Music at Parish, Monastic, and Nunnery Churches and at Confraternities*

Parish, Monastic, Nunnery Churches, and Confraternities 45

Chapter 2 Music at Parish, Monastic, and Nunnery Churches and at Confraternities*

Jonathan Glixon

A good way to understand the sacred musical world of a city like Renaissance Venice is to imagine it as a vast Minimalist composition, or perhaps a gamelan performance: building on a constant, nearly unchanging pulse are successive layers, ever less frequent but more prominent, with occasional irregularly spaced outbursts. The underlying pulse here is the daily chanting of the Catholic liturgy, marked by the ringing of bells, in the more than 150 churches spread throughout the city and its lagoon. Weekly events, primarily Sunday liturgies in the churches, but also Monday commemorative masses for the confraternities, were more elaborate, and monthly confraternity masses and processions involved even more complex music. Each church and each of the nearly 300 confraternities also observed at least one, and in many cases several once-a-year occasions, some of which could be remarkably splendid in musical terms. Superimposed on this carefully laid-out musical edifice were other, less predictable layers: frequent, musically simple funerals, and much more elaborate, though less frequent, celebrations for the election of a parish priest or abbess, for the first mass of a young priest or the entry of a novice into the cloister, or for the commemoration of a major political or ecclesiastical event. This entire picture also has a geographical dimension: while the underlying pulse of liturgical chanting was spread relatively evenly throughout the city, and certain annual religious events were celebrated widely, the sacred musical highlights of any given week, attracting both performers and audience, were likely to be spaced far apart, one day in Castello, and the next in Cannaregio or even on Murano or Torcello. On a few days each year, processions of confraternity members and civic leaders brought music to a wide swath of the city, winding through several sestieri, accompanied by singers and instrumentalists performing laude and other sacred music.

* The following abbreviations are used: I-Vasp = Venice, Archivio storico del patriarcato di Venezia; I-Vas = Venice, Archivio di Stato; I-Vmc = Venice, Biblioteca del Museo Civico Correr.

The Churches and Confraternities of Venice

In ecclesiastical terms, Venice and its lagoon were governed, in the sixteenth century, by two different bishops: from 1453, the Patriarch, with his seat at San Pietro di Castello, led the Diocese of Venice, comprising the city itself, the Lido, and the islands of the southern lagoon; the Bishop of Torcello controlled the northern lagoon, including Murano, Burano, and other islands, with the cathedral of Santa Maria Assunta on Torcello, and the Bishop’s palace, by the sixteenth century, on Murano.1 During the Renaissance (and until consolidation in the early nineteenth century after the fall of the Republic) the Diocese of Venice was divided into seventy parishes, and that of Torcello into eight. Most of the seventy Venetian parish churches were collegiate; that is, they were led by a chapter consisting of the piovano, or parish priest, two to four titled priests (preti titolati), and two to four titled deacons and subdeacons. The religious family of each collegiate parish also included several clerics, boys in training for the priesthood, and a large number, often twenty, or as many as forty, of priests known as giovani or alunni, who had started as clerics and remained affiliated with the church. The members of the chapter, responsible, among other things, for leading, in rota- tion, the liturgical chanting, were supported by the property income of the parish and fees for weddings, funerals, and the like. With the assistance of a Procurator, usually a lay lawyer, they also managed the fabrica, the physical property of the parish, including their residences and the church itself, with the organ and bells. The other priests, the alunni, received small payments for their required service in the choir, and also served as mansionari, saying masses endowed by parishioners and others. The piovano was elected, usually from among the titled priests, by the property holders of the parish. The chapter selected its own members from the alunni, and voted on promotions within its ranks. Five of the thirteen non-collegiate parishes were affiliated with nunneries, who appointed the priest and supplied funds: at Santa Croce, Santa Giustina, and Santa Lucia the parish and nunnery shared the same church; San Provolo and San Severo had their own churches, owned, respectively by San Zaccaria and San Lorenzo. Two parishes, San Gregorio and San Salvatore, shared churches with the male monastic houses that controlled them. Of the remaining five, one (San Pietro) was also the cathedral, one (San Basso), was under the jurisdiction of the Ducal Basilica of San Marco, and one (San Matteo)

1 The most complete account of the history of the church in Venice can be found in the series Contributi alla storia della chiesa di Venezia (Venice, 1987-97).