The MS Modena, Biblioteca Estense e Universitaria, α.F.9.9 is by far the most lavish collection produced in the short-lived history of the musical frottola. In its pages, unassuming four-voice secular settings are preceded by citations from Pliny and Isidore and surrounded by dazzling illuminations of birds, fruits and plants. If splendour is never amiss in gifts, one must wonder what the relationship was between the components of this intriguing artefact. In this article I investigate the gift value of the source by examining the musical repertory and style in conjunction with its other features. I propose that musical strambotti enabled fifteenth-century educated Italians to perform symbolic gestures associated with ancient music. The repertory was also perfectly congruous with the poetic and decorative choices made for the manuscript. The examination of this peculiar source helps shed more light on the musical strambotto, its uses and its implied cultural associations.
Detailed payment records and notes preserved in the Archivio di Stato di Firenze allow us to reconstruct the relationship of music and space in the Florentine church of Santissima Annunziata. In the late fifteenth century different musical styles and repertories came to define ritually the composite space of the church, one of the main houses belonging to the mendicant order of the Servants of Mary.
This special role of music came into focus in the early 1470s and even more in the 1480s, when subsequent priors increased the musical activities, possibly to negotiate the new spatial features of the church after a consequential remodeling. Music thus helped organize key areas that had undergone architectural transformations, linking each part of the building to the specific rituals performed there through special sounds directed at the likely participants.
The remodeling also involved a shift in the balance of power, with private patrons coming to control the virtual totality of the church. Music helped address this problem as well, by acoustically marking and reclaiming certain spaces as the friars' dedicated ritual sites, but also creating in its variety a nuanced representation of the community—both ordained and lay—that frequented the building.
How did the frottola inhabit Renaissance palazzi? One almost recoils from placing this unsophisticated music within the system of austere symbols that aristocratic interiors had to convey. This apparent contradiction, however, may offer precious insights on the status of music at the turn of the sixteenth century. This chapter describes the layout and content of a Paduan frottola source, MS Modena, Biblioteca Estense, Alpha.F.9.9, and the context in which it originated. The contrast between the highly learned framework and the more vernacular content of this manuscript arguably reflects the tension between humanistic standards required of music and a secular repertory just beginning to adjust to a new role. Only later would music be able to develop the vocabulary for a fruitful dialogue with literary and artistic humanism.
People today equate art music with compositionwith music composed, learned, and performed separately. Things were different in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. In addition to composing, professionals and amateurs made music extemporaneously, using preexisting melodies or special formulas. Some of these techniques shared performing venues and artistic recognition with the hallowed songs, masses, and motets that have come down to us in written form, and they are the topic of Improvising Early Music. The small volume contains three essays that originated as part of the "International Orpheus Academy for Music and Theory," held at the Orpheus Institute in Ghent in 2009. It is, however, more than just a volume of proceedings. Musicologists have traditionally focused their work on the written repertory. This book is the most valuable introduction to the topic of musical improvisation available now. Even a lay reader can at least get a good sense of the phenomenon of improvisation and of the scholarly approaches to it, though a full understanding of the essays requires knowledge of music and a familiarity with the repertory. The book's subtitle-The History of Musical Improvisation from the Late Middle Ages to the Early Baroqueis potentially misleading. This is not a systematic history of musical improvisation, but rather a collection of three essays in which specialists discuss specific topics. In the first section, Rob C. Wegman evokes the times when counterpoint was a living practice. He situates it between two distant chronological signpoststhe 1330s, when it is first discussed in theoretical treatises, and 1600, when monody
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