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LORENZO CORSINI'S ‘LIBRI DI CANZONE’ AND THE MADRIGAL IN MID-SIXTEENTH-CENTURY FLORENCE

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 August 2006

Philippe Canguilhem
Philippe Canguilhem
Affiliation:
University of Toulouse-Le-Mirail and Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, Villa I Tatti, Florence
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Abstract

The musical life of Florence in the sixteenth century was no rival to that of Rome or Venice, but the city could legitimately claim to be the birthplace of the madrigal. In troubled times, scarred by a succession of contrasting political regimes and against a backdrop of civil war, foreign composers like Arcadelt and Verdelot, as well as native Florentines like Pisano, Corteccia, Layolle and Rampollini, contributed significantly to the creation of this most representative musical genre of the Italian Renaissance. Of the many factors contributing to the appearance of the madrigal, one of the most important was patronage: several studies have shown how members of the great Florentine families encouraged the dawning of the genre by commissioning new works from composers or by ordering manuscript copies of anthologies, which today give us a precise idea of the repertory that was sung in the 1520s and 1530s.

Type
Research Article
Information
Early Music History , Volume 25 , October 2006 , pp. 1 - 57
Copyright
2006 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

Part of the research for this article was undertaken with the support of a short-term fellowship at the Newberry Library of Chicago in April 2001. I would like to thank Iain Fenlon for his comments. In addition, I wish to thank Robert Kendrick and Lucia Marchi for their precious help in Chicago, and Herbert Kellman for having offered me the opportunity of consulting the rich collection of microfilms of the Musicological Archives for Renaissance Manuscript Studies of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. I am also indebted to Kathryn Bosi and Bonnie Blackburn for their suggestions and comments.