EARLY MUSICPub Date : 2023-02-11DOI: 10.1093/em/caad003
Samantha Chang, T. Shephard
{"title":"Music, gender and the erotic in Italian visual culture of the 16th century: introduction","authors":"Samantha Chang, T. Shephard","doi":"10.1093/em/caad003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/em/caad003","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44771,"journal":{"name":"EARLY MUSIC","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-02-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46159105","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 : 2023-02-10DOI: 10.1093/em/caad004
Henry Parkes
{"title":"Prosulas in theory and practice","authors":"Henry Parkes","doi":"10.1093/em/caad004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/em/caad004","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44771,"journal":{"name":"EARLY MUSIC","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-02-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48381771","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 : 2023-02-01DOI: 10.1093/em/caac072
Helen Deeming
{"title":"Very early music in <i>Early Music</i>","authors":"Helen Deeming","doi":"10.1093/em/caac072","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/em/caac072","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44771,"journal":{"name":"EARLY MUSIC","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134940336","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 : 2023-02-01DOI: 10.1093/em/caac084
Tin Cugelj
{"title":"Lavish sounds of early modern Italy","authors":"Tin Cugelj","doi":"10.1093/em/caac084","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/em/caac084","url":null,"abstract":"In the present time, when everything seems to have been discovered, researched and revisited, it seems difficult to find a ‘first’. Yet this batch of recordings presents six firsts for early modern Italian sacred vocal polyphonic music. A collection of representative mid-17th-century small-scale sacred monodies by Carlo Filago and Leonardo Leo’s responsories are recorded in their entirety for the first time. The first two albums of Giovanni Legrenzi’s collected liturgical music revisit the late 17th-century composer’s opus, in line with the performers’ goal to record his complete works. Similarly, another in a line of first recordings of Melchior Vulpius’s liturgical output is added to the project, slowly working towards the completion of this composer’s oeuvre on disc. Lastly, late 15th- and early 16th-century music from Italian convents reaches us for the first time. Performed by Italian ensemble Les Nations, Carlo Filago: Sacri concerti a voce sola, 1642 (Tactus tc 580610, issued 2022) is a first in the row of firsts: a first almost complete recording of the composer’s last collection, missing only two out of 16 original compositions. In the context of the rest of his opus—two collections of polyphonic motets (1611 and 1619) and a lost collection of Sacrae cantiones (1611)—this collection presents a genre typical of the period. Sacred monody was an effective and popular tool in devotion and was well known by the mid 17th century. In the liner notes, musicologist Mariarosa Pollastri points out that the collection is directly connected to a Polish nun Maria Felice Sbarasca (active in the convent of St Marco and St Andrea in Murano), as well as Filago’s afterword. There, he uncovers his dissatisfaction with ‘the modern way of singing and composing’, in which he ‘condemns decidedly the excesses of the virtuosi that sing in the church as if they were in a theatre’.","PeriodicalId":44771,"journal":{"name":"EARLY MUSIC","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134976734","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 : 2023-02-01DOI: 10.1093/em/caac083
Adrian Horsewood
{"title":"‘The most principall and chiefest kind of musicke’","authors":"Adrian Horsewood","doi":"10.1093/em/caac083","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/em/caac083","url":null,"abstract":"In his influential 1597 treatise A plaine and easie introduction to practicall musicke Thomas Morley presents—through the medium of a Platonic dialogue among the characters Polymathes, Philomathes and Master—all the knowledge and skills necessary, in his opinion, to master the art of composition. One of the main themes of the work, which is explored in its third part, is an insistence that any aspiring musician should study Italian music in both its present but also historical styles, and as part of this the Master describes key vocal and instrumental forms. He begins his discussion of the latter with the ‘fantasie’, giving it the epithet found in the title of this review and defining it as ‘when a musician taketh a point at his pleasure, and wresteth and turneth it as he list, making either much or little of it according as shall seeme best in his own conceit’. Whether or not any of the northern European, High Baroque composers whose music is featured on this selection of albums would have known of Morley or his seminal treatise is a matter for speculation—yet each of the recordings under the spotlight has something of the fantastical about it, whether in form or in substance. This is, unsurprisingly, most apparent on Alina Ibragimova’s Georg Philipp Telemann: Fantasias for solo violin (Hyperion cda68384, issued 2022)—indeed, Joseph Fort’s booklet note references Morley’s text—which presents the complete set of solo violin fantasias published by Telemann alongside those for flute, keyboard and viola da gamba between 1732 and 1736. While not on the scale of, say, the solo violin works of J. S. Bach—these are all three- or four-movement works, each lasting between four and eight minutes—they nevertheless show Telemann at his most sparkling and inventive; as Fort notes, they were primarily aimed at the amateur market, and ‘designed as much for the pleasure of playing as for the pleasure of listening’. That is not to say, of course, that they present no challenge to the professional; in the hands of Ibragimova, these pieces that could sound merely gemütlich or even perhaps trite in places instead come across as rich in invention and variety, charming little miniatures that entertain without outstaying their welcome. She adopts a fairly brisk approach, which suits the tone of her 1570 Amati, and this for me works better here than the more relaxed tempos of Rachel Podger, for example.","PeriodicalId":44771,"journal":{"name":"EARLY MUSIC","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134976903","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 : 2023-01-28DOI: 10.1093/em/caac052
Agnieszka Budzińska-Bennett
{"title":"Poor Clares, rich in music: unique polyphonic Benedicamus Domino settings from southern Polish convents in the late 13th and early 14th centuries","authors":"Agnieszka Budzińska-Bennett","doi":"10.1093/em/caac052","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/em/caac052","url":null,"abstract":"Under the reign of Duke Bolesław V, Poland lived through a period of cultural prosperity with several newly founded monastic centres and productive scriptoria. Particularly important were two convents of the Order of St Clare, founded by the duke’s sister, the blessed Salomea, and his wife, St Kinga. Both cloisters were led in the spirit of royal foundations and were important repositories of medieval chant and polyphony. While Stary Sącz (founded 1280) is famous for preserving several polyphonic unica, such as the four-part conductus Omnia beneficia and fragments of Notre Dame motets, it also contains contrary-motion two-voice Benedicamus settings, added beneath monophonic Benedicamus melodies, which seem to be written records of the kinds of oral polyphonic practices common in female cloisters. Unique two- and three-part troped Benedicamus settings are also preserved in the archive in Kraków, where they too were a late addition to an earlier manuscript, revealing a particular interest in the provision of notated polyphony for the Benedicamus. This article investigates these polyphonic Benedicamus settings in their broader liturgical context. It identifies several new plainchant concordances and reflects on the status of music and polyphony in the Clarist Order in southern Poland.","PeriodicalId":44771,"journal":{"name":"EARLY MUSIC","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-01-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138540653","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 : 2023-01-25DOI: 10.1093/em/caac068
Annabelle Page
{"title":"Music and love in Sigismondo Fanti’s <i>Triompho di Fortuna</i> (1527)","authors":"Annabelle Page","doi":"10.1093/em/caac068","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/em/caac068","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract As he explains at great length in his introduction, Sigismondo Fanti painstakingly calculated and constructed his Triompho di Fortuna with the purpose of enlightening its reader as to their fortunes following on from a given situation in their life. Every step along the somewhat convoluted journey towards discovering one’s fortune is accompanied by richly meaningful imagery. The illustrations not only, in some cases, summarize the text, but also make persistent connections between the playing of the game and broader intellectual, military and artistic culture. Music appears in multiple visual forms throughout the book. Some of the ‘Wheels’ forming part of the journey through the game are given musical characters (‘Wheel of Music’, ‘Wheel of the Lyre’). A very large cycle of portraits appearing alongside some segments of the game includes musicians ranging from mythological figures to Fanti’s contemporaries. And among the tiny woodcut scenes that accompany and characterize the various fortunes at the end of the book are several musical scenes. A substantial proportion of the questions and answers provided by the book concern love, and it is with fortunes concerned with love that musical scenes are most often associated, shading across the topics of sex, romance, decorum and faithfulness. In this article—the first to expose Fanti’s the Triompho di Fortuna as a rich, multidisciplinary source—the connections proposed in the book between different aspects of love and their musical characterization will be discussed and contextualized.","PeriodicalId":44771,"journal":{"name":"EARLY MUSIC","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136082615","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 : 2023-01-04DOI: 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":null,"pages":null},"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":null,"pages":null},"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":null,"pages":null},"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}