ANTIQUAE MUSICAE LIBRI 2 Bessarion and music Concepts, theoretical sources and styles Bessarione e la musica. Concezione, fonti teoriche e stili Proceedings of the international meeting Venice, 10-11 november 2018 ANTIQUAE MUSICAE LIBRI 2 Bessarion and music Concepts, theoretical sources and styles Bessarione e la musica Concezione, fonti teoriche e stili ANTIQUAE MUSICAE LIBRI Comitato editoriale Bessarion and music Marco Gozzi, direttore Giacomo Baroffio Concepts, theoretical sources and styles Giulia Gabrielli David Hiley Silvia Tessari Bessarione e la musica Concezione, fonti teoriche e stili Proceedings of the international meeting Venice, Italy, 10-11 november 2018 edited by Silvia Tessari Edizioni Fondazione Levi Venezia 2021 FONDAZIONE UGO E OLGA LEVI Bessarion and music PER GLI STUDI MUSICALI ONLUS Concepts, theoretical sources and styles Consiglio di Amministrazione Redazione e coordinamento editoriale VII Foreword Davide Croff Presidente Silvia Tessari, Claudia Canella Davide Croff Luigi Brugnaro Paolo Costa Traduzioni XI Preface Fortunato Ortombina Silvia Tessari Matilda Colarossi Giovanni Giol Nicola Greco Vicepresidente 3 Born from a Series of Misunderstandings. The Reports about Music Giancarlo Tomasin Progetto grafico e impaginazione at the Council of Florence and the Documents of Cardinal Bessarion’s Musical Thought Karin Pulejo Daniel Glowotz Revisori dei Conti Raffaello Martelli Presidente 35 Bessarion and his Musical Culture as Reflected Chiara Boldrin In copertina in his Byzantine Musical Manuscripts now in Venice Maurizio Messina lettera incipitaria, ms. GR-AOk 448, f. 77r, autografo di Benediktos Episkopopoulos Silvia Tessari Comitato scientifico Roberto Calabretto Presidente 43 The Art of Chanting Reflected in Fifteenth/Sixteenth Centuries Byzantine Sandro Cappelletto Theoretical Treatises Dinko Fabris Il convegno è stato realizzato Gerda Wolfram Laurent Feneyrou con il contributo del Cormac Newark 51 Ioannes Plousiadenos, Bessarion and Byzantine music. Paolo Troncon Tracing Aspects of Byzantine Chant Traditions in the Later Part of Fifteenth Century Marco Tutino along the Axis Constantinople – Crete – Venice Paula Varanda Christian Troelsgård Vasco Zara 75 Byzantine ‘Polyphony’ in Bessarion’s Time Direttore e direttore della Biblioteca Nina-Maria Wanek Giorgio Busetto 111 Byzantine Chant in the Sicilian-Albanian Colonies since the Time of Bessarion Staff Giuseppe Sanfratello Ilaria Campanella Claudia Canella 125 St Kassia through the Eyes of Byzantine Composers of the Kalophonic Era Alessandro Marinello Maria Alexandru Fabio Naccari Anna Rosa Scarpa 157 Bibliography Collaboratori 177 Index of names Margherita Olivieri © 2021 by FONDAZIONE LEVI Camilla Zennaro S. Marco 2893, Venezia 179 Program of the meeting Tutti i diritti riservati per tutti i paesi Archivio Giovanni Morelli Paola Cossu edizione on-line Laura Desideri https://www.fondazionelevi.it/editoria/bessarion- Francesco Verona and-music-concepts-theoretical-sources-and-styles Valeria Zane Angelina Zhivova ISBN 978 88 7552 074 8 Davide Croff Presentation Investigating Bessarion and his context thanks to the perspective offered by musicological research is a renewed act of homage to the great Greek religious, and it is the individualization of a new perspective fire that represents an interesting methodological contribution to the historiography of the Greek- Latin fifteenth century. The volume we are presenting here was born from the collective initiative of different Venetian Institutes to honour the 550 years since the donation made to San Marco of the library of the cardinal and Nicaean patriarch Bessarion, an extraordinary man to whom Venice owes one of its glories. TheIntroduction by the editor, Silvia Tessari, gives an immediate account of the organizational structure and of the execution of the programme, which owes so much to Luisa Zanoncelli, the past President of the Scientific Committee of the Fondazione Levi. The event will not be an isolated one because it is the will of the Foundation, as well as the many scholars connected to it, to continue into the future by constituting themselves as an International Research Group ― which is, moreover, in continuity with a series of activities that the Levi Foundation has been cultivating through time, so much so that in listing them we recognise a precise fil rouge that leads back to the mythical air of the first centuries of the history of Venice, but also to the continuity of the Venetian Republic’s relationship with the East until the end of the eighteenth century. Let us, in fact, remember the works organised by Giulio Cattin since the beginning of the 1990s, works which were delivered at the conference La musica nella storia e nella civiltà bizantina (Music in the history and culture of the Byzantine civilization, 1993): the occasion was such that it included the presence of Lycourgos Angelopoulos and his Greek Byzantine Choir, which performed a memorable concert in the church of San Giorgio dei Greci, in collaboration with the Hellenic Institute for Byzantine and Post-Byzantine Studies in Venice. The subsequent publication of the proceedings of that meeting ― Da Bisanzio a San Marco. Musica e Liturgia, edited by Giulio Cattin [1997] ― clarifies that the different research conducted on the music and the liturgies of the ducal chapel of San Marco (an area of study in which Cattin towered, with the large support of the Levi Foundation) VII BESSARION AND MUSIC. CONCEPTS, THEORETICAL SOURCES AND STYLES CROFF – PRESENTATION and on same themes in the Byzantine area, lead more to disagreements than phenomena leading back to this extraordinary figure who connected two worlds, agreements. the East and the West, with their traditions, religions, and cultures, worlds which would resist both the attempt made by the fifteenth century councils to Antonio Lovato, pupil and successor of Cattin in the scientific direction of fuse them, and the political hypothesis of a league against the Turks for the the Levi Foundation, did not fail to also deal with ― among the various other reconquest of Constantinople ― this, however, does not mean that they would initiatives taken ― musical themes linked to the councils of the fifteenth remain reciprocally impermeable. century in the conferences held in Basel and Venice: the results of the research In order to facilitate these studies and the dissemination of their results, the were then summarized in a volume of proceedings, Mondo latino e civiltà Fondazione Levi is increasingly characterizing itself as a research centre with a bizantina. Musica, arte e cultura nei codici del ’400, edited by Antonio Lovato specialized scientific publishing house and a data base with free access. and Dilva Princivalli, Padova, 2014. The papers collected represent a significant contribution to the knowledge of the circulation of Greek culture in and around the councils of Basel, Ferrara, and Florence, without neglecting the areas of Lombardy and Veneto, which reveal a widespread Greek humanism particularly manifested in the creation and circulation of manuscripts, and of the men who wrote, read, collected, and conserved those manuscripts ― and especially those who taught others to read and use them. In these proceedings, among the other authors, we find Silvia Tessari, who would continue, together with the Levi Foundation, to produce her works: on occasion of the international meeting Cantus Planus ― the organisation of which was, in the 2014 edition, managed by the Levi Foundation ― Tessari presented, together with Sandra Martani, in the Sale Sansoviniane of the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, an exhibition of Greek codices bearing musical notations: I Codici, in Cantus Planus. Notazione musicale bizantina in codici marciani. Catalogo della mostra [2014]; soon afterwards the extensive Il corpus innografico attribuito a Fozio. Edizione critica e analisi musicale [2014], would be published; then Frammenti in notazione ecfonetica dai mss. 214 E 8 della Biblioteca Antoniana di Padova, in «Musica e Figura» [2017], pp. 11-23, and the volume Bizantine Music and the Veneto region. Studies in the Manuscript Collections [2018]. The works by Tessari continue methodically along the course of scientific cataloguing and valorization of the Venetian testimony of Byzantine music; and, moreover, it is an activity that is closely connected with the mission the Foundation intended to carry out from the onset, that is to say, the catalographic census of the ancient music resources of the Veneto Region. Much has been done in this field throughout the years, and it continues to be done today with the digitalization of these catalogues, which are then made accessible to scholars. The volume which is being added now enriches the knowledge of the context of the formation of the Bessarion library, and it throws new light on the cultural VIII IX Silvia Tessari Preface Five hundred and fifty years after the donation made by the Byzantine scholar and Roman cardinal Bessarion to San Marco, the celebrations of ‘Anno Bessarioneo’ 2018 involved many Venetian institutions (Marciana Library, Universities of Padua and Venice, Hellenic Institute of Byzantine and Post-Byzantine studies, Fondazione Levi) in a positive synergy. Among the other cultural initiatives offered to Venice by the Levi Foundation, we wish to mention the conferences (3 and 26 may) on Bessarion’s Byzantine musical manuscripts and on ms. Marc. Gr. Z, 322, the Conversazioni di fronte all’opera with the exhibition of the same manuscript, the