Abstracts
Notating Improvisation in Early Modern Italy
Lynette Bowring (Yale University)
Embedded within the flourishing revival of historical improvisation practices is the use of diminutions or passaggi, an idiom of ornamentation that was widespread during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The reclaiming of this style has been enabled by written records of the practice that survive: printed manuals notating short units of diminution and exemplars of their use. While modern performers have excavated techniques for improvisation through the study of these diminution manuals, I contend that their histories and materialities as written and printed documents demand closer consideration. Drawing upon notions from critical improvisation studies of a continuum of practices connecting improvisation and composition, I reassess the process of creation for diminution manuals, thereby shedding light upon the resultant interface between creative artistic activities and the technologies that preserved and transmitted them.
My paper draws selected examples from the Italian diminution repertory of the 1580s to 1620s to assess a process of improvising, writing, publishing, and reading that was undertaken by musicians—a process that indeed might circle around to further improvising and writing from the purchasers of printed diminution manuals. I argue that these sources for ornamentation disrupted traditional practices of oral transmission and improvised ornamentation in performance, contributing to transformations of musical style in the early seventeenth century and transferring the technique of diminution from an improvisatory idiom into written compositional practice. By assessing the background, affordances, and outcomes of each stage in this process, as well as the continuities between them, I offer a case study in how engagement with technologies of writing and printing might gradually transform musical style and the activities of musicians.
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The Circulation of Renaissance Keyboards in Early Modern Sub-Saharan Africa
Janie Cole (Yale University)
Keyboards often served as essential commodities in early modern European overseas exploration and expansion, circulating as a motivation of colonial, diplomatic, commercial, and religious interests. Yet while we know much about the circulation and use of keyboards in trading centers, missionary activities, ambassadorial ventures, and educational institutions in the New World and Asia, few studies have focused on their presence and cultural functions in Africa. Drawing on late Renaissance travelers’ narratives, missionary records and indigenous sources, this paper presents three case studies from the North-‐East African highlands, West-‐Central Africa, and Southern Africa, to explore the dissemination, musical functions, and cultural significance of the earliest documented Western keyboards in sub-‐Saharan Africa, and how keyboard performances served as a construct for representation, identity, agency, and power in Afro-‐European encounters and colonial perspectives. First, it focuses on one of the earliest recorded encounters between the Christian kingdom of Ethiopia and Latin Europe in 1520, namely between a Portuguese embassy and the court of King Lebnä Dengel, to provide new details on keyboards used for diplomacy and gift- giving, the local faranji (foreigners) community of musicians, and the first recorded European instruments to be brought into Ethiopia. Second, musical encounters in South Africa in Cape colonial society during the 1650s between the retinue of Jan van Riebeeck and the local indigenous Khoekhoe community reveal the use of keyboards in colonization processes. Finally, early references to missionary keyboards taken to the Kingdom of Kongo during the 1490s and possibly one of the earliest ethnographic visual representations of a European keyboard in Africa from the 1650s point to the possibility that harpsichords had reached West-‐Central Africa by the mid 17th century (if not earlier), being employed as identifiers of power and cultural appropriation. These Afro-‐Eurasian encounters offer tantalizing views on the spread of keyboard instruments across three continents, and how they were used as colonial, evangelical, and political tools by European powers, thus giving broader insight into the role of Renaissance keyboards in constructing cultural identity and the collisions of political, social and cultural hierarchies in sub-‐Saharan Africa in an entangled global early modern.
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Methodological Proposal for the Critical Edition of Domenico Zipoli’s Mass of Potosí (Mass
in F Major or Four-Part Mass)
Flora Giordani (Boston University)
In 1959, Robert L. Stevenson found in the Archivo Capitular del Cabildo Eclesiástico de Sucre (Bolivia) the source of Domenico Zipoli’s Four-Part Mass in F major, also known as Mass of Potosí. The particularities of this piece and its possible critical editing process are used as a pretext to instigate reflections about philological matters that accompany the text itself and its context, but also the issues common to the entire South America-based European repertoire and, in general, the ongoing debate about the editing of Early Music in the digital era.
The aim of this paper is to define a methodological framework and a protocol that could be applied to the edition and publication of this composition as well as the wider repertoire of the Jesuit Reducciones. This process of methodological definition takes three particular aspects into account: the evolution of the concept and methods of musical editing, the new resources brought forth by the digital era and the actual needs of potential performers of Early Music.
In order to explore these reflections, the critical editing protocol is constructed through textual criticism (exploring the sources, structure, and historical relevance of the Mass of Potosí), hermeneutic analysis, and understanding the cultural significance of the musical text. This protocol also acknowledges the existence of distinct target markets, both in Europe and South America, with varying levels of interest in historically informed performance. The author proposes, as the result of this methodology, a hybrid edition model that combines traditional print music with supplementary digital content. This flexible approach allows performers to select the material that best suits their needs while maintaining the integrity of critical editing.
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Machaut’s Rests in Scribal Hands
Emily Korzeniewski (Yale University)
The fourteenth-century ars nova (new art) fully systematized divisions of the breve and semibreve, and in so doing it offered composers and scribes a degree of rhythmic control that was previously inaccessible. But mensural notation was still contextual, and as such, it required interpretation. Some of Guillaume de Machaut’s works (such as Rose, liz, printemps) have inspired scholarly inquiry into their equivocal notation, but these are usually seen as outliers. And yet, ars nova notation is often significantly more ambiguous than might be expected. Current dating debates initiated by Karen Desmond and Anna Zayaruznaya, in addition to ongoing efforts to foreground scribal agency (Kolb, 2022), invite us to revisit Machaut’s six complete-works manuscripts anew. How do implicit scribal practices augment the explicit theoretical record?
In this paper, I revisit moments of ambiguity in Machaut’s songs, using the notation of rests as an entrypoint. Rests are more theoretically stable than notes because, unlike notes, they are not subject to the operations of imperfection and alteration. But while rests can recede into the background (for example, at the end of lines), they can also introduce complications that are not easily resolved. A handful of problematic rests in Machaut’s repertory are removed from modern editions and attributed to scribal error, despite their consistency across the sources. I argue that scribes used both these rests and their placement on the staff to affirm or reject the closure of mensural units. Rests may signal mensuration changes, as in Helas et comment aroie (Maw, 2002), or reinterpretation of repeated material, as in Aymi, dame de valour. By returning to the original notation, embracing its complexities, and taking its recorded silences seriously, we make room for ars nova notation to prioritize and convey musical ideas that exceed modern expectations.
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The Immigrant, The Illiterate Widow, and Music Printing In Early 17th-Century Salamanca: The Case of Susana Muñoz
Michael Noone (Boston College)
Between 1607 and 1620, seven atlas-sized luxury choirbooks were printed in Salamanca by Susana Muñoz and her (slightly better-known) husband Artus Tavernier (Taberniel). Three of these magnificent polyphonic choirbooks were devoted to music by Vivanco (1553?-1622), three to music by Esquivel (c. 1563-after 1612), and one — whose unique surviving exemplar was only recently discovered — transmits polyphony by Diego de Bruceña (1567-1622). Taken together, the books contain 288 Latin liturgical works scored for between four and nine voices printed on a total of more than 2,370 pages. One of them, with a page count of almost 600, is the largest choirbook ever printed in Spain. Only 24 exemplars are extant, 12 of which remain unlisted in RISM. They are found in 14 locations in five countries and all but one have been examined in situ for this study.
Taberniel was the son (or nephew?) of Plantin’s illustrious punchcutter Ameet Tavernier. Printing contracts and other archival documents reveal that the enduring force behind the printing operation that bore Taberniel’s name in both the 17th-century and current historiography, was Susana Muñoz. Through successive marriages, this remarkable woman built a prolific printing house that, until 1621, dominated music printing in Spain. In addition, the print shop she had founded with her husband issued dozens of non-musical text volumes, many under a variety of imprints that reveal neither her identity nor her full rôle.
My paper introduces Susana Muñoz as a printer of choirbooks and sacred music within the larger context of the activities of the firm she founded with Taberniel in 1602 and that by 1629 was being managed by her son Jacinto. The fact that Jacinto was named official printer to the University of Salamanca and that Susana’s third husband was named official printer to the University of Alcalá de Henares ensured a lasting legacy for a firm that traced its origin to the meeting of an illiterate Spanish girl and a Fleming who brought music printing technologies from Antwerp to Salamanca.
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Presenter Bios
Jane A. Bernstein is Professor Emerita at Tufts University. Her primary research interests center on Renaissance music, women’s studies, and nineteenth-century Italian opera. In 1999, she won the Otto Kinkeldey Award from the American Musicological Society for Music Printing in Renaissance Venice: The Scotto Press (1539–1572) and, in 2005, her book Women’s Voices across Musical Worlds was named a finalist for the Pauline Alderman Award from International Alliance for Women in Music. Her other major publications include Print Culture and Music in Sixteenth-Century Venice (2002), the thirty-volume series The Sixteenth-Century Chanson, Philip Van Wilder: Collected Works, and French Chansons of the Sixteenth Century. Her newest book Printing Music in Renaissance Rome appeared in August 2023 from Oxford University Press.
Bernstein has received fellowships and grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Philosophical Society, and the Gladys Delmas Foundation for Venetian Studies. In 2005, she was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She served as President of the American Musicological Society in 2008-10 and was conferred Honorary Member of the Society in 2014.
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Lynette Bowring is Assistant Professor of Music History at the Yale School of Music, a position that she has held since Fall 2019. She received her PhD from Rutgers University in 2017 and also holds a Masters in Musicology from the University of Manchester and a Bachelors in Violin Performance from the Royal Northern College of Music. She co-edited Music and Jewish Culture in Early Modern Italy: New Perspectives with Rebecca Cypess and Liza Malamut, published by Indiana University Press in 2022, and is currently preparing an edition of motets by Marianna Martines in collaboration with Rebecca Cypess, which will soon be published by A-R Editions.
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Janie Cole (PhD University of London) is a Research Scholar at Yale University’s Institute of Sacred Music and Visiting Professor in Yale’s Department of Music, an Affiliate of the Yale Council on African Studies, Research Officer for East Africa on the University of the Witwatersrand and University of Cape Town’s interdisciplinary project Re-‐Centring AfroAsia (2018-‐), and a Research Associate at Stanford University’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (2022-‐). Prior to this, she was a Senior Lecturer (adjunct) at the University of Cape Town’s South African College of Music for nine years (2015-‐23). Her research focuses on musical practices, instruments and thought in early modern African kingdoms and Afro-‐Eurasian encounters, transcultural circulation and entanglements in the age of exploration; the intersection of music, consumption and production, politics, patronage and gender in late Renaissance and early Baroque Italy and France; and music and the anti-‐apartheid struggle in 20th-‐century South Africa and musical constructions of Blackness, apartheid struggle movement politics, violence, resistance, trauma, and social change. Her current work centers on early modern musical culture at the royal court in the Christian kingdom of Ethiopia and intertwined sonic histories of entanglement with the Latin Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean world. She is the author of two books, as well as numerous articles in peer-‐reviewed journals and book chapters. Fellowships include The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies and the Claude V. Palisca Award in Musicology from the Renaissance Society of America. She is currently the founding Discipline Representative in Africana Studies (2018-‐23) at the Renaissance Society of America, on the Editorial Advisory Board of Renaissance Quarterly, co-‐founder of the International Musicological Society Study Group Early African Sound Worlds, and the founder/executive director of Music Beyond Borders.
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Flora Saki Giordani is currently an M.A. student in Musicology at Boston University. She received her degree in Musicology from «Manuel Castillo» Superior Conservatory of Music of Seville (Spain) in 2022. She also studied harpsichord and piano at G. B. Martini Conservatory in her home town of Bologna (Italy). Her principal interests are Identity Theories applied to music networks, the Early Music Revival and the Historically Informed Performance movement, music and urban spaces, cultural management, microhistory, and Spanish and Hispano-American heritage. She is a member of the research group «Misión M35: música de tradición oral en la provincia de Sevilla» headed by Dr. Miguel López-Fernández, a subset of the Fondo de Música Tradicional – A Spanish Collection of Traditional Music Heritage directed by Dr. Emilio Ros-Fabrega of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC). Recently, she founded the «Wanda Landowska» International Research Group in collaboration with scholars from the US, Poland, Spain, France, and Switzerland. Her monograph El redescubrimiento del clave y el surgimiento de la figura del clavecinista en España durante el siglo XX: redes de relaciones, tópicos y procesos identitarios will be published in November as part of the collection «Música Crítica. Musicología» of Editorial Libargo (Spain). She is also a writer and translator and has published a novel with Minerva Edizioni (Italy) in 2017.
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Emily Korzeniewski is a Ph.D. candidate in Music History at Yale University. Her dissertation, “Machaut’s Rhythms in a Changing Notational World,” centers on Guillaume de Machaut and the notation of his music by different scribes across the fourteenth and early-fifteenth centuries. This research continues work began in her master’s thesis at the University of Oregon on Machaut’s music and authorial persona. In 2024 Emily will be finishing her dissertation at KU Leuven on a Belgian American Education Foundation Fellowship.
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Michael Noone is Professor and Chair of the Music Department at Boston College. He has published on music at the Escorial Palace and polyphonic sources at Toledo Cathedral and has recorded more than two dozen CDs of Spanish Renaissance polyphony. In 2006 he was honored by His Majesty Juan Carlos I for his contribution to Spanish music through publications, concerts and recordings. He is a corresponding member of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts and History in Toledo.