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Don Harrán, Salamone Rossi: Jewish Musician in Renaissance Mantua. Oxford Monographs on Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. x + 310 pp. ISBN 0 19 816271 5.

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Don Harrán, Salamone Rossi: Jewish Musician in Renaissance Mantua. Oxford Monographs on Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. x + 310 pp. ISBN 0 19 816271 5.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Tim Carter*
Affiliation:
Royal Holloway, University of London

Abstract

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Copyright
Copyright © Royal Musical Association, 2000

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References

1 Cozzolani is one heroine of Robert L. Kendrick's very fine Celestial Sirens: Nuns and their Music in Early Modem Milan (Oxford, 1996). The other major recent study of nuns’ music-making is Craig Monson, Disembodied Voices: Music and Culture in an Early Modem Italian Convent (Berkeley, CA, 1995).Google Scholar

2 See Cusick, Suzanne G., ‘“Thinking from Women's Lives”: Francesca Caccini after 1627’, Rediscovering the Muses: Women's Musical Traditions, ed. Kimberly Marshall (Boston, MA, 1993), 206–25. Compare also Beth L. Glixon, ‘New Light on the Life and Career of Barbara Strozzi’, Musical Quarterly, 81 (1997), 311–35; and eadem, ‘More on the Life and Death of Barbara Strozzi’, ibid., 83 (1999), 134–41.Google Scholar

3 This first book also (and uniquely for its date) contains chitarrone tablature for some of the pieces, with the implication that the soprano part is to be sung as a solo song.Google Scholar

4 Harrán claims this date for Rossi's Il terzo libro de varie sonate, sinfonie, gagliarde, brandi e corrente, the first surviving edition of which is Alessandro Vincenti's ‘terza impressione’ from 1623. His reasoning is explained only in Salomone Rossi: Complete Works, ed. Don Harrán, Corpus mensurabilis musicae, 100 (Neuhausen-Stuttgart, 1995), xi: the dedication of the 1623 edition bears the date 20 January 1613. The suggestion that Vincenti simply copied the date of the original dedication (hence placing the first edition in 1613) certainly is plausible, although a suspicious mind might also fear a simple misprint. There is also a problematic opus number (the 1623 edition is op. 12), which Harrán has to fudge. To resolve the question properly, we need more detailed accounts of Vincenti's reprinting strategies, of the extent to which he gained whatever rights (if any) Amadino might have held in music printed by him (for Amadino must surely have issued the 1613 edition), and indeed of the dedicatee, Ferrante Gonzaga, prince of Guastalla.Google Scholar

5 The most recent study of the Jews and Mantuan court theatre is Claudia Buratelli, Spettacoli di corte a Mantova tra Cinque e Seicento, Storia dello spettacolo: Saggi, 3 (Florence, 1999), Chapter 4.Google Scholar

6 See Parisi, Susan, ‘New Documents concerning Monteverdi's Relations with the Gonzagas’, Claudio Monteverdi: Studi e prospettive. Atti del convegno, Mantova, 21–24 ottobre 1993, ed. Paola Besutti, Teresa M. Gialdroni and Rodolfo Baroncini, Accademia Nazionale Virgiliana di Scienze, Lettere e Arti: Miscellanea, 5 (Florence, 1998), 477–511; there is also much important material in eadem, ‘Ducal Patronage of Music in Mantua, 1587–1627: An Archival Study’ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1989).Google Scholar

7 For Monteverdi's relationship with Amadino and its possible impact on the Artusi-Monteverdi controversy (Artusi was printed by Giacomo Vincenti), see Carter, Tim, ‘Artusi, Monteverdi, and the Poetics of Modern Music’, Musical Humanism and its Legacy: Essays in Honor of Claude V. Polisca, ed. Nancy Kovaleff Baker and Barbara Russano Flanning (Stuyvesant, NY, 1992), 171–91.Google Scholar

8 There is, of course, no such thing as a ‘reprint’, strictly speaking, in letterpress printing, given that every edition had to be reset. Thus second and subsequent editions are just about as labour-intensive and as costly as first editions, the only saving being in preparing the copy-text. One not uncommon (but not always noticed) exception is where leftover pages from a previous edition are simply bound with a new title-page. There is also a general tendency to place reprints lower down the hierarchy of primary sources, which at least in the case of Monteverdi (for example, his fifth book of madrigals of 1605) is a serious mistake. For some of these issues, see Carter, Tim, ‘Music-Printing in Late Sixteenth- and Early Seventeenth-Century Florence: Giorgio Marescotti, Cristofano Marescotti and Zanobi Pignoni’, Early Music History, 9 (1990), 2772.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

9 The phrase comes from the dedication to Alfonso d'Este of the first book of four-voice madrigals (1614). We also find Rossi using the same convention ('pregando nostro signore per ogni sua felicità et contento') in a letter of 21 February 1606 to Duke Vincenzo Gonzaga given by Harrán as Plate IV. Clearly the letter (save the close and signature) is in a secretary's hand, and of course that secretary might also have composed it. Other of Rossi's dedications, however, find quite ingenious ways around the ‘problem’ (if such it is). For musicians using (acknowledged or unacknowledged) professional writers to pen their dedications and prefaces, see Carter, Tim, ‘Printing the “New Music”’, Music and the Cultures of Print, ed. Kate van Orden (New York and London, 1999), 337 (p. 6). The dedication of Luzzasco Luzzaschi's Sesto libro de'madrigali a cinque voci (Ferrara, 1596), ghost-written by Alessandro Guarini, is another example.Google Scholar

10 He may, however, have sought to mitigate the effect by dedicating his first major Marino volume, the third book of madrigals (1603), to a relatively minor nobleman, Alessandro Pico, prince of Mirandola.Google Scholar

11 According to the catalogue of the Roman bookseller Federico Franzini; see Mischiati, Oscar, Indici, cataloghi e avvisi degli editori e librai musicali italiani dal 1591 al 1798, Studi e testi per la storia della musica, 2 (Florence, 1984), 244–63 (p. 259, no. 296). Rossi's prints held up quite well in the seventeenth-century catalogues, although it is hard to tell whether this just means that they languished unsold.Google Scholar

12 See Carter, Tim, ‘“Sfogava con le stelle” Reconsidered: Some Thoughts on the Analysis of Monteverdi's Mantuan Madrigals’, Claudio Monteverdi: Studi e prospettive, ed. Besutti, Gialdroni and Baroncini, 147–70.Google Scholar

13 See Carter, Tim, ‘New Light on Monteverdi's Ballo delle ingrate (Mantua, 1608)’, Il saggiatore musicale (forthcoming).Google Scholar

14 In fact, there were three performances of Il pastor fido in Mantua in 1598; see Fenlon, Iain, Music and Patronage in Sixteenth-Century Mantua, i (Cambridge, 1980), 150.Google Scholar

15 With regard to this piece, a sinfonia in Il terzo libro delle sinfonie (?1613), Harrán in fact makes the more sensible suggestion in Salamone Rossi: Complete Works, xi, p. ix, that ‘la Cecchina’ refers to either Francesca Caccini or Pier Maria Cecchini (the commedia dell'arte actor prominent in Mantua and known as ‘Fritellino').Google Scholar

16 Peter Holman, ‘“Col nobilissimo esercitio della vivuola”: Monteverdi's String Writing’, Early Music, 21 (1993), 577–90.Google Scholar

17 I am grateful to Paula Chateauneuf for pointing out to me the following instruction for a piece in ‘A major’ in Pietro Paolo Melli's Intavolatura di liuto attiorbato e di tiorba, libro quinto (Venice, 1620): ‘accorda l'ottava in ottava a quattro tasti col bordone e la undecima a quattro tasti col basso'. In A tuning, this would take the eighth string from F to F#, an octave below the fourth fret of the fifth string (= ‘bordone’, tuned to D), and the eleventh string from C to C#, (an octave below) the fourth fret of the sixth string (= ‘basso’, tuned to A). The Rossi example to which Harrán refers requires an F# in the bass; therefore his instruction would seem to refer to tuning the eighth string to the fourth fret of the fifth string (tuned to D) which Rossi calls ‘contralto’ instead of Melli's ‘bordone'.Google Scholar

18 Eric Chafe devotes an entire appendix to the issue in Monteverdi's Tonal Language (New York, 1992), 361–70, citing examples from Kircher, Sigismondo d'India and, in particular, Marco da Gagliano.Google Scholar