Notating Improvisation in Early Modern Italy<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Lynette Bowring (Yale University)<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\u2014a 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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The Circulation of Renaissance Keyboards in Early Modern Sub-Saharan Africa<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Janie Cole (Yale University)<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\u2019 narratives, missionary records and indigenous sources, this paper presents three case studies from the North-\u00ad\u2010East African highlands, West-\u00ad\u2010Central Africa, and Southern Africa, to explore the dissemination, musical functions, and cultural significance of the earliest documented Western keyboards in sub-\u00ad\u2010Saharan Africa, and how keyboard performances served as a construct for representation, identity, agency, and power in Afro-\u00ad\u2010European 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 Lebn\u00e4 Dengel, to provide new details on keyboards used for diplomacy and gift-\u00ad 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-\u00ad\u2010Central Africa by the mid 17th century (if not earlier), being employed as identifiers of power and cultural appropriation. These Afro-\u00ad\u2010Eurasian 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-\u00ad\u2010Saharan Africa in an entangled global early modern.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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Methodological Proposal for the Critical Edition of Domenico Zipoli’s Mass of Potos\u00ed<\/em> (Mass Flora Giordani (Boston University)<\/p>\n\n\n\n In 1959, Robert L. Stevenson found in the Archivo Capitular del Cabildo Eclesi\u00e1stico de Sucre (Bolivia) the source of Domenico Zipoli\u2019s Four-Part Mass in F major, also known as Mass of Potos\u00ed<\/em>. 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n 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<\/em>. 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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 Potos\u00ed<\/em>), 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n ** ** ** ** **<\/p>\n\n\n\n Machaut\u2019s Rests in Scribal Hands<\/p>\n\n\n\n Emily Korzeniewski (Yale University)<\/p>\n\n\n\n The fourteenth-century ars nova <\/em>(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\u2019s works (such as Rose, liz, printemps<\/em>) have inspired scholarly inquiry into their equivocal notation, but these are usually seen as outliers. And yet, ars nova <\/em>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\u2019s six complete-works manuscripts anew. How do implicit scribal practices augment the explicit theoretical record?<\/p>\n\n\n\n In this paper, I revisit moments of ambiguity in Machaut\u2019s 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\u2019s 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 <\/em>(Maw, 2002), or reinterpretation of repeated material, as in Aymi, dame de valour<\/em>. By returning to the original notation, embracing its complexities, and taking its recorded silences seriously, we make room for ars nova <\/em>notation to prioritize and convey musical ideas that exceed modern expectations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n ** ** ** ** **<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Immigrant, The Illiterate Widow, and Music Printing In Early 17th-Century Salamanca: The Case of Susana Mu\u00f1oz<\/p>\n\n\n\n Michael Noone (Boston College)<\/p>\n\n\n\n Between 1607 and 1620, seven atlas-sized luxury choirbooks were printed in Salamanca by Susana Mu\u00f1oz 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 \u2014 whose unique surviving exemplar was only recently discovered \u2014 transmits polyphony by Diego de Bruce\u00f1a (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 <\/em>for this study.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Taberniel was the son (or nephew?) of Plantin\u2019s illustrious punchcutter Ameet Tavernier. Printing contracts and other archival documents reveal that the enduring force behind the printing operation that bore Taberniel\u2019s name in both the 17th-century and current historiography, was Susana Mu\u00f1oz. 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 r\u00f4le.<\/p>\n\n\n\n My paper introduces Susana Mu\u00f1oz 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\u2019s third husband was named official printer to the University of Alcal\u00e1 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n ** ** ** ** **<\/p>\n\n\n\n
in F Major or Four-Part Mass)<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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