Seven Reasons for Italy: Gaspar van Weerbeke’s Career between Flanders, Milan, and Rome (original) (raw)
Related papers
New Biographical Information on the Formative Years of Gaspar van Weerbeke
Erik Verroken, New Biographical Information on the Formative Years of Gaspar van Weerbeke, The Journal of the Alamire Foundation, 12 (2020), 167-194., 2020
This article uncovers new information concerning the life and family of Gaspar van Weerbeke. In particular, it shows how his social networks had an impact on Weerbeke’s professional opportunities. Milanese documents reveal that Gaspar van Weerbeke was an illegitimate son of Adriaen van Weerbeke (husband of Kateline van Steenweghe), who became a citizen of Oudenaarde in 1453. Adriaen and his brother Jan were marktschippers who shipped merchandise from Oudenaarde to Tournai (1449-76). Adriaen moved in circles that gave him the opportunity to provide his gifted son with a successful future. Gaspar was born c. 1445, and received his education as a singer in the parish of St Walburga in the town of Oudenaarde. This town had a flourishing musical culture, boasting twelve talented singers (‘canters’), four organists, and two organ builders in the period 1445-75. It is probable that the clergy from St Walburga’s helped Gaspar to gain entry into the Burgundian and papal chapels. The fact that Weerbeke had a wide social network might explain why Galeazzo Sforza sent Gaspar to the Low Countries to recruit singers as early as April 1472.
This essay takes the eighteenth-century artistic patronage of the noble Plater family in Krāslava (Pol. Krasław), a private magnate town in Polish Livonia (present-day Latgale, Latvia), an administrative division within the historical territory of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, as a case study to explore multiple modes of artistic migration facilitated by human agents and the agentive properties of objects against the historical backdrop of the Age of Partition (c. 1750-1810). I examine how the Plater by means of migration by proxy and through performative engagement commissioning, collecting and displaying art and architecture constructed a network of monuments and artworks evoking the notion of the Plater as heirs to the glory of Rome, to re-form their dominion as the crossroads of Europe’s Roman Catholic frontier, where the long Counter-Reformation negotiated a complex web of intersecting yet potentially opposed religio-political prerogatives. I argue that these magnates undertook a multifaceted campaign of self-fashioning to realign their interests and re-legitimize their patrimonial hegemonic claims by undertaking the translatio reliquiae (transfer of relics), the ceremonial transfer of holy remains from the Roman catacombs according to venerable Roman Catholic tradition, and appealing to a broader cultural translatio imperii (transfer of rule or empire). Their campaign thematized the temporal passage between ancient and modern and the geographic distance between the Italian and Baltic sphere in a way that reanimated the grandeur of the past and deployed mediated forms of knowledge about its target (Rome) in honor of the illustrious patrons. It also took advantage of the fact that the beleaguered eighteenth-century Holy See sought to reaffirm the papal city as caput mundi, renovate its image as international arbiter of taste and reaffirm the illusion of integral Catholic empire.
Mobile Musicians: Paths of Migration in Early Modern Europe
In recent years, the cultural history of music has been challenging cultural notions of style and political representation by studying migrating musicians as actors in early modern court, urban and musical life. Following the aesthetic concept of authenticity, this article examines the construction and use of cultural characterisations of mobility and migration in Glückstadt, a "city of exiles" founded by Christian IV in 1616, and in the biography of Johann Jakob Froberger, who throughout his life travelled in the service of the Viennese court. While first manifestations of a concept of authenticity can be studied very effectively by looking at the example of mobile musicians and their music, their cases also reveal immobilities, the aspiration to rise in social status and the desire to settle securely. Since these elements affected the concept of musical works at the time, they may be fruitfully connected to hybrid music editions.
Music and Migration, 2010
Music and Migration is a special issue in two book like volumes (in English (278 pp) and in Portuguese (298pp)) with 12 scientific articles by ethnomusicologists, music historians, sociologists and political scientists from different schools, on subjects related with music and migration from all over the world (Dan Lundberg on Kurdish, Turkish, Irish, and former Yugoslavian groups – Macedonians, Montenegrins, Serbs, Croatians, … in Stockohlm; John Baily on Afghans in Australia, Dieter Christensen on Kurds in Berlin; Mark Naison on Jazz and social urbanization in the Bronx, in New York; Martiniello and Lafleur on Latin music on the Presidential elections of 2008 in the US, among others on the music of other populations such as Indo-Pakistani Bollywood consumers in Spain, Cape-Verdean and Goan music producers and consumers in Portugal, Portuguese Fado musicians in the US, …). Besides the 12 articles it contains also 18 opinion and research notes by musicians, teachers, researchers, students, music managers and interested listeners on subjects related with the topic. A substantial introduction includes theoretical considerations connecting these with earlier ethnomusicology writings on music and migration (namely those on the volume edited by Baily and Collyer, among others) and presents the volume in which music deals with basic citizenship and migration rights and specificities, unmasking boundaries, nurturing participation, pacifying emotions and acknowledging its power to inflame them, challenging categories and definitely renewing references in the current global era.
Musicians' Mobilities and Music Migrations in Early Modern Europe
Mainzer Historische Kulturwissenschaften, 2016
During the 17th and 18th century musicians' mobilities and migrations are essential for the European music history and the cultural exchange of music. Adopting viewpoints that reflect different methodological approaches and diversified research cultures, the book presents studies on central scopes, strategies and artistic outcomes of mobile and migratory musicians as well as on the transfer of music. By looking at elite and non-elite musicians and their everyday mobilities to major and minor centers of music production and practice, new biographical patterns and new stylistic paradigms in the European East, West and South emerge.