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Music in Italy on the Brink of the Baroque*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 November 2018
Abstract
In choosing this title to address the topic of style change in music in the late sixteenth century, my intention is to suggest the apparent suddenness with which the early Baroque style appeared on the musical scene around the turn of the century. Furthermore, in its evocation of the dramatic, the title is suited to a style that burst on the scene in the new, essentially dramatic forms of monody (or solo song) and opera. If one observes the prospect from the brink of such a precipitous style change, however, one's retrospective view is complicated by entangled paths leading from various corners of the Renaissance landscape roughly to their convergence at the spot on which the viewer stands, at the entry into the Baroque. The purpose of this paper is not to chart new paths but to explore and describe some of those which have already been well traveled by music historians and others in search of explanations of style change. Certain signposts beckon more intriguingly than others—madrigal, monody, linguistics, mannerism—and these will mark the principal routes of our investigation.
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- Research Article
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- Copyright
- Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 1984
Footnotes
*
An earlier version of this paper was presented at the combined meetings of the South Central Renaissance Conference and the Renaissance Society of America in Memphis, Tennessee on March 26, 1983, as part of its panel on “Current Methodological Trends in Renaissance Studies.“
References
1 Dean T., Mace, “Musical Humanism, the Doctrine of Rhythmus, and the St. Cecilia Odes of Dryden, “ Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institute, 27 (1964), 253.Google Scholar
2 Mace, , “Pietro Bembo and the Literary Origins of the Italian Madrigal,” The Musical Quarterly, 55 (1969), 65-8.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
3 New Haven and London, 1981, pp. 136-49.
4 In his Dialogo della musica antica e della moderna (Florence, 1581), Galilei praised de Rore as the founder of the new style. Cf. Howard Brown: “Rore deserves his place of honor in the history of the madrigal … for his profound skill in capturing and reflecting the changing moods of serious poetry—his mastery, in other words, of rhetoric“ (Misic in the Renaissance, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1976, p. 225.)
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7 This melodic contour may be seen in the soprano and alto parts where the solmization syllables correspond to notes in the G and C hcxachords respectively. Thus sol, the fifth step in both hexachords, appears first on the pitch d and, one measure later, on g. Another aspect of this musical pun, one pointed out to me by Professor Palisca, depends upon the literal meaning of sol (alone), for in each case the voice which articulates the syllable is the only one moving at that point in the musical context.
8 See Mace, “Musical Humanism … ,” pp. 254-55; and his “Tasso, La Gerusalemme liberata, and Monteverdi,” soon to be published by Broude Brothers Limited in Studies in the History of Music, volume 1: Music and Language (New York, 1983).
9 Gary, Tomlinson, “Madrigal, Monody, and Monteverdi's ‘ via naturale alia itnmitatione',“ Journal of the American Musicological Society, 34 (1981), 60–108;Google Scholar and “Music and the Claims of Text: Monteverdi, Rinuccini, and Marino,” Critical Inquiry, 8 (1982), 565-89.
10 Tomlinson, “Madrigal, Monody … ,” p. 95.
11 The complete score may be found in Monteverdi, Tutle le opere, Vol. XI, ed. G. F. Malipiero (Vienna, 1930), pp. 159-67. For a survey of other commentary on this work, see Tomlinson, “Madrigal, Monody . . ,” pp. 87-88, note 41.
12 See Tomlinson, “Music and the Claims of Text,” pp. 575-76. Although Tomlinson finds evidence that Marino “looked to Rinuccini's music-dramas as one source“ for his “attempt to forge a rhetoric of impassioned emotion,” he does not go so far as to suggest a relationship between Marino's musical language and the actual language of dramatic music. Cf. James V. Mirollo, who comments briefly as follows: “While I would not argue a profound influence, it seems reasonable to suggest that the appeal and popularity of the new musical genre, like that of the still popular madrigals, might have strengthened Marino's already ingrained lyric preferences.” See his The Poet of the Marvelous, Giambattista Marino (New York and London, 1963), p. 53, note 16.
13 See especially his “Girolamo Mei, Mentor to the Florentine Camerata,” The Musical Quarterly, 40(1954), 1-20; and Girolamo Mei: Letters on Ancient and Modern Music to Vincenzo Galilei and Giovanni Bardi (Musicological Studies and Documents, no. 3), American Institute of Musicology, 1960.
14 Palisca suggests that they were probably written before 1550, and around the time of Mei's initiation into the Accademia de’ Umidi, later known as the Accademia fiorentina. See his Introduction to the edition of Mei's letters (Girolamo Mei … ), p. 21.
15 Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Magliabecchiana, Cl. 6, cod. 34, an autograph MS in 72 folios; see my discussion and summary of this treatise in Of Poetry and Music's Power: Humanism and the Creation of Opera (Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1980), pp. 31-37.
16 “Come potesse tanto la musica appresso gli antichi,” also unpublished, exists in a sixteenth-century copy now in Paris (Bibliothèque Nationale, Ms. lat. 72092). See Hanning, Of Poetry and Music's Power, pp. 34-41.
17 ”… quasi tasti naturali, ubbediscon’ all'anima nel volontariamente o necessariamente esprimer’ quanto da’ lei vien’ comandato in quello stante” (“Come potesse tanto la musica … , “ p . 14).
18 “Del verso toscano,” Mei's companion piece to his treatise on Tuscan prose, exists in a seventeenth-century copy in the Biblioteca Riccardiana, Ms. Rice. 2597. Further on this treatise, see Hanning, pp. 31-35.
19 ”.. . si trattava di poesia dramatica, e che pero si doveva imitar col canto chi parla… . “ See Peri's preface to his score of Euridice (Florence, 1601), edited with translation by Howard Brown (Recent Researches in the Music of the Baroque Era, Vols. 36 and 37; Madison, Wisconsin, 1981), which also contains his own wonderful description of his method in writing recitative.
20 For a survey of recent trends and prospects for musical iconography, see James McKinnon, “Iconography,” in Musicology in the 1980s, ed. Holoman and Palisca (New York, 1982), 79-93.
21 The word is borrowed from James Haar, who has written several useful and interesting essays on the subject of musical Mannerism. Most recently, see “Maniera and Mannerism in Italian Music of the Sixteenth Century,” in Essays on Mannerism in Art and Music, ed. Murray and Weidner (West Chester, Pa., 1980), pp. 34-62.
22 Such a bibliography was prepared for my Ph.D. seminar in Music History at the City University Graduate Center in February, 1983 by Martin Wulfhorst, to whom I am very grateful. The most complete published bibliography is that found in Maria Rika Maniates, Mannerism in Italian Music and Culture, 1530-1630 (Chapel Hill, 1979), pp. 620-55. Another, though less complete, is Mannerism in Art, Literature, and Music: A Bibliography, compiled by Richard Studing and Elizabeth Kruz (San Antonio, 1979). See James Haar's review of both works in RQ, 33 (1980), 766-69.
23 See Tomlinson's review of Maniates, Mannerism in Italian Music and Culture, in Journal of the American Musicological Society, 34 (1981), 552-57.
24 Einstein, , The Italian Madrigal, 3 vols., trans. Krappe, , Sessions, , and Strunk, (Princeton, 1949; repr. 1971), II, 709.Google Scholar
25 See Watkins, “Gesualdo as Mannerist: A Reconsideration,” in Essays on Mannerism in Art and Music, pp. 63-88.
26 See especially John, Shearman, Mannerism (Harmondsworth, 1967), pp. 99–100.Google Scholar
27 Shearman, pp. 60-61.
28 This list of characteristics is adduced in James, Haar, “Classicism and Mannerism in Sixteenth-Century Music,” The International Review of Music Aesthetics and Sociology, 1 (1970), 55–67.Google Scholar
29 See Maniates, Mannerism in Italian Music …, pp. 469-80.
30 See Robert Erich, Wolf, “Renaissance, Mannerism, Baroque: Three Styles, Three Periods,“ in Les Colloques de Wegimont, 4 (1957), Paris, 1963; pp. 59–80.Google Scholar
31 Tomlinson, however, does not employ the term in this context. See “Music and the Claims of Text,” p. 567.
32 Maniates uses this example in her chapter, “Mannerism in Poetry.” See Mannerism in Italian Music …, p. 83 and p. 527, note 49, in which she cites Panofsky's development of Galileo's criticism.