“Musical Networks in Bergamo and the Borders of the Venetian Republic, 1580–1630,” examines the mediation and circulation of northern Italian music through social and professional networks with an emphasis on Bergamo, a thriving musical center during this period. In so doing, I challenge established narratives of early modern history that limit centers of influence to larger cities such as Florence and Venice. A trend towards teleology has shifted musical histories towards the innovators, especially in those cities. I demonstrate through the study of musical institutions like Santa Maria Maggiore in Bergamo and forgotten composers such as Giovanni Cavaccio, who worked there as maestro di cappella (chapel master) from 1598 to 1626, that a reductive narrative of Florentine and Venetian innovation ignores the musical quotidian in the early modern period. The focus on perpetual innovation has obfuscated the reality of musical life—particularly sacred musical life—and how it relates to the larger political, cultural, and religious climate in early modern Italy, anachronistically relegating smaller cities like Bergamo to peripheral status. In addition to bringing neglected musical repertoires to life, I contribute a more robust notion of regional and interregional communication than currently recognized in musicology, thereby revealing a complex and supraregional network of musicians, composers, artists, poets, patrons, religious figures, and diplomats engaged in musical production. I additionally investigate cultural exchanges between, and exports from, Venice and German-speaking lands. The mobility of composers, musicians, and musical objects in and out of the Venetian Republic recasts the static idea of a city-centered music history into a fluid network of reciprocating influences.

Creator

• Rosenholtz-Witt, Jason

DOI

• https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-3eh5-vw12

Subject

• History
• European history
• Music history

Language

• en

Alternate Identifier

• etdadmin_upload_764519
• http://dissertations.umi.com/northwestern:15270

Keyword

• Early Modern Italy
• Sixteenth-Century Music
• Seventeenth-Century Music
• Giovanni Cavaccio
• Bergamo
• Venetian Republic

Date created

• 2020-01-01

Resource type

• Dissertation

Rights statement

• In Copyright