EARLY MUSICPub Date : 2023-01-04DOI: 10.1093/em/caac074
Bláithín Hurley
{"title":"Musical instruments in the Venetian home: contextualizing Marietta Robusti’s self-portrait","authors":"Bláithín Hurley","doi":"10.1093/em/caac074","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/em/caac074","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In her self-portrait of c.1578, Marietta Robusti, daughter of Tintoretto, and a successful artist in her own right, represented herself not with the tools of her chosen profession but with a keyboard instrument and holding a music book. Much has been written about how this painting, and others like it, reflect the necessity for well-bred 16th-century young women to promote their musical skills. However, little effort has so far been made to connect the world this image represents with the documentary evidence available in Venetian domestic household inventories. The current article analyses post-mortem and other inventories in order to establish the musical instruments found in 16th-century Venetian homes, and the rooms in which they were found and potentially used. Such inventories, through their employment of simple language and stock descriptive adjectives, offer strong insights into ordinary lives in Renaissance Venice, including the domestic lives of the otherwise invisible musical women of the Venetian household.","PeriodicalId":44771,"journal":{"name":"EARLY MUSIC","volume":"76 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135500279","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
EARLY MUSICPub Date : 2023-01-03DOI: 10.1093/em/caac080
John Bryan
{"title":"<i>Dido</i> restor’d","authors":"John Bryan","doi":"10.1093/em/caac080","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/em/caac080","url":null,"abstract":"Journal Article Dido restor’d Get access Henry Purcell, Dido and Aeneas, ed. Bruce Wood, Purcell Society Edition 3 (London: Stainer & Bell, 2021), £60.00 John Bryan John Bryan j.h.bryan@hud.ac.uk Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Early Music, Volume 51, Issue 1, February 2023, Pages 142–144, https://doi.org/10.1093/em/caac080 Published: 03 January 2023","PeriodicalId":44771,"journal":{"name":"EARLY MUSIC","volume":"7 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135604346","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
EARLY MUSICPub Date : 2023-01-03DOI: 10.1093/em/caac067
Sigrid Harris
{"title":"Transcending the body: music, chastity and ecstasy in Reni’s <i>St Cecilia playing the violin</i>","authors":"Sigrid Harris","doi":"10.1093/em/caac067","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/em/caac067","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract After St Cecilia’s reportedly incorrupt body was excavated in Rome in 1599, Cardinal Paolo Emilio Sfondrato commissioned a series of artworks in her honour. The last of these, Guido Reni’s St Cecilia playing the violin (1606), shows her gazing upwards, violin in hand, in a state of musical ecstasy. Highlighting the importance of this painting, which thus far has received little attention from musicologists, this article seeks to unpack the ambiguities inherent in Reni’s portrayal of the virgin martyr as a violinist. Taking the complex tradition linking Cecilia with music as a point of departure, the article examines the portrait in the context of contemporary attitudes to spiritual listening and women’s performance. This brings into focus the network of ideas about music-induced transcendence that would have informed visual readings of the painting; conversely, it also shows that the virginal saint was not immune to sensualizing interpretations. Finally, the study explores the ways in which the portrait references the saint’s miraculous body, suggesting that Reni sought to emphasize Cecilia’s sacred chastity and to gesture towards a numinous music unknowable by the senses.","PeriodicalId":44771,"journal":{"name":"EARLY MUSIC","volume":"50 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135604345","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
EARLY MUSICPub Date : 2022-12-17DOI: 10.1093/em/caac056
Chriscinda Henry
{"title":"Will she or won’t she? The ambivalence of female musicianship in two paintings by Bernardino Licinio (1489–1565)","authors":"Chriscinda Henry","doi":"10.1093/em/caac056","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/em/caac056","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article examines the depiction of sexual proposition, the corruption of female virtue and the ambivalent allurements of secular music in a pair of 16th-century Concert paintings by the Venetian artist Bernardino Licinio. It argues that Licinio’s multi-figure concerts, centred on the music-making of young women, both parody and invert the classical elegiac theme of the pauper amans, the impoverished poet-lover who condemns the power of wealth and bestows poetry instead of gold on his beloved, only to be rejected due to her vanity and materialism. The pauper amans theme appears in several 16th-century Venetian strambotti and early madrigals, which are decidedly satiric in tone. In his paintings, Licinio reverses the familiar roles of poet and beloved, and the refined music of the virtuous-seeming young woman is challenged by the dissonant sound of her older male admirer shaking a purse full of coins or by his bold physical advances, which impede her playing. The dissonant and crude gesture of offering her coin payment equates the young woman’s art of music with her sexuality. It alleges not only her corruptibility and low status as a piece of merchandise for sale, but also debases the spiritually elevating art of music, with its noble and abstract figurations of love. The motif of the shaken purse with its ‘music of gold’ first appears in the Venetian dialect comedy La buelsca (c.1514), and is repeated in a series of later songs and poems centred on the subject of the grasping, mercenary prostitute in the 1520s and 30s. Licinio’s paintings play with such popular literary and musical themes but ultimately prefer visual ambiguity and unresolved narrative tension to their frankness and specificity.","PeriodicalId":44771,"journal":{"name":"EARLY MUSIC","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-12-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49143756","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
EARLY MUSICPub Date : 2022-12-06DOI: 10.1093/em/caac058
J. Cunningham
{"title":"Recordings for all seasons","authors":"J. Cunningham","doi":"10.1093/em/caac058","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/em/caac058","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44771,"journal":{"name":"EARLY MUSIC","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-12-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42222576","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
EARLY MUSICPub Date : 2022-11-04DOI: 10.1093/em/caac039
P. Barbieri
{"title":"Violin-making in Rome, 1700−1830: new archival investigations","authors":"P. Barbieri","doi":"10.1093/em/caac039","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/em/caac039","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 In the 16th and 17th centuries, Roman production in the lutherie sector focused almost exclusively on plucked-string instruments: in the numerous workshop inventories that have come down to us, the various members of the viola family are very rare indeed, while violins are almost entirely absent. Again in Rome, the profession of violin-maker (‘violinaro’) starts to appear only in the second quarter of the 18th century; unlike the situation with the luthiers of the two previous centuries, only one workshop inventory has previously been described from this type of maker: that of the ‘violinaro’ Crescenzio Ugar (1791), which unfortunately provides very little information about the maker’s effective production.\u0000 This article aims to help to fill the gap, which is all the more serious since it concerns a class of instruments that (unlike those of the plucked-string type) was the most valued from the 18th century onwards—not only from a musical point of view, but also from a purely economic perspective. I refer in particular to three previously unpublished inventories of the stock of well-known violinari operating in Rome: Francesco Emiliani (1736), Giulio Cesare Gigli (1794) and Giovanni Maria Valenzano (1826). To these we may add Magno Longo (1704), one of just two guitar-makers (‘chitarrari’) of German origin, from whose workshop we also find documentation concerning the production of violins. I also present a review of the instruments played by several Roman violinists during the 18th and 19th centuries.","PeriodicalId":44771,"journal":{"name":"EARLY MUSIC","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-11-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45744374","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
EARLY MUSICPub Date : 2022-11-04DOI: 10.1093/em/caac044
Julie Anne Sadie Goode
{"title":"The Chevalier de Quincy: an officer and his musical passe-partout","authors":"Julie Anne Sadie Goode","doi":"10.1093/em/caac044","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/em/caac044","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 In common with many military officers at the turn of the 18th century, Joseph Sevin kept a journal that chronicled army life on and off the battlefield. His memoirs, covering the years 1697 to 1713, are of particular interest because they reveal his pleasure in making music with his fellow officers and the women whom he met socially. While boasting of only modest attainments, the Chevalier de Quincy adored his basse de viole and took it everywhere he went in the course of the War of the Spanish Succession, from Paris to the châteaux of Quincy, Versailles and Fontainebleau, to Provence, Flanders and Italy. His descriptions bring to life the musical occasions in which he took part or simply attended. They also mention fellow officers who we know played and enjoyed the viol. Among the many bonds between members of the noblesse militaire, music can at last be counted.","PeriodicalId":44771,"journal":{"name":"EARLY MUSIC","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-11-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46508012","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}