Blake Wilson | Dickinson College (original) (raw)
Books by Blake Wilson
Apollo Volgare: Serafino Aquilano and the Performance of Vernacular Poetry in Renaissance Italy
Singing to the Lyre in Renaissance Italy, 2019
1. Title: Singing to the Lyre in Renaissance Italy:: Memory, Performance, and Oral Poetry 2. A... more 1. Title: Singing to the Lyre in Renaissance Italy:: Memory, Performance, and Oral Poetry
2. Author: Blake Wilson
3. Cambridge University Press, forthcoming
4. Overview
We tend to think of Italian Renaissance literary culture as one born along by manuscripts, printed books, and a renewed interest in philology. For this reason the deeply oral aspect of this same culture has been overlooked, and among the victims of this historiographical bias is the widespread practice of performing Italian and Latin poetry, which typically took the form of singing to the accompaniment of a musical instrument. The performers ranged from casual practitioners, including popes, princes, and many artists, to professionals like Serafino Aquilano, but all engaged in both the creation (often improvisation in situ) and singing of poetry, a practice usually called cantare ad lyram, or cantare all'improvviso. The favored instrument of accompaniment was the lira da braccio, famously depicted in the hands of Apollo in Raphael's Parnassus.
Part I of this study (chs. 1-3) explores the older civic tradition of the canterino, a ubiquitous figure in the cities of north and central Italy throughout the middle ages and Renaissance. His fate was tied to the rapidly changing status of vernacular language and oral discourse (rhetoric), and to the contrasting patronage environments of feudal courts and republican communes. Though no note of canterino music survives (nor is ever likely to have been written down), a substantial amount of their poetry does, making them fascinating case studies in the mixed orality that prevailed in their cultural environment. Though by the fifteenth century (and probably sooner) the canterini were voracious collectors of written literary works of all kinds, mostly this fed an oral practice of memorization, and memory techniques built for rapid combinatorial retrieval (i.e., improvisation). Here and throughout the humanist practice treated in part II, one is struck by the remarkable variety and ubiquity of poetry as an oral and performative discourse, one capable of embracing a remarkable range of subject matter. And the ability to perform poetry through the powerful affective dimension of singing and playing clearly won for the canterini and their humanist successors enthusiastic audiences in both the piazzas and palaces of early modern Italy.
The second part of this study is concerned with the humanist practice of singing to the lyre. While the intellectual roots of cantare ad lyram are to be found in classical antiquity, its practical roots are in the civic tradition discussed in part I. The fusion of ancient and early modern practice occurs first in the Florentine circles of Marsilio Ficino's "Platonic Academy," and among the performing poets in Lorenzo de' Medici's circle, including Angelo Poliziano, Baccio Ugolini, and Lorenzo himself (ch. 4). Though Florence was pre-eminent in this practice, versions of this same transformation also occurred in other centers (like Ferrara and Naples) that supported both older civic traditions of oral performance, and an embrace of humanist culture. The practice of cantare ad lyram quickly became a component of humanist educational theory (ch. 5), linked as it was to rhetoric and oratorical eloquence, and a fixture of Italian humanist courts and academies (chs. 6-7) where it was fostered by the humanist interest in classicizing poetry, courtly eloquence (especially as modeled in Il cortegiano), and dramatic productions. Where poetry thrived, cantare ad lyram thrived, and that was just about everywhere in humanist Italy.
Articles by Blake Wilson
Lectio in Musica Dantis: Dante e la musica del suo tempo. Filologia e Musicologia a confronto.
Taking as a point of departure Dante’s reference in the De vulgari eloquentia to an "ars cantandi... more Taking as a point of departure Dante’s reference in the De vulgari eloquentia to an "ars cantandi poetice, this article explores Dante's conception of the
relationship between poetry and music along three lines: his writings on the subject in the De vulgari eloquentia (esp. the terms actio/passio, proferere, and modulatio/oda), his interactions with other poets and musicians, and the Trecento musical reception of the Commedia.
Rivista italiana di Musicologia, 1996
This is an English translation of my 1996 article, "Indagine sul laudario fiorentino (BNF Banco r... more This is an English translation of my 1996 article, "Indagine sul laudario fiorentino (BNF Banco rari 18)," which explains through analysis of selected works how the manuscript was damaged, trimmed, and "restored" with no effort to recreate the original melodic readings. Analysis demonstrates how many of the original readings can be restored. This is best used in conjunction with the original Italian article published in the Rivista italiana di muscologia 31 (1996), 243-80, which provides the plates, tables, and musical examples that are referred to in the body of the english translation text. The Italian article is also available on my Academia site. A shorter account of this situation, and a critical edition of the entire manuscript, is available in A-R Edition, "The Florence Laudario...," ed. B. Wilson and N. Barbieri, RRMMER 29 (Madison WI, 1995)
Posted here is the draft introduction to a lengthy article on Serafino Aquilano (Serafino Cimine... more Posted here is the draft introduction to a lengthy article on Serafino Aquilano (Serafino Ciminelli dall'Aquila) (1466-1500), the most famous singer-poet of his age. The work is in progress and is about 2/3 complete. In its finished state it will present a significant revision of his biography and chronology, and re-evaluation of his place in history.
Dante e la musica. Filologia e musicologia a confronto, ed. Cecilia Campa, Salvatore de Salvo, & Agostino Ziino (Rome: Ibimus), 2022
Henricus Isaac (ca. 1450–1517): Composition – Reception – Interpretation WIENER FORUM FÜR ÄLTERE MUSIKGESCHICHTE (Vienna: Hollitzer Wissenschaftsverlag), eds. S. Gasch, M. Grassl, B. Lodes and A. V. Rabe., 2019
Blake Wilson Paper delivered at conference: “Henricus Isaac (ca. 1450/55–1517): Composition – R... more Blake Wilson
Paper delivered at conference: “Henricus Isaac (ca. 1450/55–1517): Composition – Reception – Interpretation,” University of Vienna, July 1-3, 2017.
Published in: Henricus Isaac (ca. 1450–1517): Composition – Reception – Interpretation WIENER FORUM FÜR ÄLTERE MUSIKGESCHICHTE, eds. S. Gasch, M. Grassl, B. Lodes and A. V. Rabe (Vienna: Hollitzer Wissenschaftsverlag, 2019), 153-176.
Remembering Isaac Remembering Lorenzo: The Musical Legacy of Quis dabit
In a lively series of articles and communications during the 1970s, Allan Atlas, Martin Staehelin, and Richard Taruskin focused our attention on Isaac's Lorenzo lament, Quis dabit capiti meo aquam, especially its relationship to his Missa salva nos. This paper seeks a fresh view of the motivic structure of Quis dabit, in particular its almost obsessive deployment of a figure drawn from the mass that is re-contextualized in the motet, and subsequently widely adopted as an expressive figura. This will then provide the basis for a close look at the legacy of this iconic work in the decades after the death of Lorenzo (1492), when early madrigal composers again took up a Poliziano text dealing with the subject of mourning, this time from his Fabula d’Orfeo. Also at issue here is the extent to which the citation of musical and textual material linked to Quis dabit (esp. in the madrigal by Francesco Layolle, whose direct allusion to Isaac’s music is the particular focus of this paper) invoked Florentine cultural practice of the Laurentian era at a time (the 1520s) when its composer had been dead but a few years, and when Florentine cultural & political identity hung in the balance. Or to put the question a different way: what meanings did the music of one of Isaac's most obviously Laurentian works hold shortly after the composer's death, when the city's political and cultural life was in flux?
Italian Studies, 2016
Many of the texts of these oral poets survive, often bearing intriguing traces of their oral orig... more Many of the texts of these oral poets survive, often bearing intriguing traces of their oral origins, but what can we say about the 'canta' that all three terms share, except that the singing was often accompanied by the instrument of choice, the lira da braccio, and that the music so thoroughly inhabited the oral realm of these singer/poets that it is entirely lost to us? In fact, there is evidence that can be summoned to make informed speculation possible, and it is essential to try, for it is clear that musical delivery was an essential ingredient of the canterino's practice and popularity. In this article I approach the subject in several ways: the surviving archival records, which drop significant bits of information about the singing and playing of the canterini; the evidence of the cantasi come tradition in Florence, which reveals the wide array of music (much traceable to surviving sources) that circulated orally in the city and that can be connected to some of the Florentine canterini; the evidence of the vernacular memory treatises that can be linked to 15th-century canterini, the techniques of which suggest something about how the musical process of improvisation and rifacimento might have worked; and finally what we know about the technical capabilities of the lira da braccio, including what kinds of music could have been played on it, and how it might have been deployed in performance. I will also attempt to address another knotty problem encountered in the documents related to these performers: the often interchangeable use of the verbs 'cantare' and 'recitare'.
Cambridge History of Fifteenth-Century Music, 2015
The Medici: Citizens and Masters, ed. Robert Black and John Law (Cambridge MA: I Tatti Studies), 2015
Medici musical patronage is usually considered only with respect to polyphonic music and repertor... more Medici musical patronage is usually considered only with respect to polyphonic music and repertory, a view that lends itself to ready comparison with other Italian signori and their aristocratic patterns of patronage. This article takes a more comprehensive view of their patronage of musicians, including the improvisatory singers with which all three generations of quattrocento Medici were closely involved. The situation became especially complex in Laurentian Florence with the increased presence of northern musicians and the humanist transformation of improvisatory singing (cantare ad lyram). While cultivation of both musical practices is superficially similar to seigniorial patronage patterns in Ferrara and Naples, Florence exhibits a more complex and de-centralized environment, one still conditioned (if less so) by older communal practices and values.
"Jannes, Jean Japart, and Florence," in Firenze e la musica: Fonti, protagonisti, commitenza, scritti in ricordo di Maria Adelaide Bartoli Bacherini (Rome: Istituto Italiano per la Storia della Musica), 2014
The whereabouts of the south Netherlandish composer Johannes Japart are unknown after his departu... more The whereabouts of the south Netherlandish composer Johannes Japart are unknown after his departure from the Ferrara court in January, 1481. This paper will explore a web of evidence suggesting a direct connection between Japart and Florence, and the distinct possibility that Japart was in Florence sometime during the 1480s. He may be the Jannes compositore mentioned in Medici correspondence, as well as the Jannes who turns up in the account books of church of Santissima Annunziata, a possibility strengthened by the evidence of Japart’s musical compositions. Whether or not Japart's actual presence in Florence can be determined, a number of his works show particularly strong Florentine features (most obviously, though not only, his setting of Nenciozza mia), and are well-represented in Florentine sources. Finally, I would like to examine the striking similarity between his Vray dieu d’amour/Sancte Iohanes Baptista/Ora pro nobis, and two other litany settings, Isaac’s Fortuna desperata/Sancte Petre/Ora pro nobis and the anonymous Ic zie den claren dach/Sancte Johannes baptista/Ora pro nobis, and explore my hunch that these works share a Florentine connection.
I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance, 2013
"Dominion of the Ear: Singing the Vernacular in Piazza San Martino (Florence), " I Tatti Studie... more "Dominion of the Ear: Singing the Vernacular in Piazza San Martino (Florence), " I Tatti Studies 16 (2013), 273-287.
The late Bill Kent spoke of the "voices" of Renaissance Florence that the careful historian could discern: voices emanating from the tax records (the Catasto), from the bocche of the piazze, and the voices of friends, neighbors, and family that could be pieced together from letters, zibaldoni, and ricordanzi. This paper extends his perception of the Florentine soundscape by focusing on what was perhaps its noisiest and most important communal venue for the public dissemination of popular knowledge, information and news of all kinds, all channeled through the cherished medium of sung poetry. Piazza San Martino was, for most the fifteenth-century, where Florentines of all walks and classes gathered to hear the city's famous improvvisatori sing poetry (often improvised, always from memory) in sulla lyra (to the accompaniment of the lira da braccio, a bowed string instrument). New archival evidence is adduced to explain the exact location of the piazza (not the current Piazza San Martino), and to show how the history and evolution of this location--from a battleground of the Cerchi and Donati families to the thriving center of wool botteghe--shaped its quattrocento character as a stronghold of communal, mercantile sensibilities resistant to usurpation by the wealthy and powerful. Though San Martino is rarely mentioned in official civic documents, a surprising wealth of letters, poems, and manuscript collections testify to the brilliance and immense popularity of its best practitioners, and to the strength of the traditional oral practices fostered there, both tied to the cultivation of memory techniques that can be traced directly to certain San Martino performers through surviving vernacular arte della memoria treatises.
Blake Wilson
Dickinson College (musicology)
"Beyond 50 Years of Ars Nova Studies at Certaldo, 1959-2009," proceedings of the Convegno internazionale di Studi, Certaldo, Palazzo Pretorio, 12-14 June 2009, ed. Marco Gozzi, Agostino Ziino, and Francesco Zimei, L'Ars Nova italiana del Trecento, 8 (Lucca: LIM, 2013), 25-56., 2013
In one of his Trecentonovelle (1392-7), Franco Sacchetti tells the story of Dante coming across a... more In one of his Trecentonovelle (1392-7), Franco Sacchetti tells the story of Dante coming across a blacksmith who is singing Dante’s verse, but to the chagrin of Dante, singing it “like one sings a cantare.” With this as a metaphor for a widespread and omnivorous practice of sung poetry that involved poetic modeling and opportunistic recourse to all manner of available music, this paper will examine the late Trecento phase of a vital oral musical culture that would thrive well into the early 16th century. The primary sources for this early practice are a group of literary anthologies that contain lauda texts, and rubrics indicating the music to which these poems are to be sung (“cantasi come...”). Analysis of the poetic modeling between lauda and model show clearly what the cantasi come titles suggest, that the point of the process was access to the polyphonic ballate of Landini, Niccolò da Perugia, and other contemporary Florentine composers. The presence here of works by Ciconia, Zacara, and a number of anonymous works, suggests a greater repertory of polyphony in circulation than that contained in the Florentine anthologies. I will also consider evidence for the practical execution of this cantasi come process by local singers, including the importance of the oratory of Orsanmichele as its primary site.
Sleuthing the Muse: Essays in Honor of William F. Prizer (N.Y.: Pendragon Press), 2012
This article examines the Florentine context of a group of three interrelated madrigals. Shared m... more This article examines the Florentine context of a group of three interrelated madrigals. Shared melodic material between settings of Orpheus’ lament, Qual sarà mai, by Verdelot, Layolle, and Costanzo Festa suggest a shared context—perhaps a commission or competition—in homage to Poliziano’s original play and its first singing Orpheus, Baccio Ugolini. All three works not only set the same ottava from Poliziano’s play, but engage in a number of stylistic and structural devices that evoke the genre of the strambotto, at the same time absorbing and transforming those elements within the newer polyphonic language of the emerging madrigal. These works also reveal an emerging language of lament, which may be related to Isaac’s Quis dabit for the death of Lorenzo de’ Medici; striking similarities to Mille regrets (formerly attributed to Josquin) prompt a re-examination of the context for this work, as well.
Orsanmichele and the History and Preservation of Civic Monument, ed. Carl Strehlke, National Gallery, Wash., D.C., Studies in the History of Art 76 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press), 2012
Given the visual splendor of the building and its embellishements, it is easy to forget that Orsa... more Given the visual splendor of the building and its embellishements, it is easy to forget that Orsanmichele was once filled with singing. It may be argued, in fact, that the sung devotions conducted by the Company of Orsanmichele before its images provided both the spiritual and financial impetus for the oratory’s building and decorating campaigns. These campaigns, however clouded they became at times by the competing agendas of the guilds, the city government, and the confraternity, were driven above all by the miracle-working status of the famous Madonna, and that status was sustained primarily by the sung devotions of the Orsanmichele musicians (laudesi).
What, then, can an understanding of the oratory’s musical activities contribute to our broader understanding of how this unique public space evolved, and what it meant to contemporary Florentines? The elaboration of the interior cultic life of Orsanmichele paralleled that of its venue, and throughout the late 14th and early 15th centuries it was home to the city’s most lavish musical establishment and progressive musical practices. The confraternity’s employment of a series of prominent musicians, and the involvement of Franco Sacchetti (a poet who supplied many of the city’s leading composers with texts) in the administration and decoration of the oratory suggest a city-wide context for these activities. Drawing on extant archival records (statutes, accounts books, and tax records), music, and poetry, this paper will examine the larger Florentine context of the oratory’s musical practices, en route to exploring the relationship between these musical activities and the building and decorating activities that culminated in the exterior niche sculptures. Particular attention will be paid to the intersection of patronage, devotion, and politics in the oratory’s multiple representations of St. Matthew and singing angels.
Music Education in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, ed. R. E. Murray S. F. Weiss, and C. J. Cyrus (Bloomington, IN: Indiana Univ Press), 287-302, 2010
This article explores the implications of a recently discovered set of letters by an unknown Flor... more This article explores the implications of a recently discovered set of letters by an unknown Florentine concerning Heinrich Isaac’s extraordinary tenure in Florence (ca. 1485-95). Isaac is here revealed to be interacting with local Florentine music collectors and composers, and intimately involved with the rehearsals and revisions of the latter’s works. These documents both illuminate and raise questions about how the pedagogical environment worked at a critical time when the influx of northern music and musicians transformed local compositional activity and levels of music literacy in Florence. These changes are considered in relation to both Medici cultural programmes, and the experimental nature of the polyphony being composed, collected and copied into Florentine sources at just this time.
Apollo Volgare: Serafino Aquilano and the Performance of Vernacular Poetry in Renaissance Italy
Singing to the Lyre in Renaissance Italy, 2019
1. Title: Singing to the Lyre in Renaissance Italy:: Memory, Performance, and Oral Poetry 2. A... more 1. Title: Singing to the Lyre in Renaissance Italy:: Memory, Performance, and Oral Poetry
2. Author: Blake Wilson
3. Cambridge University Press, forthcoming
4. Overview
We tend to think of Italian Renaissance literary culture as one born along by manuscripts, printed books, and a renewed interest in philology. For this reason the deeply oral aspect of this same culture has been overlooked, and among the victims of this historiographical bias is the widespread practice of performing Italian and Latin poetry, which typically took the form of singing to the accompaniment of a musical instrument. The performers ranged from casual practitioners, including popes, princes, and many artists, to professionals like Serafino Aquilano, but all engaged in both the creation (often improvisation in situ) and singing of poetry, a practice usually called cantare ad lyram, or cantare all'improvviso. The favored instrument of accompaniment was the lira da braccio, famously depicted in the hands of Apollo in Raphael's Parnassus.
Part I of this study (chs. 1-3) explores the older civic tradition of the canterino, a ubiquitous figure in the cities of north and central Italy throughout the middle ages and Renaissance. His fate was tied to the rapidly changing status of vernacular language and oral discourse (rhetoric), and to the contrasting patronage environments of feudal courts and republican communes. Though no note of canterino music survives (nor is ever likely to have been written down), a substantial amount of their poetry does, making them fascinating case studies in the mixed orality that prevailed in their cultural environment. Though by the fifteenth century (and probably sooner) the canterini were voracious collectors of written literary works of all kinds, mostly this fed an oral practice of memorization, and memory techniques built for rapid combinatorial retrieval (i.e., improvisation). Here and throughout the humanist practice treated in part II, one is struck by the remarkable variety and ubiquity of poetry as an oral and performative discourse, one capable of embracing a remarkable range of subject matter. And the ability to perform poetry through the powerful affective dimension of singing and playing clearly won for the canterini and their humanist successors enthusiastic audiences in both the piazzas and palaces of early modern Italy.
The second part of this study is concerned with the humanist practice of singing to the lyre. While the intellectual roots of cantare ad lyram are to be found in classical antiquity, its practical roots are in the civic tradition discussed in part I. The fusion of ancient and early modern practice occurs first in the Florentine circles of Marsilio Ficino's "Platonic Academy," and among the performing poets in Lorenzo de' Medici's circle, including Angelo Poliziano, Baccio Ugolini, and Lorenzo himself (ch. 4). Though Florence was pre-eminent in this practice, versions of this same transformation also occurred in other centers (like Ferrara and Naples) that supported both older civic traditions of oral performance, and an embrace of humanist culture. The practice of cantare ad lyram quickly became a component of humanist educational theory (ch. 5), linked as it was to rhetoric and oratorical eloquence, and a fixture of Italian humanist courts and academies (chs. 6-7) where it was fostered by the humanist interest in classicizing poetry, courtly eloquence (especially as modeled in Il cortegiano), and dramatic productions. Where poetry thrived, cantare ad lyram thrived, and that was just about everywhere in humanist Italy.
Lectio in Musica Dantis: Dante e la musica del suo tempo. Filologia e Musicologia a confronto.
Taking as a point of departure Dante’s reference in the De vulgari eloquentia to an "ars cantandi... more Taking as a point of departure Dante’s reference in the De vulgari eloquentia to an "ars cantandi poetice, this article explores Dante's conception of the
relationship between poetry and music along three lines: his writings on the subject in the De vulgari eloquentia (esp. the terms actio/passio, proferere, and modulatio/oda), his interactions with other poets and musicians, and the Trecento musical reception of the Commedia.
Rivista italiana di Musicologia, 1996
This is an English translation of my 1996 article, "Indagine sul laudario fiorentino (BNF Banco r... more This is an English translation of my 1996 article, "Indagine sul laudario fiorentino (BNF Banco rari 18)," which explains through analysis of selected works how the manuscript was damaged, trimmed, and "restored" with no effort to recreate the original melodic readings. Analysis demonstrates how many of the original readings can be restored. This is best used in conjunction with the original Italian article published in the Rivista italiana di muscologia 31 (1996), 243-80, which provides the plates, tables, and musical examples that are referred to in the body of the english translation text. The Italian article is also available on my Academia site. A shorter account of this situation, and a critical edition of the entire manuscript, is available in A-R Edition, "The Florence Laudario...," ed. B. Wilson and N. Barbieri, RRMMER 29 (Madison WI, 1995)
Posted here is the draft introduction to a lengthy article on Serafino Aquilano (Serafino Cimine... more Posted here is the draft introduction to a lengthy article on Serafino Aquilano (Serafino Ciminelli dall'Aquila) (1466-1500), the most famous singer-poet of his age. The work is in progress and is about 2/3 complete. In its finished state it will present a significant revision of his biography and chronology, and re-evaluation of his place in history.
Dante e la musica. Filologia e musicologia a confronto, ed. Cecilia Campa, Salvatore de Salvo, & Agostino Ziino (Rome: Ibimus), 2022
Henricus Isaac (ca. 1450–1517): Composition – Reception – Interpretation WIENER FORUM FÜR ÄLTERE MUSIKGESCHICHTE (Vienna: Hollitzer Wissenschaftsverlag), eds. S. Gasch, M. Grassl, B. Lodes and A. V. Rabe., 2019
Blake Wilson Paper delivered at conference: “Henricus Isaac (ca. 1450/55–1517): Composition – R... more Blake Wilson
Paper delivered at conference: “Henricus Isaac (ca. 1450/55–1517): Composition – Reception – Interpretation,” University of Vienna, July 1-3, 2017.
Published in: Henricus Isaac (ca. 1450–1517): Composition – Reception – Interpretation WIENER FORUM FÜR ÄLTERE MUSIKGESCHICHTE, eds. S. Gasch, M. Grassl, B. Lodes and A. V. Rabe (Vienna: Hollitzer Wissenschaftsverlag, 2019), 153-176.
Remembering Isaac Remembering Lorenzo: The Musical Legacy of Quis dabit
In a lively series of articles and communications during the 1970s, Allan Atlas, Martin Staehelin, and Richard Taruskin focused our attention on Isaac's Lorenzo lament, Quis dabit capiti meo aquam, especially its relationship to his Missa salva nos. This paper seeks a fresh view of the motivic structure of Quis dabit, in particular its almost obsessive deployment of a figure drawn from the mass that is re-contextualized in the motet, and subsequently widely adopted as an expressive figura. This will then provide the basis for a close look at the legacy of this iconic work in the decades after the death of Lorenzo (1492), when early madrigal composers again took up a Poliziano text dealing with the subject of mourning, this time from his Fabula d’Orfeo. Also at issue here is the extent to which the citation of musical and textual material linked to Quis dabit (esp. in the madrigal by Francesco Layolle, whose direct allusion to Isaac’s music is the particular focus of this paper) invoked Florentine cultural practice of the Laurentian era at a time (the 1520s) when its composer had been dead but a few years, and when Florentine cultural & political identity hung in the balance. Or to put the question a different way: what meanings did the music of one of Isaac's most obviously Laurentian works hold shortly after the composer's death, when the city's political and cultural life was in flux?
Italian Studies, 2016
Many of the texts of these oral poets survive, often bearing intriguing traces of their oral orig... more Many of the texts of these oral poets survive, often bearing intriguing traces of their oral origins, but what can we say about the 'canta' that all three terms share, except that the singing was often accompanied by the instrument of choice, the lira da braccio, and that the music so thoroughly inhabited the oral realm of these singer/poets that it is entirely lost to us? In fact, there is evidence that can be summoned to make informed speculation possible, and it is essential to try, for it is clear that musical delivery was an essential ingredient of the canterino's practice and popularity. In this article I approach the subject in several ways: the surviving archival records, which drop significant bits of information about the singing and playing of the canterini; the evidence of the cantasi come tradition in Florence, which reveals the wide array of music (much traceable to surviving sources) that circulated orally in the city and that can be connected to some of the Florentine canterini; the evidence of the vernacular memory treatises that can be linked to 15th-century canterini, the techniques of which suggest something about how the musical process of improvisation and rifacimento might have worked; and finally what we know about the technical capabilities of the lira da braccio, including what kinds of music could have been played on it, and how it might have been deployed in performance. I will also attempt to address another knotty problem encountered in the documents related to these performers: the often interchangeable use of the verbs 'cantare' and 'recitare'.
Cambridge History of Fifteenth-Century Music, 2015
The Medici: Citizens and Masters, ed. Robert Black and John Law (Cambridge MA: I Tatti Studies), 2015
Medici musical patronage is usually considered only with respect to polyphonic music and repertor... more Medici musical patronage is usually considered only with respect to polyphonic music and repertory, a view that lends itself to ready comparison with other Italian signori and their aristocratic patterns of patronage. This article takes a more comprehensive view of their patronage of musicians, including the improvisatory singers with which all three generations of quattrocento Medici were closely involved. The situation became especially complex in Laurentian Florence with the increased presence of northern musicians and the humanist transformation of improvisatory singing (cantare ad lyram). While cultivation of both musical practices is superficially similar to seigniorial patronage patterns in Ferrara and Naples, Florence exhibits a more complex and de-centralized environment, one still conditioned (if less so) by older communal practices and values.
"Jannes, Jean Japart, and Florence," in Firenze e la musica: Fonti, protagonisti, commitenza, scritti in ricordo di Maria Adelaide Bartoli Bacherini (Rome: Istituto Italiano per la Storia della Musica), 2014
The whereabouts of the south Netherlandish composer Johannes Japart are unknown after his departu... more The whereabouts of the south Netherlandish composer Johannes Japart are unknown after his departure from the Ferrara court in January, 1481. This paper will explore a web of evidence suggesting a direct connection between Japart and Florence, and the distinct possibility that Japart was in Florence sometime during the 1480s. He may be the Jannes compositore mentioned in Medici correspondence, as well as the Jannes who turns up in the account books of church of Santissima Annunziata, a possibility strengthened by the evidence of Japart’s musical compositions. Whether or not Japart's actual presence in Florence can be determined, a number of his works show particularly strong Florentine features (most obviously, though not only, his setting of Nenciozza mia), and are well-represented in Florentine sources. Finally, I would like to examine the striking similarity between his Vray dieu d’amour/Sancte Iohanes Baptista/Ora pro nobis, and two other litany settings, Isaac’s Fortuna desperata/Sancte Petre/Ora pro nobis and the anonymous Ic zie den claren dach/Sancte Johannes baptista/Ora pro nobis, and explore my hunch that these works share a Florentine connection.
I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance, 2013
"Dominion of the Ear: Singing the Vernacular in Piazza San Martino (Florence), " I Tatti Studie... more "Dominion of the Ear: Singing the Vernacular in Piazza San Martino (Florence), " I Tatti Studies 16 (2013), 273-287.
The late Bill Kent spoke of the "voices" of Renaissance Florence that the careful historian could discern: voices emanating from the tax records (the Catasto), from the bocche of the piazze, and the voices of friends, neighbors, and family that could be pieced together from letters, zibaldoni, and ricordanzi. This paper extends his perception of the Florentine soundscape by focusing on what was perhaps its noisiest and most important communal venue for the public dissemination of popular knowledge, information and news of all kinds, all channeled through the cherished medium of sung poetry. Piazza San Martino was, for most the fifteenth-century, where Florentines of all walks and classes gathered to hear the city's famous improvvisatori sing poetry (often improvised, always from memory) in sulla lyra (to the accompaniment of the lira da braccio, a bowed string instrument). New archival evidence is adduced to explain the exact location of the piazza (not the current Piazza San Martino), and to show how the history and evolution of this location--from a battleground of the Cerchi and Donati families to the thriving center of wool botteghe--shaped its quattrocento character as a stronghold of communal, mercantile sensibilities resistant to usurpation by the wealthy and powerful. Though San Martino is rarely mentioned in official civic documents, a surprising wealth of letters, poems, and manuscript collections testify to the brilliance and immense popularity of its best practitioners, and to the strength of the traditional oral practices fostered there, both tied to the cultivation of memory techniques that can be traced directly to certain San Martino performers through surviving vernacular arte della memoria treatises.
Blake Wilson
Dickinson College (musicology)
"Beyond 50 Years of Ars Nova Studies at Certaldo, 1959-2009," proceedings of the Convegno internazionale di Studi, Certaldo, Palazzo Pretorio, 12-14 June 2009, ed. Marco Gozzi, Agostino Ziino, and Francesco Zimei, L'Ars Nova italiana del Trecento, 8 (Lucca: LIM, 2013), 25-56., 2013
In one of his Trecentonovelle (1392-7), Franco Sacchetti tells the story of Dante coming across a... more In one of his Trecentonovelle (1392-7), Franco Sacchetti tells the story of Dante coming across a blacksmith who is singing Dante’s verse, but to the chagrin of Dante, singing it “like one sings a cantare.” With this as a metaphor for a widespread and omnivorous practice of sung poetry that involved poetic modeling and opportunistic recourse to all manner of available music, this paper will examine the late Trecento phase of a vital oral musical culture that would thrive well into the early 16th century. The primary sources for this early practice are a group of literary anthologies that contain lauda texts, and rubrics indicating the music to which these poems are to be sung (“cantasi come...”). Analysis of the poetic modeling between lauda and model show clearly what the cantasi come titles suggest, that the point of the process was access to the polyphonic ballate of Landini, Niccolò da Perugia, and other contemporary Florentine composers. The presence here of works by Ciconia, Zacara, and a number of anonymous works, suggests a greater repertory of polyphony in circulation than that contained in the Florentine anthologies. I will also consider evidence for the practical execution of this cantasi come process by local singers, including the importance of the oratory of Orsanmichele as its primary site.
Sleuthing the Muse: Essays in Honor of William F. Prizer (N.Y.: Pendragon Press), 2012
This article examines the Florentine context of a group of three interrelated madrigals. Shared m... more This article examines the Florentine context of a group of three interrelated madrigals. Shared melodic material between settings of Orpheus’ lament, Qual sarà mai, by Verdelot, Layolle, and Costanzo Festa suggest a shared context—perhaps a commission or competition—in homage to Poliziano’s original play and its first singing Orpheus, Baccio Ugolini. All three works not only set the same ottava from Poliziano’s play, but engage in a number of stylistic and structural devices that evoke the genre of the strambotto, at the same time absorbing and transforming those elements within the newer polyphonic language of the emerging madrigal. These works also reveal an emerging language of lament, which may be related to Isaac’s Quis dabit for the death of Lorenzo de’ Medici; striking similarities to Mille regrets (formerly attributed to Josquin) prompt a re-examination of the context for this work, as well.
Orsanmichele and the History and Preservation of Civic Monument, ed. Carl Strehlke, National Gallery, Wash., D.C., Studies in the History of Art 76 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press), 2012
Given the visual splendor of the building and its embellishements, it is easy to forget that Orsa... more Given the visual splendor of the building and its embellishements, it is easy to forget that Orsanmichele was once filled with singing. It may be argued, in fact, that the sung devotions conducted by the Company of Orsanmichele before its images provided both the spiritual and financial impetus for the oratory’s building and decorating campaigns. These campaigns, however clouded they became at times by the competing agendas of the guilds, the city government, and the confraternity, were driven above all by the miracle-working status of the famous Madonna, and that status was sustained primarily by the sung devotions of the Orsanmichele musicians (laudesi).
What, then, can an understanding of the oratory’s musical activities contribute to our broader understanding of how this unique public space evolved, and what it meant to contemporary Florentines? The elaboration of the interior cultic life of Orsanmichele paralleled that of its venue, and throughout the late 14th and early 15th centuries it was home to the city’s most lavish musical establishment and progressive musical practices. The confraternity’s employment of a series of prominent musicians, and the involvement of Franco Sacchetti (a poet who supplied many of the city’s leading composers with texts) in the administration and decoration of the oratory suggest a city-wide context for these activities. Drawing on extant archival records (statutes, accounts books, and tax records), music, and poetry, this paper will examine the larger Florentine context of the oratory’s musical practices, en route to exploring the relationship between these musical activities and the building and decorating activities that culminated in the exterior niche sculptures. Particular attention will be paid to the intersection of patronage, devotion, and politics in the oratory’s multiple representations of St. Matthew and singing angels.
Music Education in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, ed. R. E. Murray S. F. Weiss, and C. J. Cyrus (Bloomington, IN: Indiana Univ Press), 287-302, 2010
This article explores the implications of a recently discovered set of letters by an unknown Flor... more This article explores the implications of a recently discovered set of letters by an unknown Florentine concerning Heinrich Isaac’s extraordinary tenure in Florence (ca. 1485-95). Isaac is here revealed to be interacting with local Florentine music collectors and composers, and intimately involved with the rehearsals and revisions of the latter’s works. These documents both illuminate and raise questions about how the pedagogical environment worked at a critical time when the influx of northern music and musicians transformed local compositional activity and levels of music literacy in Florence. These changes are considered in relation to both Medici cultural programmes, and the experimental nature of the polyphony being composed, collected and copied into Florentine sources at just this time.
‘Uno gentile e subtile ingenio’: Studies in Honor of Bonnie Blackburn, ed. M.J. Bloxam and G. Filocamo (Turnhout: Brepols), 2009
Journal of Musicology, 2006
In the family archives of the da Filicaia family in the Florentine Archivio di Stato, there survi... more In the family archives of the da Filicaia family in the Florentine Archivio di Stato, there survives a group of letters written by, among others, one Ambrogio Angeni to the young Antonio da Filicaia, the member of an old and wealthy patrician family who was away on family business in northern Europe for extended periods of time during the 1480s and 1490s. The letters make frequent and intimate reference to Heinrich Isaac, and reveal a surprising involvement with Lorenzo’s private musical circles, including commissioning and obtaining copies of works from Isaac and other named individuals, works that Ambrogio then sent to Antonio. The letters are full of musical references to new compositions, works by Isaac, preparation for carnival, aesthetic judgments and technical discussions, Lorenzo’s patronage, and a very active local composer previously unknown to musicologists. The letters date from1487-1489 while Antonio was residing in Nantes (Brittany), and they provide an unprecedented view of musical life in Florence at a critical period when carnival celebrations were resurgent, northern repertory was being collected and copied, northern composers (like Isaac) were interacting with local composers, and compositional procedures were changing.
Una città e il suo profeta: Firenze di fronte al Savonarola, ed. G.C. Garfagnini (Firenze: Sismel), 2001
Cantate Domino: Musica nei Secoli per il Duomo di Firenze, Florence, May 23-25, 1997 (Florence: Edifir-Edizioni, 2001), 17-36.
New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2001
![Research paper thumbnail of New Grove Dictionary: Lauda (It.: 'praise'; pl. laude [laudi])](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/66023871/thumbnails/1.jpg)
](The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2001
The principal genre of non-liturgical religious song in Italy during the late Middle Ages and Ren... more The principal genre of non-liturgical religious song in Italy during the late Middle Ages and Renaissance. In its monophonic form, the lauda also constitutes the primary Italian repertory of late medieval vernacular song, and is distinguished from most neighbouring repertories in its strictly urban, non-courtly context. The religious lauda endured into the 19th century, and extant repertory remains an important source of popular Italian texts and music.
Bonnie Blackburn (Wolfson College, Oxford), Chair Elizabeth G. Elmi (Indiana University), “Perfor... more Bonnie Blackburn (Wolfson College, Oxford), Chair
Elizabeth G. Elmi (Indiana University), “Performing Culture and Community in the Kingdom of Naples: Italian-Texted Songs and Their Sources”
Blake Wilson (Dickinson College), “The Shifting Landscape of Italian Song: Oral and Written Traditions in Florence and Beyond ca. 1500”
Giovanni Zanovello (Indiana University), “Songs without Dukes: Singing Communities in Veneto Cities”
Renaissance Conference of Southern California The Huntington, San Marino CA March 10, 2018 [... more Renaissance Conference of Southern California
The Huntington, San Marino CA
March 10, 2018
[note: the material from this paper has now been revised and incorporated into chapter 7 of the author's recent book, Singing to the Lyre in Renaissance Italy: Memory, Performance, and Oral Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2020)]
This paper will explore an aspect of Raphael's famous fresco in the Vatican Stanza della Segnatura that is generally overlooked in most scholarship on the subject: the contemporary qualities and implications of the instrument held by the figure of Apollo. It is often (though not always) correctly identified as a lira da braccio, but it is not often asked why Raphael decided in his finished version to substitute this instrument for the ancient-looking lyre shown in an earlier study for the fresco. Having just completed a book manuscript on the widespread contemporary Italian humanist practice of cantare ad lyram (singing, and often improvising, Latin and vernacular poetry to the accompaniment of a lira da braccio), I think the unusual choice of a modern instrument in the midst of an image in which Raphael was otherwise so attentive to archeological accuracy can only be explained with reference to this practice.
This paper will argue for Raphael's familiarity with cantare ad lyram, which was at the peak of its popularity in Rome at just this time, and which was closely tied to poetic practice in Roman academies and garden sodalities. An important witness to this practice is Raffaele Brandolini's De musica et poetica, a full-on defense of the art of improvisatory performance of neo-Latin verse ad lyram, in which Brandolini argues for the ancient precedents of the practice. The work was completed at about the same time as Raphael's Parnassus, and contains some clear links to the imagery on Parnassus wall. In Rome, in particular, the performance of vernacular poetry also became closely tied to language debates, specifically the notion that Rome was the crucible of a lingua cortigiana, or lingua commune, which may constitute another important strand in the Parnassus given the inclusion of performer in the cantare ad lyram tradition). In other words, I believe the full signifying range of Raphael's image of the art of poetry includes, and can only be fully appreciated with reference to contemporary poetic performance practice. The familiar modern instrument was critical to Raphael's intention to project an understanding of poetry as a dynamic oral practice close to Ficino's concept of song as an air-born imitative force, as underscored by the words numine afflatur held by the lyre-playing personification of poetry portrayed in the ceiling roundel directly above the fresco.
National Humanities Center Podcast
This working list includes scholarly studies, attributions and documents published since Zambrano... more This working list includes scholarly studies, attributions and documents published since Zambrano-Nelson, Filippino Lippi (Milan: 2004). An asterisk (*) indicates an item posted in 2021.
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There is no doubt that Vergil's great epic poem the Aeneid was one of the most well-known and int... more There is no doubt that Vergil's great epic poem the Aeneid was one of the most well-known and intensely studied literary works in early modern Europe. Between 1469, when the first printed edition appeared in Rome, and the end of the sixteenth century, some 750 different print runs of Vergil and Vergil commentaries appeared to feed an "inexhaustible market" for his works.[1] These early editions of Vergil are, moreover, "the most profusely annotated classical texts the world has ever seen" (Allen 1970, 140–41). And the appetite for Vergilian poetry and themes did not stop there, as scenes from the Aeneid appeared in paintings, the fresco cycles of many palace walls, the illustrations of printed books, and just about every other artistic medium (Fagiolo 1981; Scherer 1964, 181–216). Authors of early modern epic poems from Petrarch on modeled their works on the Aeneid, the singers in the oral tradition of popular cantari continually reworked and embellished its stories into vernacular poetic form, and readers from schoolboys to mature scholars mined it for moral aphorisms and elegant phrases, copying them into "commonplace" books for eventual use in their own compositions. That a poem of such vast and varied reception, and one beginning with the line "I sing of arms and of the man," should also be rendered in musical settings is no surprise.
This project, hosted on the Dickinson College Commentaries website, grew out of a collaboration with my colleague in the classics dept., Prof. Christopher Francese. It began as a concert of Renaissance musical settings of texts from the Aeneid, performed by the Dickinson Collegium under my direction. Then with the support of a Mellon Digital Humanities grant it was expanded into a long essay on the DCC website supported by sound files, music examples, and access to relevant images of art and original manuscript sources. The essay is currently being revised and expanded into a short monograph, with the intention of placing the 16th-century musical settings of Aeneid texts into the larger context of early modern Vergil reception and commentary.
In one of his Trecentonovelle (1392-7), Franco Sacchetti tells the story of Dante coming across a... more In one of his Trecentonovelle (1392-7), Franco Sacchetti tells the story of Dante coming across a blacksmith who is singing Dante’s verse, but to the chagrin of Dante, singing it “like one sings a cantare.” With this as a metaphor for a widespread and omnivorous practice of sung poetry that involved poetic modeling and opportunistic recourse to all manner of available music, this paper will examine the late Trecento phase of a vital oral musical culture that would thrive well into the early 16th century. The primary sources for this early practice are a group of literary anthologies that contain lauda texts, and rubrics indicating the music to which these poems are to be sung (“cantasi come...”). Analysis of the poetic modeling between lauda and model show clearly what the cantasi come titles suggest, that the point of the process was access to the polyphonic ballate of Landini, Niccolò da Perugia, and other contemporary Florentine composers. The presence here of works by Ciconia, Zacara, and a number of anonymous works, suggests a greater repertory of polyphony in circulation than that contained in the Florentine anthologies. I will also consider evidence for the practical execution of this cantasi come process by local singers, including the importance of the oratory of Orsanmichele as its primary site.
The whereabouts of the south Netherlandish composer Johannes Japart are unknown after his departu... more The whereabouts of the south Netherlandish composer Johannes Japart are unknown after his departure from the Ferrara court in January, 1481. This paper will explore a web of evidence suggesting a direct connection between Japart and Florence, and the distinct possibility that Japart was in Florence sometime during the 1480s. He may be the Jannes compositore mentioned in Medici correspondence, as well as the Jannes who turns up in the account books of church of Santissima Annunziata, a possibility strengthened by the evidence of Japart’s musical compositions. Whether or not Japart's actual presence in Florence can be determined, a number of his works show particularly strong Florentine features (most obviously, though not only, his setting of Nenciozza mia), and are well-represented in Florentine sources. Finally, I would like to examine the striking similarity between his Vray dieu d’amour/Sancte Iohanes Baptista/Ora pro nobis, and two other litany settings, Isaac’s Fortuna desperata/Sancte Petre/Ora pro nobis and the anonymous Ic zie den claren dach/Sancte Johannes baptista/Ora pro nobis, and explore my hunch that these works share a Florentine connection.
Singing to the Lyre in Renaissance Italy
Italian Studies, 2016
Many of the texts of these oral poets survive, often bearing intriguing traces of their oral orig... more Many of the texts of these oral poets survive, often bearing intriguing traces of their oral origins, but what can we say about the ‘canta’ that all three terms share, except that the singing was often accompanied by the instrument of choice, the lira da braccio, and that the music so thoroughly inhabited the oral realm of these singer/poets that it is entirely lost to us? In fact, there is evidence that can be summoned to make informed speculation possible, and it is essential to try, for it is clear that musical delivery was an essential ingredient of the canterino’s practice and popularity. In this article I approach the subject in several ways: the surviving archival records, which drop significant bits of information about the singing and playing of the canterini; the evidence of the cantasi come tradition in Florence, which reveals the wide array of music (much traceable to surviving sources) that circulated orally in the city and that can be connected to some of the Florentine canterini; the evidence of the vernacular memory treatises that can be linked to 15th-century canterini, the techniques of which suggest something about how the musical process of improvisation and rifacimento might have worked; and finally what we know about the technical capabilities of the lira da braccio, including what kinds of music could have been played on it, and how it might have been deployed in performance. I will also attempt to address another knotty problem encountered in the documents related to these performers: the often interchangeable use of the verbs ‘cantare’ and ‘recitare’.
Studies in Renaissance Music in Honour of Bonnie J. Blackburn, 2009
Festa Musicologica: Essays in Honor of …, 1995
The Journal of Musicology, 2011
