Studi Pergolesiani / Pergolesi Studies 7

The extraordinary notoriety that Giovanni Battista Pergolesi enjoyed after his death rendered immortal the historical figure of the musician from Jesi but at the same time it had the effect of grossly distorting the body of his work. In fact, from as early as the 18th century the success of Pergolesi's music in Europe generated such a huge demand for his compositions that unscrupulous copyists and publishers were able to satisfy it only by attaching his name to the music of other composers. In this way the number of works by Pergolesi multiplied in a wholly artificial manner. It has only been in relatively recent times that researchers have made the decisive advances necessary to liberate the Pergolesi corpus from the cluttering presence of false attributions. Starting from the 1950s studies carried out on the sources have made it possible to identify with precision Pergolesi's handwriting and modus operandi and in this way to establish the overall number of compositions that can be attributed with certainty to the Jesi musician. In 1986 the publishing companies Pendragon and Ricordi set in train the joint publication of a new edition of the works of Pergolesi (The Complete Works), but after the release of the first four volumes between 1986 and 1994 the work came to a halt. The idea of taking up this work again and bringing it to completion, founding it on new bases and adhering to criteria of academic rigor and practical utility, arose out of discussions within the Pergolesi Committee of the Fondazione Pergolesi – Spontini (Jesi). In view of the 300th anniversary of the birth of the composer the foundation took the decision to give concrete form to a project that had been tenaciously cultivated and already solidly conceived by Francesco Degrada. The initiative has revealed itself to be a natural outlet for the work of a range of scholars who in more recent years have prepared for the Foundation and Casa Ricordi a number of critically revised performance scores for use in the Pergolesi Festival.

Music, Individuals and Contexts. Dialectical Interaction, edited by Nadia Amendola, Alessandro Cosentino, Giacomo Sciommeri, Università degli Studi di Roma “Tor Vergata”, 27-28 aprile 2017, Roma, UniversItalia, 2019, pp. 309-318. , 2019

2016

Maria Caraci Vela è professore ordinario di Filologia musicale, Storia della musica rinascimentale e Storia e critica dei testi musicali medievali e rinascimentali della Facoltà di Musicologia di Cremona (Università di Pavia), membro del collegio del dottorato di ricerca del Dipartimento di Scienze Musicologiche e Paleografico-filologiche e di vari comitati scientifici, direttrice della collana di Dipartimento «Diverse voci…» e del periodico del Dipartimento Philomusica on line e coordinatrice di diverse ricerche (COFIN, FIRB, FAR), tra cui il progetto internazionale su La notazione della polifonia vocale sec. IX-XVII e quello su La tradizione delle opere di Niccolò da Perugia: una chiave interpretativa per la storia delle forme, delle tecniche compositive, delle notazioni. Maria Caraci Vela is full Professor in Music Philology, History of Renaissance Music and Middle-Ages and Renaissance Musical Texts' history and criticism in the Faculty of Musicology (Cremona, University of Pavia), member of the PhD. Board of the Department of Paleographic, Philological and Musicological Sciences and of several scientific committees, director of the Department series «Diverse voci…», editor of the Department Review, Philomusica on line, and coordinator of several researches (COFIN, FIRB, FAR); among them the international project The notation of polyphonic music in the IX-XVII centuries, and The textual and musical tradition of Niccolò da Perugia: a new key to the riding for the history of musical forms, composition techniques, notations.

Florence: Olschki, 2011

is a scholar of Italian and French music, literature, opera, theatre and culture of the late sixteenth-and early seventeenth centuries. Her publications include A Muse of Music in Early Baroque Florence: the Poetry of Michelangelo Buonarroti il Giovane (Olschki, 2007) and numerous articles.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Rivista Italiana di Musicologia, 2019

De musica disserenda, 2019

Izvleček: Bralec tretjega zvezka Syntagme musicum Michaela Praetoriusa dobi vtis, da so bili po mnenju avtorja na tekočem le tisti glasbeniki, ki so znali skladati, igrati ali peti »all'italiana«, torej na italijanski način. Zato to delo predstavlja nekakšno ogledalo miselnosti in razumevanja načina recepcije italijanske glasbe severno od Alp v drugem desetletju 17. stoletja. Razprava, ki temelji na ponovnem branju tretje knjige Praetoriusovega traktata Syntagma musicum, govori o tem, kako so v prvih desetletjih 17. stoletja krožile glasbene knjige ter kako je asimilacija italijanske glasbene kulture in terminologije prežela nemško govoreče dežele in doprinesla h genezi panevropskega glasbenega sloga in terminologije.

Today’s concert takes its point of departure from Tasso’s epic La Gerusalemme liberata: from its tales of Erminia amongst the shepherds, and her tears over what she believes to be the body of Tancredi; the pagan warrior Clorinda, who saves the Christians Sofronia and Olindo, about to be burnt at the stake; the maga Armida, who came upon the sleeping knight Rinaldo in her enchanted garden, and becomes enamoured of him, but is abandoned soon after their idyll. Composers have drawn on Tassos’ epic for their inspiration from even before the work was published in its authorized form. Since the late 16th century the epic has been an inexhaustible source of texts and themes for madrigals, monodies, chamber cantatas and operas - for works composed until even as late as our own time. But in today's concert we will focus on the music which was composed in Italy within the first five decades subsequent to its publication, from the first composer known to have set its ottave - the Flemish Giaches de Wert, employed at the court of Mantua, who had personal contact with Tasso - to the great masters of the Italian Baroque, Monteverdi, Marini and Mazzocchi, who have left us works of outstanding beauty and interest. One need only think of Monteverdi’s innovative Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda, or Marini’s enchanting La Bella Erminia, with its echo lament, to perceive the importance of this repertoire. That there is a particular focus on the Roman composers of the early Baroque period in today’s concert is by no means a coincidence, for it is intended as a personal, affectionate and grateful homage to the director of Villa I Tatti, Joseph Connors, whose passion for music of the Renaissance and Baroque periods has led him to establish the series of biennial concerts that present early music in the limonaia, to the great joy of our Florentine and international public. Music has never flowered at I Tatti so rigorously as in these last eight years.

This two-day conference, exploring the connections between theatre and music in seventeenth-century Italy, was held on Thursday 20th September and Friday 21st September 2018 at the University of Cambridge. We welcomed Prof. Richard Andrews (University of Leeds), Prof. Antonio Rostagno (Università degli Studi di Roma ‘La Sapienza’), and Dr Lisa Sampson (University College London) as our keynote speakers. The conference programme included a Commedia dell’Arte acting workshop with director Ludovico Nolfi and a fully-staged performance of Monteverdi’s Il combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda (1624) in Clare College Chapel. Both events were free and open to the public. More details on the conference website: www.intersectionsconferencecambridge2018.wordpress.com