions within the genre, together with masses with identical or similar reference points. The mass of the sixteenth and early seventeenth century can, therefore, be perceived as a genre allowing various forms of extra-musical relationships to earlier repertoires, to people such as patrons or other composers, or to religious figures.
In this conference talk I would like to address a small, but particular repertoire in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century history of the mass ordinary in Italy: the use of devotional titles dedicating settings to saints, potentially indicating their suitability for performance on particular feast days. These devotional references to saints, such as in Spontoni’s “Missa Sanctae Catherinae” of 1588, or Nascimbeni’s “Missa Sancti Stefani” of 1612 are a fairly rare practice in printed collections. The vast majority of mass settings published in printed collections bear titles referring either to parody models (e.g. Missa Ascendit in coelum) or to their mode (e.g. Missa Secundi toni). In my paper I would like to examine what the small number of decidedly devotional masses have in common, and how they establish a relationship with the venerative reference point of a particular saint. They will be discussed in the context of the tradition of Missae de Beata Virgine, Marian masses which stylistically are mostly very different, yet which contextualise the continued popularity of Marian veneration in the post-Tridentine period.
This should allow me to attempt explanations why most of these devotional masses are dedicated to female saints, such as Mary Magdalene, Barbara, or Cecilia. The masses of Grammatio Metallo will be looked at in more detail: In six collections between 1602 and 1613 he had eleven mass settings published, of which six are dedicated to female saints, two to the Virgin Mary, and one to all virgin saints. Metallo is already unique in his practice of dedicating all of his masses to one or several saints, yet even more remarkable with his focus on female members of the Catholic canon. This makes him a suitable case study for compositional devotion in the mass ordinary of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.
Esperanza Rodríguez-García (Universidade Nova de Lisboa) - Still Another Book of Small-Scale Motets: Sebastián Raval’s Motecta (1600)
Lodovico Viadana’s Cento concerti ecclesiastici (Venice: Giacomo Vincenti, 1602), a collection of small-scale motets with basso continuo, is still considered ‘chronologically the first publication to include a basso continuo with sacred vocal music’. It has become the epitome of the advent of the Baroque in Italian sacred music.
But, as has been argued in recent times, both the basso continuo and the concertato style were used at the end of the Renaissance all over Italy. Furthermore, there are examples of books with similar scope prior to Viadana’s [such as Asprilio Pacelli’s Chorici psalmi et motecta quatour vocum. Liber primus (Rome: Niccolò Muzi, 1599), and Gabriele Fattorini’s I sacri concerti a due voci ... co'l basso generale per maggior commodità de gl'organisti (Venice: Riccardo Amadino, 1600)]. Probably because these books do not fit comfortably into the geographical boundaries and periodization of the Baroque (traditionally understood as a development of North Italian origin occurred in the seventeenth-century), they have received little attention until recently.
This paper seeks to examine another book of small-scale motets, Sebastián Raval’s Motecta selecta organo accomodata (Palermo: Giovanni Antonio de Franceschi, 1600). This almost unknown publication is one of the first solo-motet volumes with thoroughbass ever published. Although only one partbook is extant, it provides yet another piece of evidence that this avant-garde language was known even in a remote parts of Italy at least two years before Viadana’s Cento concerti was published.
Ginte Medzvieckaite (The University of Manchester) - The Sacred and the Secular in Giovanni Pellio's, Canzoni spirituali (Venice, 1578 and 1584)
Neither the exact date of birth nor much detail about the life and death of the priest and composer Giovanni Pellio are known. The article devoted to him in Oxford Music Online barely exceeds 100 words, and only a fraction of his musical output has survived. His extant works however prove to be valuable evidence regarding the existence of a devotional music culture connected to the Benedictine order. These are Pellio's three collections of spiritual madrigals. Of the first collection, the Primo libro delle canzoni spirituali a cinque voci (Venice, 1578), only the Quintus part book is extant in the Proskesche Musikbibliothek in Regensburg. The other two collections, the Primo Libro de Canzoni spirituali a sei voci (Venice, 1584) and the Secondo Libro delle Canzoni spirituali a sei voci (Venice, 1597) are extant in full and are available as digital facsimiles from the Bavarian State Library in Munich.
This paper will introduce the five-part book and the earlier of the two six-part books. Both collections are based on the same textual source, a cycle of poems called Salmi written by Bernardo Tasso, the father of Torquato Tasso. As the title says, the poems are written with reference to the Psalter. However, the texts do not closely paraphrase the psalms, but are rather newly composed poetry blending the contrite tone of the Penitential Psalms with Petrarchist vocabulary and references to the Classical authors. Pellio’s musical settings reflect the contradictions inherent in these texts by applying the standard secular composer’s word-painting toolkit to highlight the religious statements found in the poems.
Augusta Campagne (Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst Wien) - The Concept of 'Amateur' in Music for Liturgy and Devotion: Preliminary Thoughts Concerning Canzonettas and their Makers and Consumers in Rome
This paper researches the professional realities of musicians in Rome around 1600. By examining the situation of some of the makers and consumers of canzonettas, the modern concepts of 'amateur' and 'professional' will be questioned as to their usefulness.
The quantity of canzonettas printed experienced a sharp rise in last quarter of the 16th century, particularly in Rome. Simone Verovio - a scribe, composer, engraver, publisher and printer active in Rome at that time - published an enticing series of mostly spiritual 3 and 4 part canzonetta anthologies using an unprecedented technique: intaglio printing. Most of these anthologies are in choir-book layout and include intabulations for the harpsichord as well as for the lute, an exception at the time.
Because these intabulations are actually written out and printed and as they are mostly not exceedingly complicated to play, modern scholars and musicians alike have frequently interpreted the canzonettas as being aimed at amateurs. Therefore the intabulations are dismissed as models for contemporary realisations of accompaniment around 1600. By examining the makers, composers and consumers of the canzonettas, it will be shown that many of them had other occupations and sources of incoming besides music. Although the composers for example were among the most famous composers in Rome at the time, they were not always the full-time musicians that we like to associate with professionals nowadays.
In conclusion, this paper will show that intabulations can be taken seriously and that our modern concept of an amateur is not congruent with the realities of the period and of the people composing and performing these works.
Gioia Filocamo (Istituto superiore di Studi musicali “G. Briccialdi”, Terni) - The Professional Creativity of Musical Women between Courts and Devotion in the Early Modern Era
During the Cinquecento the moral disapprobation of women dealing with music became exacerbated (Castiglione’s Cortegiano did not envisage women composing): they could be professional performers only in private, inside the courts; at the end of the century, for example, we find such musical groups as the “Concerto delle dame” at Ferrara and Mantua. At the same time, the Council of Trent (1545-63) renewed the compulsory seclusion of nuns and forbade in general terms lascivious music in church; moreover, many Italian bishops strengthened the prohibitions. In the censors’ consideration longing for music was easily assimilated with longing for food, with specific and direct implications: very good health for men, and shameful sexual voracity for women connected to the inevitable distraction («Vagare col cuore fuori, mentre stanno col corpo ne’ sacri chiostri», in the words of the archbishop Gabriele Paleotti taken from his Ordine da servarsi dalle suore nel loro cantare et musica, Bologna 1580). The nuns reacted by reinterpreting many prohibitions and limitations, sometimes turning them in their favour, even to the extent of making music their most creative activity.
In my paper I investigate some of the profound reasons why polyphony was considered a scapegoat, especially in the lives of nuns: at least in some cases it seems to have been regarded as something more than just music, both for the censors and for the nuns. The production of this kind of ‘spiritual food’ often came at the cost of mental suffering for the nuns in their underground resistance. At the same time, their professional musical creativity was necessary to affirm themselves actively both inside and outside the cloisters.
Angela Fiore (University of Fribourg) - Music and Liturgy in Female Cloisters in 17th-Century Naples
In the social and religious history of Naples, monasteries and convents were centres of culture which were privileged by the nobility to accommodate young single women. Female religious institutions were promoters of devotional practices: they contributed at the development of musical and liturgical traditions of the city. In effect the use of solemnizing the major feasts with music is constantly documented by several Neapolitan archival sources: for example, a remarkable use of music is documented for the main Marian feasts such as the Immaculate Conception day and the Assumption, the liturgies of the Forty Hours Devotion and the Holy Week, the procession of the Corpus Christi. We find also the use of music for feasts of the patron saints of religious orders. The musical organization of these celebrations changed according to the economic prestige of the specific devotion, the importance of the various monasteries and of the noble families supporting them. Some of these institutions benefited from the patronage of great musical ensembles in the city, such as the Cathedral Chapel or the prestigious Royal Chapel, while others simply gathered a few singers and musicians to accompany liturgies.
Besides the use of music on the occasion of the main celebrations, it is interesting to note that some archival and musical sources attest a daily liturgical activity of the institutions, often organized by the nuns themselves. The nuns ensured the musical service to several daily celebrations, although in a more restrained and sober way.
This has resulted in a great variety of sacred music genres. The aim of this contribution is to analyse the relationships between music and liturgy in Neapolitan monastic communities, considering Tridentine rules, highlighting the differences between the use of music and musicians both in the major feasts and in liturgical routine.
Thomas Schmidt (The University of Manchester) - On the transmission of Polychoral Music in the Papal Chapel around 1600
In 1994, the first overview of polychoral music in the repertoire of the Papal Chapel was published by Noel O'Regan in the proceedings of a conference held in Heidelberg in 1989. A quarter of a century later, scholarship on this repertoire remains scant. As O'Regan pointed out back then, too engrained is our idea of the Cappella Sistina as the preservers of the Holy Grail of stile antico polyphony to allow for a serious consideration of such modern idioms as a vital part of this institution's repertoire. My paper, while unable to go far beyond O'Regan in filling this lacuna, will consider one specific aspect of this repertoire: the way it was notated. Almost universally, polychoral repertoire, whether in manuscript or print, was around 1600 recorded and transmitted in partbooks, as much for reasons of performance pragmatics (to allow for the separate positioning of the choirs) as for codicological reasons (it is simply very hard to fit eight or more voices onto a single opening in a choirbook). Uniquely, however, the polychoral pieces in the Fondo Cappella Sistina are indeed notated in choirbooks. Not only does this correspond to the compact positioning of the choir on the singers' balcony, but as a result, the physical size of the books containing this repertoire surpasses that of any others in the Fondo (or indeed virtually anywhere else). I will examine the way in which the voices are entered into these books, some implications for performance practice, and the way in which through the production of these books the Papal Chapel maintained its 'brand' of the large choirbook well into the seventeenth century even in the context of a repertoire to which it was ill-suited.
Luca Della Libera (Conservatorio di Musica Licinio Refice Frosinone) - Marian Devotion in Rome between Music, Liturgy and Art in the Seventeenth Century: The Music of Alessandro Melani for the Pauline Chapel in Santa Maria Maggiore
The Pauline Chapels in the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore represents one of the more complex and significant ecclesiastical buildings in Counter-Reformation Rome. It was conceived as relic venue and built to underline and reassert Catholic doctrine in response to the reforming zeal of Protestantism The most important painting preserved in this Chapel is the Virgin of Saint Luke. According to tradition, it has legendary origins: drafted by the apostle Luke and completed by the angels. With the bull Immensae bonitas (1615) Pope Paul V asserted his belief in the Virgin’s strength as the merciful intercessor before Christ, an advocate for Christian souls, and an essential vehicle for salvation: all of these concepts are expressed in the text of the antiphon Salve Regina. The statutes of this Chapel were approved in 1615: The “Salve” services were committed to twelve musicians: ten singers, one organist and the chapel master. They sang litanies, antiphons, and the Compline for two choirs every Saturday night, at all feasts, and on the eves of Marian feasts. The earlier “Salve” music that has been preserved is that composed by Alessandro Melani (1639-1703), appointed director of the “Salve” from 1667 until his death.
The music repertoire was written for two choirs and sung with one voice assigned to each part. The rhetorical scheme of the texts and their musical setting follows the ideological program of the bull issued by Pope Paul V. This music offers a systematic repertoire by a single composer for the most important Marian chapel of the Roman Counter-Reformation. The aim of this paper is to underline the connections between Melani’s music and that religious and cultural context. I am convinced that this perspective of study, based on the intersection between visual art, architecture, liturgy, and music, represents an important way for achieve a broader knowledge of this complex cultural and religious message in Counter-Reformation Rome.
Daniele V. Filippi, Fachhochschule Nordwestschweiz (Schola Cantorum Basiliensis) -The Soundscape of Italian Catholicism, c.1600
Whereas devotion and liturgy have often been regarded by musicologists as distinct fields of enquiry, recent interdisciplinary developments encourage us rather to consider them as interactive parts of a continuum. In an even wider perspective, I will reflect in this keynote speech on how the topic of the present conference might be reframed within the larger endeavour of reconstructing the soundscape of Italian Catholicism around 1600. Such an enterprise entails working on different levels and with different cultural layers, situating the products of high culture in a wider range of artefacts, and balancing the perspective of the elites with that of larger communities. It requires a shift in attitude from compiling an abstract taxonomy of genres to mapping concrete musical practices, and from aiming at an evolutionary history of style, almost exclusively focused on progressive elements, to accounting for a sonic experience largely shaped by continuity. By surveying recent scholarship (and performance practice) and by discussing micro case studies, I will show how music and sound from this period embodied essential traits of Italian Catholicism, and how communities of Catholic listeners negotiated the not always straightforward interaction between real and virtual soundscapes.
Noel O’Regan (The University of Edinburgh) - Between Liturgy and Devotion: Roman Confraternity Oratories and their Music around 1600
Roman confraternity oratories developed during the sixteenth century as liminal spaces whose activities fell somewhere between public liturgy and private devotion. Some were simple meeting halls; others were designed as small churches but laid out in the manner of monastic choirs. They hosted a variety of activities from electing officials to chanting the divine office, from welcoming pilgrims to mounting Gospel dialogues and proto oratorios during Lent. The music heard in them ranged from chant, through falsobordone and simple laude, to polychoral settings, monody and instrumentalsinfonie. This keynote paper will survey the information we have about oratories’ musical activities (in the broadest sense), including evidence for the purchase and copying of music, the hiring of musicians and the mechanisms by which they were organised and paid for.
Papers
Jeffrey Kurtzman (Washington University in St. Louis) - Sacred Music in Italy 1580-1615: What the Published Repertoire Tells us about Trends, Use, and Change in the Performance of the Liturgy
Published sacred music probably represents far less than 10% of the music written for the liturgy in the period 1580-1615. Nevertheless, published music itself inevitably represents the character, the influences, and the expectations for liturgical music since every publisher had to guage accurately the demand for his offerings and sufficiently meet that demand to sell enough of his production to make a profit, either for himself or for his investors.
My paper, based on the complete catalogue by Anne Schnoebelen and myself of Music for the Mass, Office and Holy Week published in Italy 1516-1770, available online in JSCM Instrumenta, will trace the changes and trends in the repertoire as well as the way composers and publishers organized their prints from the beginning of this repertoire’s rapid expansion in the 1580s (especially in the hands of Gianmatteo Asola) through the remarkable stylistic developments in the first 15 years of the 17th century that diversified dramatically the character of music performed in the Church, setting the stage for the developments of the remainder of the century.
The published liturgical repertoire reveals the role of instruments in the liturgy, the development of the concertato style, the addition of the basso continuo, the role of monody and few-voiced textures, the dramatic expansion of polychorality, the declining influence of psalm tones and Magnificat tones, the continued use of pre-existing secular, as well as sacred, compositions as the basis of new liturgical music, the gradual rejection of the restraints of the Catholic reform movement and the Caeremoniale Episcoporum, and the move toward variety and splendor in response to the Church’s pastorale mission. The repertoire also reflects the vocal and instrumental forces secular churches, monasteries, chapels and confraternities were willing to employ in order to perform such music on many feasts throughout the liturgical calendar.
Marianne C.E. Gillion (Universität Salzburg) - Iuxta ritum Missalis novi, ex decreto Sacrosancti Concilii Tridentini restituti: ‘Tridentine’ Revisions to Italian Printed Graduals, 1572–1586
On 4 December 1563, during the 25th and final session of the Council of Trent, Pope Pius IV was asked to oversee the revision of several liturgical books, including the missal. A ‘restored’ Missale Romanum, the work on which was supervised by Cardinal Guglielmo Sirleto, was issued in 1570 during the reign of Pius V. The bull of promulgation required that missal’s adoption be universal, unless institutions or regions could prove the use of rite for over 200 years. The revisions made to the contents of the missal would necessitate that commensurate revisions be made to the contents of graduals, which contained the plainchant used in the celebration of the Mass. The modifications to the Calendar of the Saints in particular could require that entire propers and their music be amended, added, or removed. The first printed editions of the Graduale Romanum published in Italy after the promulgation of the revised Missale Romanum were issued by the Venetian firms of Giunta and Varisco in 1572. In these prints, the required alterations are gathered into lists that preface the volumes. In subsequent years the modifications would be integrated into into the bodies of printed graduals, where they would undergo a further process of adaptation. An examination of the incorporation of liturgical amendments in graduals issued by Liechtenstein, Giunta, and Varisco between 1572 and 1586 will provide insight into a key component of the changing experience of worship in late sixteenth century Italy.
Rosemarie Darby (The University of Manchester) - Some Early Masses and Motets by Giovanni Animuccia from the Music Library of the Chiesa Nuova, Rome
During the years around 1600 the Chiesa Nuova in Rome, the mother house of the newly-founded Congregation of the Oratory, acquired a reputation for the magnificence of its liturgical performances. The founder, Filippo Neri, recognised the value of splendid liturgical music as a tool for evangelisation and he attracted the best professional musicians in Rome. Some chose to become priests of the Oratory and others offered their services as performers or composers whilst continuing to work in other prestigious institutions. One of the earliest composers to be associated with the Oratory was Giovanni Animuccia (c.1520-1571) who, like Fillippo Neri, was from Florence. He attended Neri's Oratory gatherings from the early 1550s and continued his association with the Oratory after his appointment as maestro of the Cappella Giulia in 1555, a post which he retained until his death.
Whilst Animuccia's composition of laude for the Oratory is well documented, evidence of his liturgical music specifically linked to the Oratory has not been fully examined. The earliest surviving inventory of music held at the Chiesa Nuova dated to 1608 lists a set of partbooks titled Mottetti dell’Animuccia in 5 tomi, dedicated to Cardinal Guido Ascanio Sforza (1518-64). Four of these partbooks now survive in the collection of manuscript music from the Chiesa Nuova that is housed in the Biblioteca Nazionale in Rome.
These volumes provide the only known source of some of Animuccia's earliest works, including a number of antiphons and two Masses, as well being possibly the oldest collection of manuscript partbooks from the Chiesa Nuova. They provide a fascinating example of Florentine contribution to liturgical music in Rome during the latter part of the sixteenth century.
Emanuel Signer (Queens’ College, University of Cambridge) - “ad Honorem Sanctae Ceciliae” – The Veneration of Female Saints in Italian Mass Ordinaries around 1600
From its emergence in the late fifteenth century until well into the seventeenth century, parody (or imitation) was the most prominent technique for the composition of mass ordinary settings in Italy. Parody allowed composers to engage with earlier polyphonic repertoires such as motets and madrigals or, sometimes, cantus firmi in the musical texture, which meant that settings of mass ordinary could assume a referential character, indicating a relationship with earlier repertoires, composers, or liturgical or secular texts. This allows these mass settings to be considered as part of historiographical networks of smaller traditions within the genre, together with masses with identical or similar reference points. The mass of the sixteenth and early seventeenth century can, therefore, be perceived as a genre allowing various forms of extra-musical relationships to earlier repertoires, to people such as patrons or other composers, or to religious figures.
In this conference talk I would like to address a small, but particular repertoire in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century history of the mass ordinary in Italy: the use of devotional titles dedicating settings to saints, potentially indicating their suitability for performance on particular feast days. These devotional references to saints, such as in Spontoni’s “Missa Sanctae Catherinae” of 1588, or Nascimbeni’s “Missa Sancti Stefani” of 1612 are a fairly rare practice in printed collections. The vast majority of mass settings published in printed collections bear titles referring either to parody models (e.g. Missa Ascendit in coelum) or to their mode (e.g. Missa Secundi toni). In my paper I would like to examine what the small number of decidedly devotional masses have in common, and how they establish a relationship with the venerative reference point of a particular saint. They will be discussed in the context of the tradition of Missae de Beata Virgine, Marian masses which stylistically are mostly very different, yet which contextualise the continued popularity of Marian veneration in the post-Tridentine period.
This should allow me to attempt explanations why most of these devotional masses are dedicated to female saints, such as Mary Magdalene, Barbara, or Cecilia. The masses of Grammatio Metallo will be looked at in more detail: In six collections between 1602 and 1613 he had eleven mass settings published, of which six are dedicated to female saints, two to the Virgin Mary, and one to all virgin saints. Metallo is already unique in his practice of dedicating all of his masses to one or several saints, yet even more remarkable with his focus on female members of the Catholic canon. This makes him a suitable case study for compositional devotion in the mass ordinary of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.
Esperanza Rodríguez-García (Universidade Nova de Lisboa) - Still Another Book of Small-Scale Motets: Sebastián Raval’s Motecta (1600)
Lodovico Viadana’s Cento concerti ecclesiastici (Venice: Giacomo Vincenti, 1602), a collection of small-scale motets with basso continuo, is still considered ‘chronologically the first publication to include a basso continuo with sacred vocal music’. It has become the epitome of the advent of the Baroque in Italian sacred music.
But, as has been argued in recent times, both the basso continuo and the concertato style were used at the end of the Renaissance all over Italy. Furthermore, there are examples of books with similar scope prior to Viadana’s [such as Asprilio Pacelli’s Chorici psalmi et motecta quatour vocum. Liber primus (Rome: Niccolò Muzi, 1599), and Gabriele Fattorini’s I sacri concerti a due voci ... co'l basso generale per maggior commodità de gl'organisti (Venice: Riccardo Amadino, 1600)]. Probably because these books do not fit comfortably into the geographical boundaries and periodization of the Baroque (traditionally understood as a development of North Italian origin occurred in the seventeenth-century), they have received little attention until recently.
This paper seeks to examine another book of small-scale motets, Sebastián Raval’s Motecta selecta organo accomodata (Palermo: Giovanni Antonio de Franceschi, 1600). This almost unknown publication is one of the first solo-motet volumes with thoroughbass ever published. Although only one partbook is extant, it provides yet another piece of evidence that this avant-garde language was known even in a remote parts of Italy at least two years before Viadana’s Cento concerti was published.
Ginte Medzvieckaite (The University of Manchester) - The Sacred and the Secular in Giovanni Pellio's, Canzoni spirituali (Venice, 1578 and 1584)
Neither the exact date of birth nor much detail about the life and death of the priest and composer Giovanni Pellio are known. The article devoted to him in Oxford Music Online barely exceeds 100 words, and only a fraction of his musical output has survived. His extant works however prove to be valuable evidence regarding the existence of a devotional music culture connected to the Benedictine order. These are Pellio's three collections of spiritual madrigals. Of the first collection, the Primo libro delle canzoni spirituali a cinque voci (Venice, 1578), only the Quintus part book is extant in the Proskesche Musikbibliothek in Regensburg. The other two collections, the Primo Libro de Canzoni spirituali a sei voci (Venice, 1584) and the Secondo Libro delle Canzoni spirituali a sei voci (Venice, 1597) are extant in full and are available as digital facsimiles from the Bavarian State Library in Munich.
This paper will introduce the five-part book and the earlier of the two six-part books. Both collections are based on the same textual source, a cycle of poems called Salmi written by Bernardo Tasso, the father of Torquato Tasso. As the title says, the poems are written with reference to the Psalter. However, the texts do not closely paraphrase the psalms, but are rather newly composed poetry blending the contrite tone of the Penitential Psalms with Petrarchist vocabulary and references to the Classical authors. Pellio’s musical settings reflect the contradictions inherent in these texts by applying the standard secular composer’s word-painting toolkit to highlight the religious statements found in the poems.
Augusta Campagne (Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst Wien) - The Concept of 'Amateur' in Music for Liturgy and Devotion: Preliminary Thoughts Concerning Canzonettas and their Makers and Consumers in Rome
This paper researches the professional realities of musicians in Rome around 1600. By examining the situation of some of the makers and consumers of canzonettas, the modern concepts of 'amateur' and 'professional' will be questioned as to their usefulness.
The quantity of canzonettas printed experienced a sharp rise in last quarter of the 16th century, particularly in Rome. Simone Verovio - a scribe, composer, engraver, publisher and printer active in Rome at that time - published an enticing series of mostly spiritual 3 and 4 part canzonetta anthologies using an unprecedented technique: intaglio printing. Most of these anthologies are in choir-book layout and include intabulations for the harpsichord as well as for the lute, an exception at the time.
Because these intabulations are actually written out and printed and as they are mostly not exceedingly complicated to play, modern scholars and musicians alike have frequently interpreted the canzonettas as being aimed at amateurs. Therefore the intabulations are dismissed as models for contemporary realisations of accompaniment around 1600. By examining the makers, composers and consumers of the canzonettas, it will be shown that many of them had other occupations and sources of incoming besides music. Although the composers for example were among the most famous composers in Rome at the time, they were not always the full-time musicians that we like to associate with professionals nowadays.
In conclusion, this paper will show that intabulations can be taken seriously and that our modern concept of an amateur is not congruent with the realities of the period and of the people composing and performing these works.
Gioia Filocamo (Istituto superiore di Studi musicali “G. Briccialdi”, Terni) - The Professional Creativity of Musical Women between Courts and Devotion in the Early Modern Era
During the Cinquecento the moral disapprobation of women dealing with music became exacerbated (Castiglione’s Cortegiano did not envisage women composing): they could be professional performers only in private, inside the courts; at the end of the century, for example, we find such musical groups as the “Concerto delle dame” at Ferrara and Mantua. At the same time, the Council of Trent (1545-63) renewed the compulsory seclusion of nuns and forbade in general terms lascivious music in church; moreover, many Italian bishops strengthened the prohibitions. In the censors’ consideration longing for music was easily assimilated with longing for food, with specific and direct implications: very good health for men, and shameful sexual voracity for women connected to the inevitable distraction («Vagare col cuore fuori, mentre stanno col corpo ne’ sacri chiostri», in the words of the archbishop Gabriele Paleotti taken from his Ordine da servarsi dalle suore nel loro cantare et musica, Bologna 1580). The nuns reacted by reinterpreting many prohibitions and limitations, sometimes turning them in their favour, even to the extent of making music their most creative activity.
In my paper I investigate some of the profound reasons why polyphony was considered a scapegoat, especially in the lives of nuns: at least in some cases it seems to have been regarded as something more than just music, both for the censors and for the nuns. The production of this kind of ‘spiritual food’ often came at the cost of mental suffering for the nuns in their underground resistance. At the same time, their professional musical creativity was necessary to affirm themselves actively both inside and outside the cloisters.
Angela Fiore (University of Fribourg) - Music and Liturgy in Female Cloisters in 17th-Century Naples
In the social and religious history of Naples, monasteries and convents were centres of culture which were privileged by the nobility to accommodate young single women. Female religious institutions were promoters of devotional practices: they contributed at the development of musical and liturgical traditions of the city. In effect the use of solemnizing the major feasts with music is constantly documented by several Neapolitan archival sources: for example, a remarkable use of music is documented for the main Marian feasts such as the Immaculate Conception day and the Assumption, the liturgies of the Forty Hours Devotion and the Holy Week, the procession of the Corpus Christi. We find also the use of music for feasts of the patron saints of religious orders. The musical organization of these celebrations changed according to the economic prestige of the specific devotion, the importance of the various monasteries and of the noble families supporting them. Some of these institutions benefited from the patronage of great musical ensembles in the city, such as the Cathedral Chapel or the prestigious Royal Chapel, while others simply gathered a few singers and musicians to accompany liturgies.
Besides the use of music on the occasion of the main celebrations, it is interesting to note that some archival and musical sources attest a daily liturgical activity of the institutions, often organized by the nuns themselves. The nuns ensured the musical service to several daily celebrations, although in a more restrained and sober way.
This has resulted in a great variety of sacred music genres. The aim of this contribution is to analyse the relationships between music and liturgy in Neapolitan monastic communities, considering Tridentine rules, highlighting the differences between the use of music and musicians both in the major feasts and in liturgical routine.
Thomas Schmidt (The University of Manchester) - On the transmission of Polychoral Music in the Papal Chapel around 1600
In 1994, the first overview of polychoral music in the repertoire of the Papal Chapel was published by Noel O'Regan in the proceedings of a conference held in Heidelberg in 1989. A quarter of a century later, scholarship on this repertoire remains scant. As O'Regan pointed out back then, too engrained is our idea of the Cappella Sistina as the preservers of the Holy Grail of stile antico polyphony to allow for a serious consideration of such modern idioms as a vital part of this institution's repertoire. My paper, while unable to go far beyond O'Regan in filling this lacuna, will consider one specific aspect of this repertoire: the way it was notated. Almost universally, polychoral repertoire, whether in manuscript or print, was around 1600 recorded and transmitted in partbooks, as much for reasons of performance pragmatics (to allow for the separate positioning of the choirs) as for codicological reasons (it is simply very hard to fit eight or more voices onto a single opening in a choirbook). Uniquely, however, the polychoral pieces in the Fondo Cappella Sistina are indeed notated in choirbooks. Not only does this correspond to the compact positioning of the choir on the singers' balcony, but as a result, the physical size of the books containing this repertoire surpasses that of any others in the Fondo (or indeed virtually anywhere else). I will examine the way in which the voices are entered into these books, some implications for performance practice, and the way in which through the production of these books the Papal Chapel maintained its 'brand' of the large choirbook well into the seventeenth century even in the context of a repertoire to which it was ill-suited.
Luca Della Libera (Conservatorio di Musica Licinio Refice Frosinone) - Marian Devotion in Rome between Music, Liturgy and Art in the Seventeenth Century: The Music of Alessandro Melani for the Pauline Chapel in Santa Maria Maggiore
The Pauline Chapels in the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore represents one of the more complex and significant ecclesiastical buildings in Counter-Reformation Rome. It was conceived as relic venue and built to underline and reassert Catholic doctrine in response to the reforming zeal of Protestantism The most important painting preserved in this Chapel is the Virgin of Saint Luke. According to tradition, it has legendary origins: drafted by the apostle Luke and completed by the angels. With the bull Immensae bonitas (1615) Pope Paul V asserted his belief in the Virgin’s strength as the merciful intercessor before Christ, an advocate for Christian souls, and an essential vehicle for salvation: all of these concepts are expressed in the text of the antiphon Salve Regina. The statutes of this Chapel were approved in 1615: The “Salve” services were committed to twelve musicians: ten singers, one organist and the chapel master. They sang litanies, antiphons, and the Compline for two choirs every Saturday night, at all feasts, and on the eves of Marian feasts. The earlier “Salve” music that has been preserved is that composed by Alessandro Melani (1639-1703), appointed director of the “Salve” from 1667 until his death.
The music repertoire was written for two choirs and sung with one voice assigned to each part. The rhetorical scheme of the texts and their musical setting follows the ideological program of the bull issued by Pope Paul V. This music offers a systematic repertoire by a single composer for the most important Marian chapel of the Roman Counter-Reformation. The aim of this paper is to underline the connections between Melani’s music and that religious and cultural context. I am convinced that this perspective of study, based on the intersection between visual art, architecture, liturgy, and music, represents an important way for achieve a broader knowledge of this complex cultural and religious message in Counter-Reformation Rome.