Barocco Padano 6: Atti del XIV Convegno internazionale sulla musica italiana nei secoli XVII–XVIII, Brescia, 16–18 Iuglio 2007 (review)

This rich offering of studies emanating from the 2007 Brescia symposium spans studies exploring aspects of performance practice, examinations of genre, and focused historical, biographical, and bibliographical accounts of diverse northern Italian baroque repertories. Among other rewarding studies on aspects of modality, Gregory Barnett (“Lo stile tonale seicentesco nella teoria settecentesca di Giuseppe Paolucci”) presents a particularly cogent reassessment of the relationship between modality and tonality in musical composition from the cinquecento through the eighteenth century. Barnett interrogates the notion and deployment of the term “tuono” as exposited by eighteenth-century musical theorist Giuseppe Paolucci as a means to reevaluate and refine current scholarly interpretation of the emergence of functional tonality. In another treatment of modal concerns, Piotr PoŸniak (“Palestrina—Frescobaldi. Una melodia— due modi”) discusses the divergent modal implications of parallel melodic profiles in Palestrina’s O lux et decus Hispaniae and Frescobaldi’s Canzon seconda (1615).

Another major strand addressed in the collection involves the investigation of stylistic features in the motet form and the relation of this form to others like the cantata. A case in point, Reinmars Emans’s “Geistliche und weltliche Stilelemente in Giovanni Legrenzis Acclamationi divote a voce sola op. 10” collates secular and sacred stylistic aspects of Giovanni Legrenzi’s op. 10 motets with his cantata output in order to extrapolate the degree of stylistic fluidity existing between the two genres. Stewart Carter (“Musical Form and Liturgical Function in the Late-Seventeenth-Century Motet: the Case of Isabella Leonarda”) utilizes the solo motets of Isabella Leonarda as a case study to investigate late seicento stylistic trends and similarities across the secular-sacred continuum and to situate them within the frame of both liturgical and nonliturgical contexts. Examining features such as textual conceits, formal construction, and typology, Carter extrapolates the positioning of these works as “a bridge between the sacred and secular realms” (p. 295). Rodobaldo Tibaldi (“Strumenti e forme strumentali nel mottetto italiano del primo Seicento: alcune riflessioni. Con una nota su Incipite Domino di Pietro Lappi”) gives an account of the role of instrumental writing in the corpus of motet publications in the early seicento. If not thoroughly exhaustive, the treatment classifies various typologies of instrumental interpolation in the motet genre, namely mere instrumental substitution, added instrumental parts to motet structures, and full-fledged vocal-instrumental interaction. Tibaldi’s appendix contains an incomplete list of prints containing motets with instrumental writing.

Some very intriguing case studies on local repertories present new perspectives on the diverse and multivalent spectrum of style and performance practice in the northern Italian baroque. In his study “L’oratorio di Papa Odescalchi. La congregazione filippina di Como e la musica,” Francesco Bustaffa recreates the Como oratory, which came under the protectorship of Cardinal Benedetto Odescalchi, the soon-to-be Pope Innocent XI. The study considers the institution’s musical life and the role of music in light of the pope’s “manifest inferiority” in the patronage of the arts as contrasted to his immediate predecessors. The musical activity at the Oratory of Santa Maria della Steccata in Parma serves as the focal point for Maurizio Padoan’s comprehensive study (“Organici in Santa Maria della Steccata (1582–1630) e contesto. Un’indagine comparata”). Padoan builds on the foundation laid by Nestore Pelicelli, amassing extensive documentary and archival material to position the community at the vanguard of baroque stylistic trends at the inception of the seicento. In “Politica in cantoria, Lineamenti e modelli di studio per un’interpretazione della musica sacra nel ducato di Ranuccio I Farnese (1592–1622),” Giuseppe Martini interprets a Farnese strategy to endorse ducal sovereignty and the claim to defensor Fidei (especially in light of the relationship to the Spanish and Habsburg thrones). Martini identifies...