The Musical Life of a Flemish City in the Sixteenth Century

1948 ◽  
Vol 11-12-13 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-23 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edward E. Lowinsky
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Musical Life

scholarly journals Simon Lyra and the Lutheran liturgy in the second half-century of the Reformation in Breslau

Muzyka ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 65 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-18
Author(s):  
Allen Scott
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Sacred Music ◽  
Musical Culture ◽  
Musical Life ◽  
Lutheran Church ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Musical Works ◽  
Printed Music ◽  
Congregational Participation ◽  
The Church

In 1593, Simon Lyra (1547-1601) was appointed cantor of the St. Elisabeth Church and Gymnasium in Breslau/Wrocław. In the same year, he drew up a list of prints and manuscripts that he considered appropriate for teaching and for use in Lutheran worship. In addition to this list, there are six music manuscripts dating from the 1580s and 1590s that either belonged to him or were collected under his direction. Taken together, Lyra’s repertoire list and the additional manuscripts contain well over a thousand items, including masses, motets, responsories, psalms, passions, vespers settings, and devotional songs. The music in the collections contain all of the items necessary for use in the liturgies performed in the St. Elisabeth Church and Gymnasium in the last quarter of the sixteenth century. This list provides valuable clues into the musical life of a well-established Lutheran church and school at the end of the sixteenth century. When studying collections of prints and manuscripts, I believe it is helpful to make a distinction between two types of use. Printed music represents possibilities. In other words, they are collections from which a cantor could make choices. In Lyra’s case, we can view his recommendations as general examples of what he considered liturgically and aesthetically appropriate for his time and position. On the other hand, manuscripts represent choices. The musical works in the six Bohn manuscripts associated with Lyra are the result of specific decisions to copy and place them in particular collections in a particular order. Therefore, they can provide clues as to what works were performed on which occasions. In other words, manuscripts provide a truer picture of a musical culture in a particular location. According to my analysis of Lyra’s recommendations, by the time he arrived at St. Elisabeth the liturgies, especially the mass, still followed Luther's Latin "Formula Missae" adopted in the 1520s. The music for the services consisted of Latin masses and motets by the most highly regarded, international composers of the first half of the sixteenth century. During his time as Signator and cantor, he updated the church and school choir repertory with music of his contemporaries, primarily composers from Central Europe. Three of these composers, Gregor Lange, Johann Knoefel, and Jacob Handl, may have been his friends and/or colleagues. In addition, some of the manuscripts collected under his direction provide evidence that the Breslau liturgies were beginning to change in the direction of the seventeenth-century Lutheran service in which the "Latin choir" gave way to more German-texted sacred music and greater congregational participation.

I Sing it to an Italian Tune . . . Thoughts on Performing Sixteenth-Century Italian-Jewish Sung Poetry Today

2014 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 9-52
Author(s):  
Avery Gosfield
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Jewish Community ◽  
Jewish Life ◽  
Musical Life ◽  
Musical Notation ◽  
Renaissance Music ◽  
Renaissance Italy ◽  
Jewish Liturgy ◽  
Divina Commedia

Although we know that Jewish musicians and composers were active in Renaissance Italy, very few compositions by Jewish authors or music specifically destined for the Jewish community has survived. There are few exceptions: Salamone Rossi’s works, the tunes from Guglielmo Ebreo da Pesaro’s dance manuals, Ercole Bottrigari’s transcriptions of Jewish liturgy, a handful of fragments. If we limit the list to pieces with specifically Jewish content, it becomes shorter still: Rossi’s HaShirim asher liShlomo and Bottrigari’s fieldwork. However, next to these rare musical sources, there are hundreds of poems by Jewish authors that, although preserved in text-only form, were probably performed vocally. Written in Italian, Hebrew and Yiddish, they usually combine Italian form with Jewish content. The constant transposition and transformation of form, language and content found in works such as Josef Tzarfati’s Hebrew translation of Tu dormi, io veglio, Elye Bokher’s Bovo Bukh, or Moses of Rieti’s Miqdash Me’at (an artful reworking of Dante’s Divina Commedia) mirror the shared and separate spaces that defined Jewish life in sixteenth-century Italy. None of these poems have come down to us with musical notation. However, several have extant melodic models, while others have indications, or are written in meters—like the ottava or terza rima—that point to their being sung, probably often to orally transmitted melodies. Even if it is sometimes impossible to ascertain the exact tune used in performance, sung poetry’s predominance in Jewish musical life remains undeniable. HaShirim asher liShlomo, usually considered the most important collection of Jewish Renaissance music, might not have ever been performed during its composer’s lifetime, while Rieti’s Miqdash Me’at survives in over fifty manuscripts, including four Italian translations. In one of these, translator/author Lazzaro of Viterbo writes, tellingly, about looking forward to hearing his verses sung by his dedicatee, Donna Corcos.

Sixteenth-century patronage at St Mark's, Venice

1988 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
pp. 81-115 ◽  
Author(s):  
Giulio Ongaro
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Economic Status ◽  
Western Music ◽  
Musical Life ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Modern Work ◽  
Comprehensive Study

The chapel of St Mark's in Venice occupied a prominent place in the musical life of most of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, so that a Venetian writer could justly remark: ‘The chapel of these Lords is thought to be among the best in the world, and [singers] have come to serve from France and Spain.’ Yet, in spite of its importance in the history of Western music, our knowledge of its development and organisation is far from complete and contains large gaps. It will suffice to point out that we know a lot more about the Gabrielis – organists – than we do about Zarlino in his capacity as maestro and composer, that the first modern study of the chapel, barely eight years old, is the recent Vespers at St Mark's by James Moore, and that the venerable Storia della musica sacra nella già cappella ducale di S. Marco in Venezia by Francesco Caffi, the only comprehensive study of the subject, has, in default of more modern work, been reprinted several times in recent years. The situation is gradually improving, with several new studies on music in Venice and at St Mark's already available or in preparation, but one of the issues not yet treated adequately is the question of patronage at St Mark's and of the social and economic status of its singers.

LORENZO CORSINI'S ‘LIBRI DI CANZONE’ AND THE MADRIGAL IN MID-SIXTEENTH-CENTURY FLORENCE

2006 ◽  
Vol 25 ◽  
pp. 1-57
Author(s):  
Philippe Canguilhem
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Italian Renaissance ◽  
Political Regimes ◽  
Musical Life ◽  
Musical Genre ◽  
The Creation ◽  
The Many ◽  
The City

The musical life of Florence in the sixteenth century was no rival to that of Rome or Venice, but the city could legitimately claim to be the birthplace of the madrigal. In troubled times, scarred by a succession of contrasting political regimes and against a backdrop of civil war, foreign composers like Arcadelt and Verdelot, as well as native Florentines like Pisano, Corteccia, Layolle and Rampollini, contributed significantly to the creation of this most representative musical genre of the Italian Renaissance. Of the many factors contributing to the appearance of the madrigal, one of the most important was patronage: several studies have shown how members of the great Florentine families encouraged the dawning of the genre by commissioning new works from composers or by ordering manuscript copies of anthologies, which today give us a precise idea of the repertory that was sung in the 1520s and 1530s.

Claude Le Jeune, Adrian Willaert and the Art of Musical Translation

1994 ◽  
Vol 13 ◽  
pp. 123-148
Author(s):  
Richard Freedman
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Music History ◽  
Historical Change ◽  
Musical Life ◽  
The Past ◽  
French Music ◽  
The Social ◽  
Adrian Willaert ◽  
The Status ◽  
History Of

In calling for a new history of French music and musical life of the second half of the sixteenth century, Howard Mayer Brown's paper has presented scholars with a number of formidable challenges. It admonishes us to re-examine nearly every facet of what remains largely an enigma of music history. Simultaneously exacting and encyclopedic, it considers in turn each of four themes: the relation of words and music; the means and character of print culture; musical styles and genres; and (perhaps most important of all) the social context of the chanson itself – what Brown called ‘the anthropology of the French chanson’. His essay concerns the problems and perspectives of Renaissance musicology: how we hear and how we explain the music of the past in relation to those who first made and heard it. It thus requires us to reconsider our assumptions about the nature and workings of historical change, the status of canonical styles and those who promoted them, and the very place of music in culture.

scholarly journals I ki hezar aferin bon nidge Sultan olur

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Giovanni De Zorzi
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Fine Arts ◽  
Chronological Order ◽  
Musical Life ◽  
Age Of Exploration

Between the sixteenth century and the eighteenth century many Europeans visited Constantinople, the new Ottoman capital, and wrote reports that took various aspects of its cultural and musical life into consideration. Among the recurring elements of such reports, we note the description of Dervishes and their ceremonies, often accompanied by engravings and very rarely by musical transcriptions. Through time, such a description became a topic (and a stereotype) both in literature and in fine arts. My article retraces and comments descriptions of Dervish ceremonies, in a chronological order, by Western travellers and scholars between sixteenth and eighteenth century, between the so-called Age of Exploration and Modernity.

Gugliemo Gonzaga and the Castrati

1980 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-56 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Sherr
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Scholarly Work ◽  
Musical Life ◽  
Special Studies

While it is well known that castrati ruled the Italian operatic stage in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, very little scholarly work has been done on the first phase of their history. The little that can be gleaned from special studies, from general articles about musical life in the late sixteenth century, from various histories and biographies, and from two articles dealing specifically with the introduction of castrati into the papal chapel suggests that castrati entered Italy in the middle of the sixteenth century, and were needed to support (eventually supplant) boy sopranos and male falsettists employed by chapel and church choirs. The present study takes a further look at the early days of the castrato, concentrating on the court of Guglielmo Gonzaga, third Duke of Mantua (r. 1550—1587), a man who was apparently extremely interested in this type of singer.

Maxims of Foreign Policy

Itinerario ◽  
2000 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 62-79
Author(s):  
W.J. Boot
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Foreign Relations ◽  
East Asian ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Cultural Sphere ◽  
Japanese Identity

In the pre-modern period, Japanese identity was articulated in contrast with China. It was, however, articulated in reference to criteria that were commonly accepted in the whole East-Asian cultural sphere; criteria, therefore, that were Chinese in origin.One of the fields in which Japan's conception of a Japanese identity was enacted was that of foreign relations, i.e. of Japan's relations with China, the various kingdoms in Korea, and from the second half of the sixteenth century onwards, with the Portuguese, Spaniards, Dutchmen, and the Kingdom of the Ryūkū.

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