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  • Music in Renaissance Florence: Studies and Documents
  • Bojan Bujic
Music in Renaissance Florence: Studies and Documents. By Frank A. D'Accone. pp. xiv + 330. Variorum Collected Studies Series. (Ashgate, Aldershot and Burlington, Vt., 2006, £57.50. ISBN 0-7546-5900-3.)

There is no scholar working in the field of Italian Renaissance music who is unfamiliar with Frank D'Accone's edition of the Florentine repertory in the series Corpus Mensurabilis Musicae, or with his articles on Florentine music of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. D'Accone's work has been characterized by a judicious combination of archival research and penetrating critical reasoning, enabling him to come up with narratives that are both factually precise and flowing in their prose style. Of the [End Page 608] nine essays reprinted here, the majority (seven) are primarily studies of documents while two are conceived as broader investigations of Florentine music, life, and politics in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. The documentary evidence is very much in the fore-front of the essays 'Music and Musicians at the Florentine Monastery of Santa Trinita, 1360- 1363', 'Music and Musicians at Santa Maria del Fiore in the Early Quattrocento', or 'The Singers of San Giovanni in Florence during the 15th Century'. 'Heinrich Isaac in Florence: New and Unpublished Documents', first published in 1963, has established itself as a little classic and contributed a great deal to the knowledge of the composer's biography. While by no means of secondary importance, documentary evidence serves as a starting point in 'Lorenzo the Magnificent and Music' and in 'Sacred Music in Florence in Savonarola's Time', enabling D'Accone to proceed from the evidence to ambitious interpretative sketches of an important historical period.

Articles on Isaac and on Alessandro Coppini and Bartolomeo degli Organi date from the early and late 1960s respectively, while the study of Florentine music in Savonarola's time came out in 2001. The collection thus represents nearly forty years of dedicated scholarly work. It is a measure of D'Accone's attention to detail and his scrupulous scholarly method that the texts do not appear dated. As is customary in this series, the author was given an opportunity to provide information intended to update the facts and opinions in the light of other scholars' later work and to offer his own comment on such work. Addenda and cross-referencing update the bibliographical information to as recently as 2006. Significantly, the most recent study referred to is Blake Wilson's one on Isaac in Florence, itself very much inspired by D'Accone's work of several decades ago.

The essays on Lorenzo and on Savonarola, placed more or less at the centre of the volume, form its core in the sense that here one comes across two instances of closely argued yet wide-ranging investigations of many of the threads that emerge from the archival work and then lead to interpretative syntheses. There is a school of historical thought that holds the period of Lorenzo the Magnificent as the pinnacle of Florentine culture, the fullest fruition of Medicean artistic patronage, while the following hundred or so years stand in comparison as a period of mannerist artifice and, if not exactly of decline, then a significant slowing down of the impetus that characterized Lorenzo's time. This does not quite apply to the music, which in sixteenth-century Florence was hardly in decline. D'Accone's account does not go so far as to engage with the historiography of the later sixteenth-century Florence, but in some important respects the richness of his historical observation leads one to consider how the relationship between the late Quattrocento and the first half of the Cinquecento can be construed in the Florentine context. Some of the hints are there: in the Lorenzo essay, for example, he wonders 'whether late 16th- and 17th-century Italian music . . .would have been what it became had not Lorenzo and other like-minded individuals brought all of those oltremontani to Italy in the late 15th century' (Essay V, p. 288). The Savonarola essay ends with a provocative suggestion that: 'the early Cinquecento madrigal as exemplified by Verdelot's...

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