Printed collections including contrafacta (1646–1649) (original) (raw)
Related papers
Texting Polyphonic Settings of the Ordinary of the Mass in the Late Fifteenth Century
Journal of the Alamire Foundation, 2023
Texting in late fifteenth-century music has long challenged musicologists and editors, who often use sixteenth-century theories to explain earlier repertories. This article examines texting in polyphonic mass ordinary settings. It analyzes the role played by composer, scribe, and performer, and examines how texting differed depending on the repertory. Taking Josquin’s Missa L’homme armé super voces musicales as a case study, this article investigates one source in particular, Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Cappella Sistina 197, which contains an almost unique instance of coeval additions and corrections to the original scribal texting. This manuscript allows us to assess the priorities of the emendator(s) in modifying the original text underlay, and thus provides some fifteenth-century texting principles for modern editors.
Patriotic Purification: Cleansing Italian Secular Vocal Music in Thuringia, 1575–1600
Early Music History, 2016
In German-speaking lands until the 1580s, Italian secular vocal music was mainly cultivated by a narrow elite of aristocrats and merchants who valued its exclusivity. Yet some German patriots – teachers, clergy and humanists – regarded such foreign imports as emasculating luxuries that would corrupt their national character. This article examines four collections of contrafacta of Italian villanellas and madrigals that were published in Erfurt and have been neglected by modern scholars: the Cantiones suavissimae (1576 and 1580), Primus liber suavissimas praestantissimorum nostrae aetatis artificum Italianorum cantilenas (1587) and Amorum filii Dei decades duae (1598). According to the prefatory material of these anthologies, their editors were motivated by a patriotic agenda of purifying Italian secular song and by a Lutheran belief in the intrinsic holiness of music. This article provides the first comprehensive identification of the originals of the contrafacta, showing that the l...
Studi Musicali, 2023
In 2019 two largely intact parchment bifolios containing late fourteenth-century polyphony, reused as book covers, were found independently in Milanarea libraries: one at the Biblioteca Universitaria in Pavia (I-PAVu, Pergamene sparse, scatola 4, n. 8) and the other at the Biblioteca Trivulziana in Milan (binding of I-Mt, 1759). This is the first of two articles demonstrating that the two bifolios belonged to the same original manuscript, a compilation of Mass Ordinary movements and secular songs copied in northern Italy (ca. 1400). This first essay presents the fragment Pv, a bifolio containing five polyphonic anonymous unica. The pieces are written in fourteenth-century black notation using dragmae, including an unknown form of ‘dragma brevis’ and a case of half-coloration. The four secular works, two virelais and two rondeaux, are all for two voices with untexted tenor. The fifth piece is a fragmentary Credo of which only two texted voices remain. The essay contains a codicological and palaeographic description of the bifolio, a musicological study of the works, a linguistic and stylistic analysis of the French poems, and a critical edition of both texts and music. In the final paragraph, we offer a hypothesis on the origin of the fragment based on the data collected.
2021
The liturgical chant sung in the churches of Southern Italy between the ninth and thirteenth centuries reflects the multiculturalism of a territory in which Romans, Franks, Lombards, Byzantines, Normans, Jews, and Muslims were all present with various titles and political roles. Chants, Hypertext, and Prosulas examines a specific genre, the prosulas that were composed to embellish and expand pre-existing liturgical chants. Widespread in medieval Europe, prosulas were highly cultivated in southern Italy, especially by the nuns, monks, and clerics of the city of Benevento. These texts shed light on the creativity of local cantors to provide new meanings to the liturgy in accordance with contemporary waves of religious spirituality, and to experiment with a novel musical style in which a syllabic setting is paired with the free-flowing melody of the parent chant. In their representing an epistemological 'beyond', and in their interconnectedness with the parent chant, these prosulas can be likened to modern hypertexts. In this book, author Luisa Nardini presents the first comprehensive study to integrate textual and musical analyses of liturgical prosulas as they were recorded in Beneventan manuscripts. Discussing general features of prosulas in southern Italy and their relation to contemporary liturgical genres (e.g., tropes, sequences, hymns), Nardini firmly situates Beneventan prosulas within the broader context of European musical history. An invaluable reference for the field, Chants, Hypertext, and Prosulas provides a new understanding of the phonetic and morphological transformations of the Latin language in medieval Italy, and clarifies the use of perennially puzzling features of Beneventan notation.
Chants, Hypertext, and Prosulas: Re-texting the Proper of the Mass in Beneventan Manuscripts
2021
The liturgical chant sung in the churches of Southern Italy between the ninth and thirteenth centuries reflects the multiculturalism of a territory in which Romans, Franks, Lombards, Byzantines, Normans, Jews, and Muslims were all present with various titles and political roles. Chants, Hypertext, and Prosulas examines a specific genre, the prosulas that were composed to embellish and expand pre-existing liturgical chants. Widespread in medieval Europe, prosulas were highly cultivated in southern Italy, especially by the nuns, monks, and clerics of the city of Benevento. These texts shed light on the creativity of local cantors to provide new meanings to the liturgy in accordance with contemporary waves of religious spirituality, and to experiment with a novel musical style in which a syllabic setting is paired with the free-flowing melody of the parent chant. In their representing an epistemological 'beyond', and in their interconnectedness with the parent chant, these prosulas can be likened to modern hypertexts. In this book, author Luisa Nardini presents the first comprehensive study to integrate textual and musical analyses of liturgical prosulas as they were recorded in Beneventan manuscripts. Discussing general features of prosulas in southern Italy and their relation to contemporary liturgical genres (e.g., tropes, sequences, hymns), Nardini firmly situates Beneventan prosulas within the broader context of European musical history. An invaluable reference for the field, Chants, Hypertext, and Prosulas provides a new understanding of the phonetic and morphological transformations of the Latin language in medieval Italy, and clarifies the use of perennially puzzling features of Beneventan notation.
Early Music History, 2013
Dated to the 1240s, the Florence manuscript (F: Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Plut. 29.1) is the earliest surviving source to contain a collection of motets. The exclusively Latin-texted motets in F are widely regarded as the oldest layer(s) of pieces in this new genre. This study closely analyses three motets in F, demonstrating that they are Latin contrafacta reworkings of vernacular motets extant only in chronologically later sources. It traces the influences of secular, vernacular refrains in two supposedly liturgical clausulae in F, proposing that these clausulae are textless transcriptions of French motets, and engages with wider questions concerning scribal practices, the relationship between sine littera and cum littera notations and issues of consonance and dissonance. Reasons as to why clausulae might have been transcribed in F and the possible extent of vernacular influences in this manuscript are explored. These findings challenge established chronological narratives of motet development. The three case studies offer methodological models, demonstrating ways in which relationships between clausulae and Latin and French motets can be tested and their relative chronologies established.
Recenti indagini sul repertorio musicale in uso presso la cappella ducale di Venezia hanno permesso di identificare un numero significativo di composizioni polifoniche divenute parti integranti e insostituibili del cerimoniale liturgico marciano. Si tratta di un fenomeno che si accentua in maniera considerevole soprattutto nel corso del Seicento, da mettere in correlazione al sensibile aumento dell’attività ordinaria della cappella ducale. Assai diverse sono le modalità grazie alle quali una partitura può legarsi al cerimoniale divenendone parte insostituibile (e quindi perpetuata grazie alla ciclicità del calendario liturgico). Scopo di questo intervento è da un lato quello considerare alcuni aspetti di questo processo; dall’altro, di riflettere sulle sue implicazioni funzionali ed estetiche legate a questo fenomeno. L’impiego di simili repertori costringe infatti a interrogarsi sugli effetti da essi generati. La scelta di dare vita a nuove partiture a cappella va considerata alla luce del quotidiano confronto con un repertorio che ogni maestro di cappella è chiamato a conoscere e a dirigere secondo precise modalità imposte dal cerimoniale. In questo senso vanno considerati alcuni significativi esempi di contraffazione, sintomatici della volontà di reimpiegare il repertorio ‘proprio’ della cappella. Fino a che punto simili processi abbiano caratterizzato la produzione musicale della cappella marciana in epoca moderna e quali siano le possibili implicazioni all’interno della complessa dialettica che caratterizza la fenomenologia musicale veneziana del tempo, sono questioni a cui si cercherà di dare risposta, interrogandosi su possibili future strategie di indagine.