Three interrelated productions take their cue from the architecture of Venice’s famed San Marco Basilica: Igor Stravinsky’s Canticum Sacrum ad Honorem Sancti Marci Nominis (1956), French nouveau roman writer Michel Butor’s literary prose poem Description de San Marco (1963), and Columbia Masterworks producer John McClure’s production of the LP “The Glory of Gabrieli” (1969), recorded in San Marco and dubbed “a stereo spectacular.” This chapter explores homologies between the architecture of San Marco, the polychoral music of Venetian composers, the polyvocal literature of Michel Butor and the stereophonic relief of McClure’s “stereo spectacular” in order to gauge the parallels between sound, space and phonography in these works. Exploring Butor’s photographically inspired writing leads to an examination of a “stereophonic étude” that he devoted in 1965 to another familiar monument, Niagara Falls, and the way this poetic text then got translated into a spatialized cantata by French composer Claire Schapira.

This chapter surveys the engagement with material culture of three popes in the second quarter of the ninth century – Eugenius II, Gregory IV and Sergius II – spanning the years 824 through to 847. Although not as prolific as Paschal I in terms of patronage, all have left at least one significant project to have survived to the present day. Eugenius II’s marble clerical enclosure at Santa Sabina initiates a discussion of stone furnishings in Rome’s early medieval churches; Gregory IV’s apse mosaic in San Marco provides interesting insights into his participation in contemporary ecclesiastic politics in northern Italy, and other initiatives testify to continuing preoccupations with urban infrastructure and the cult of relics; and Sergius II’s newly reconstructed church of San Martino ai Monti attests to the continuing presence in Rome of significant teams of builders and decorators.