Lodi E Canzoni Spirituali Per Cantar Insieme
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Medieval Ritual and Early Modern Music RITUS ET ARTES Traditions and Transformations Series Board Nils Holger Petersen Eyolf Østrem Mette Birkedal Bruun Danish National Research Foundation: Centre for the Study of the Cultural Heritage of Medieval Rituals University of Copenhagen Richard Utz Western Michigan University Gunilla Iversen Stockholm University Nicolas Bell British Library Volume 1 Medieval Ritual and Early Modern Music by Eyolf Østrem and Nils Holger Petersen British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data © , Brepols Publishers n.v., Turnhout, Belgium All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. isbn: 978•2•503•52295•1 A Typeset with LTEX 2" . Music examples typeset with LilyPond. Printed in the E.U. on acid•free paper. Contents Illustrations vii Introduction The Religious and Ritual Context of the Earlier Italian Lauda The Conceptual Universe of Lauda Practice Musical Style and Background of the Polyphonic Lauda ‘Medieval’ Devotion and Musical ‘Avant Garde’ The Polyphonic Lauda in the Seventeenth century The Historiography of Opera Reconsidered Outlook: Medieval Ritual Reception and Musical Novelty Appendices Longo: Lodi e canzonette () Archivio dell’Opera di S. Maria del Fiore: Arch. mus II, and Supplementing Texts Index Illustrations 1 Plangiamo from the Cortona manuscript. 22 2 Madonna santa Maria from the Cortona manuscript. 27 3 Ave Maria from Ledesma’s Modo (1573), beginning. 62 4 Recitation formulas from Longo’s lauda collection 63 5 Longo’s formulas applied to the first texts in the Compendio. 63 6 Reconstruction of the beginning of Ledesma’s dialogue set to the music of Longo’s formulas 64 7 O vergin santa from Razzi: Libro primo (1563). 91 8 Herod’ il volto mio (second part), from Razzi: Libro primo (1563). 92 9 Da che tu m’hai, Iddio (beginning), from Razzi: Libro primo (1563). 94 10 Crucifixum in carne, from Razzi: Libro primo (1563). 95 11 Poliziano: La pastorella/Razzi: Lo fraticello (Libro primo, 1563). 96 12 Deh, piangi aflitto core from Terzo libro (1577). 107 13 Dolce, felice e lieta from Terzo libro (1577). 108 14 O glorioso corpo from Il quarto libro delle laudi spirituali (1591). 111 15 Per ch’in aspri dolori from Il quarto libro delle laudi spirituali (1591). 112 16 Giesù, Giesù, Giesù from Ansaldi’s Dottrina cristiana (1585). 114 17 Record of a Christmas Day service in the draft for the final Ricordi of the Raffaello. 124 18 Record of the same service in the oYcial Ricordi. 125 19 Longo: Gioia et amore 170 20 Longo: Chi non ama te, Maria 172 21 Longo: Disposto ho di seguirti 174 22 First page of the ms 55, beginning of Fredd’ e quel cuore 176 23 Ho visto con mio danno, from Corona (1710), p. 283. 181 24 Fredd’ è quel cuore, opening. 184 25 Final cadence in Felici noi. 192 26 Maria Vergin, version from Corona (upper) and corresponding phrases from the version in ms 55. 195 27 Title page from the printed edition of Emilio de’ Cavalieri’s Rappresentatione di anima et di corpo (Rome, 1600). 208 Introduction ccrebbe la devotione’ — ‘it increased the devotion’. This is perhaps not a characterization one would expect of a lavish performance of music ‘Afor a full ensemble of singers, a viol consort, violin, an organ, and an unspecified number of other instruments, but that is nevertheless what it is. It is used about a liturgical event that took place in the Compagnia dell’ Archangelo Raffaello, a youth confraternity in Florence, in August 1626, and the description is found in the company’s own oYcial records.1 The phrase accentuates the central theme of this book: the use of music in devotional contexts in Florence and Rome in the early modern period. It hints at the importance that was ascribed to the sensuous quality of music in the institutions where devotional music was performed: the beauty of music was invested with a theologically conceived quality of ritual eYcaciousness. The material on which our account builds concerns music from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as well as contemporary statements about music and its uses. It comes partly out of our own archival studies and partly from work pre• sented by scholars during the last decades. Through the materials and interpreta• tions presented in the book, we wish to emphasize the position of early modern devotional music in the array of topics which are central to traditional music his• torical accounts, and thereby to suggest a revision and a re•interpretation of its role in the development of Western art music and the establishment of modern music aesthetics. 1 CRS 162, 23 (olim 22), fol. 138v; ‘et ci fu Musica con voce sceltissime, et armonia di Viole concertate oltre al Violino, Organo, et altri instrumenti musicali, che accrebbe la devotione.’ 2 Introduction Florence: a Historiographical Test Bed Florence has an undisputed position in music history as the birthplace of the opera, first conceived and cultivated in academies sponsored by noble amateurs, brought to the stage by singer•composers like Jacopo Peri and Giulio Caccini, and finally moved away from its intellectual origins to realize its fuller commer• cial and public potentials in the skilled hands of Claudio Monteverdi. In that third stage, Florence loses its place of pride to other cities like Venice and Naples and disappears from music history. In the introduction to his monumental study The Court Musicians in Flo• rence, Warren Kirkendale notes: Studies on musicians at the court of the grand dukes of Tuscany have long fo• cussed on single figures or on that small group generally referred to as the ‘Floren• tine Camerata’. The documents extant in the Archivio di Stato Firenze, however, present a quite diVerent picture. They remain blissfully silent on the so•called ‘Camerata’, that cliché so beloved by aestheticians and compilers of music his• tory textbooks who seem to have imagined that all significant musical activity in Florence at the end of the sixteenth century took place in a small group of experi• menting intellectuals, formally organized like an academy.2 This quite precisely sums up the practical consequences of a historiography which takes as its point of departure what happened after the events that are studied and evaluates its materials not in terms of their importance and role in their own time, but rather those of some later time; or, conversely, interprets events of an earlier time as ‘pointing forward’ to something not yet existing, as links in a historical chain which necessarily ends at the point of perspective from which the narrative has been told — in other words, a teleological historiogra• phy, in some sense of the word. In the case of Florence, the main focus of interest has been the Camerata and other more or less formally organized circles of musicians and theoreticians who gathered in the homes of noblemen like Giovanni Bardi and Jacopo Corsi. The corresponding historical narrative has been one which emphasized how out of the experimentation in these circles new musical practices evolved, which in the very last years of the sixteenth century gave rise to a new genre, the opera, which has developed from there into the music dramas performed in modern opera houses. There is nothing wrong with such a focus and such a narrative, in principle. After all, our interest in history is primarily dictated by a quest for knowledge about how the things that we know came out of things that we do not know. In 2 Warren Kirkendale, The Court Musicians in Florence During the Principate of the Medici (Florence: Olschki, 1993), p. 33. See also below, p. 210. Introduction 3 this particular case, posterity has found it most interesting to trace the begin• nings of the opera as we know it today or to follow ‘the development of classical music’ and the emancipation of instrumental music, giving rise c. 1800 to the idea of absolute music. This latter line, too, can quite meaningfully be drawn with a beginning in the early opera, or more generally in the ideas of the Floren• tine academies about how to let music represent words and poetical meaning. Here, the emphasis on the rhetorical potential of music as opposed to the former predomincance of a mathematical approach is most marked. With the transfor• mation of the sinfonia from an instrumental preparation for the spectacle to come to an independent musical piece, guided by principles that are not (or not only) shaped by the stage action, we are a long way towards a musical aesthetics sui generis. Such narratives are not only a natural choice, they are also unavoidable; writ• ing history is about selecting, shaping the chosen facts into a coherent narrative. But despite the obvious merits of isolating the most prominent features of a cer• tain period and leaving out details which seen from the point of view of some posterity were of no consequence, this also necessarily means deselecting other possible narratives, which in hindsight appear insignificant and hence remain untold, but which may have been equally rich in potential seen from the vantage point of the period itself and, possibly, a better or equally valid representation of society during the period in question. Alternative narratives like this may also enlighten the generally accepted stan• dard story. As one looks closer at a period, a milieu, or a personal biography and what is initially perceived as curious details that add colour to the received com• mon knowledge about the period, milieu, or biography, the picture grows in de• tail and wealth of interconnections.