The Sounds of Milan, 1585-1650

Robert L. Kendrick's second book has been eagerly awaited. His huge erudition and knowledge of the Milanese scene were obvious from his earlier study of Milanese nuns' music, Celestial Sirens (reviewed in Music & Letters, 79 (1998), 273-4). The application of these qualities to a broader study of the musical life of the city from 1585 to 1650 set up keen expectations, which have not been disappointed. The present book contains an immense amount of information about music in one of Europe's important centres, which has until recently been comparatively neglected. Under Spanish control and with a strong Church influence, Milan did not on the whole attract first-rate composers. Despite its size and strategic importance, the lack of an independent court and a super-rich aristocracy meant that the most interesting figures looked elsewhere. Milan's best-known composers over this period, Orfeo Vecchi, Vincenzo Pellegrini, Giovanni Paolo Cima, and Ignazio Donati, are not household names, and Kendrick's challenge has been to make them, and a host of minor figures, interesting, which he does remarkably well. The challenge is further heightened by the fact that perhaps the best Milanese composer of the period, the nun Chiara Maria Cozzolani, is comprehensively treated in his earlier book. Indeed, this latest book is in many respects complementary to the previous one, with frequent cross-referencing.

Kendrick is emphatically not writing a study of just a few composers: his title indicates that this is a study that seeks to take a holistic view of all aspects of musical life in Milan. It is divided into three main sections, each further symmetrically subdivided into three. The first major section deals with urban spaces and their musics: the city, its two principal churches (the duomo and S. Maria presso S. Celso—the main centre for Marian devotion), other churches, monasteries, and palaces where music was performed and listened to. Then comes a central section on 'Attitudes and Actions' dealing with: music theory and aesthetics; devotional and liturgical rituals; and the people who produced and performed the music. The third and most extended section, entitled 'Musical Expresssions', divides the period into three for a detailed survey of published and manuscript music: from Carlo Borromeo's death (1584) to his canonization (1610); from then to the great plague of 1630; and from that to the deaths in 1650 of the archbishop, Cardinal Monti, and the duomo's maestro di cappella, Antonio Maria Turati. At the same time, Kendrick includes discussion of some music in every section of the book so that context and music are always closely bound together.

From the ecclesiastical point of view the dominant figure for much of Kendrick's period was Federigo Borromeo, nephew of Carlo but a more enlightened and liberal archbishop of Milan (1595-1631) than his somewhat intransigent uncle. More like Filippo Neri than Carlo Borromeo in his approach, Federigo encouraged devotion wherever he found it and was keenly aware of the importance of music in kindling it. One factor that set Milan apart was the persistence of the Ambrosian rite (referred to by Kendrick as a 'mysterious other'), allowed to continue after the Council of Trent because of its antiquity and encouraged by successive archbishops eager to recognize the city's historical importance. Associated with Milan's patron saint, Ambrose, it was an object of civic pride, even if only strictly observed in the duomo and S. Maria alia Scala. Most of the other churches, especially those run by non-Milanese religious orders, followed the Roman rite. There were considerable differences in both Mass and the offices, which meant that liturgical music written for the one rite could not easily be transferred to the other. This led Milan-based composers to concentrate more than others on writing motets that could cross the boundary; certainly motets are at the forefront of Kendrick's discussions. The Ambrosian calendar also differed from the Roman one, with more feast-days on which there was a potential audience from various social classes for liturgical music and a week-long carnival season. Duomo maestri were required to write specifically for the Ambrosian rite and, in an insightful discussion, Kendrick shows how Proper settings by Pellegrini and Donati, built over a cantus firmus in the bass, and written for four choirs accompanied by the cathedral's two fixed organs and two regals, provided a stunning audible projection of Milanese liturgical tradition to citizens and visitors alike.

Kendrick enters in medias res with a contemporary description of the entry into Milan of Margaret of Austria, on her journey to meet her new husband, Philip III of Spain (and Lord of Milan), in 1598. This allows him to introduce the city with its cast of characters and institutions as well as a piece of music specifically written for the occasion, Serafino Cantone's double-choir Audite me, divini fructus. Kendrick's great strength, in this book as elsewhere, is his ability to contextualize the music, to read both text and musical setting in a myriad ways while seeking to relate it to place, time, image, feast-day, and the various stylistic undercurrents that might have shaped it. When discussing an institution or occasion he always tries to find a piece in the surviving repertory that might have been performed. This can often be speculative, but by engaging in the process he continually links the music and its context. Similarly he tries to relate printed repertories of composers active at particular churches to the feasts, images, patrons, and special celebrations particular to these institutions. Again this can sometimes be problematic, though perhaps less so for Milan than for other large centres because of the limited number of composers publishing their music. Kendrick is particularly sensitive to place and the sonic characteristics of individual churches and spaces, something that has hitherto been given far too little attention. He gives equal consideration to decorative schemes, whether frescoes, images, or organ shutters, always seeking to approach the music in the context of the same set of experiences in which it might originally have been heard.

Despite its title, Kendrick's book is dominated by sacred music. Milan was not a significant centre for madrigal production, to which its religious atmosphere was perhaps not conducive. Of the book's seventy-three music examples only thirteen are non-sacred, and discussion of madrigal composition is largely confined to a few pages in the section on music from 1610 to 1630. The discussion here is no less rounded, but one does get the feeling that Kendrick is somewhat doing his duty by this repertory before returning to his beloved sacred music. Earlier he provides a useful discussion of a genre that he calls the 'canzona-motet', a term I have not come across before but which usefully describes a lighter sort of motet with a canzona-like opening, associated by Kendrick with processions on feast-days when vocal and instrumental ensembles performed cheek-by-jowl. The author pays due attention to music printing and its role in preserving and disseminating the Milanese repertory. Milan did have an indigenous music publishing industry, centred mainly on the printers Tini and Lomazzo, with Tradate and Rolla also participating; apart from a brief period in the early seventeenth century when Lomazzo opened up his press to outsiders, they stuck to printing Milanese music. Equally, few Milanese pieces were reprinted north of the Alps, with only Orfeo Vecchi and Giovanni Paolo Cima having any success. In general Milanese music was remarkably self-contained, although music by outside composers did find its way into the city's institutions, usually from Venetian printers.

Because of the sheer breadth of the author's scholarship this book is not always an easy read or a book to dip into. Virtually every sentence has a lot of carefully researched information, which makes for dense reading and demands a level of sustained concentration. Nor would this be an easy book for a general reader: Kendrick's discussion of the music is peppered with rhetorical and other terms, and it might have benefited from the inclusion of a glossary; one does sometimes want him to call a spade a spade—or a diatessaron a fourth! Even the general reader, though, should enjoy the sexual connotations given to cantus durus and cantus mollis in the singer Fabio Varese's seduction sonnet, which helps Kendrick illustrate the earthier side of the city's musicians' everyday lives. Occasionally, too, we need to be given the full text of a piece under discussion in order to make sense of it, as in the analysis of Gabussi's Sperent in te omnes (pp. 195-6). Indeed, given the importance of the book to a wide variety of readerships, the publishers might have encouraged the author to include not only a glossary of rhetorical and other terms as applied to music but also some information on lesser-known religious orders, such as the Somaschi. The reader would also have been assisted by tables of institutions with their maestri and singers, a list of the archbishops, some better maps of the city (the map and panorama provided are virtually unreadable, and indeed the book's illustrations are generally of poor quality).

The book is lavishly illustrated with music examples, many of them quite extended. This is certainly very welcome, given that the repertory being discussed is not otherwise easily accessible. There is, however, a downside in that textual discussion and musical illustration increasingly drift apart in some of the later chapters: by the end of chapter 8 (which has no fewer than twenty-seven musical excerpts), text and related example are fourteen pages apart, which makes for constant page-turning. Matters are not helped by the fact that, in the list of music examples at the beginning of the book, gremlins have ensured that the vast majority of page numbers are wrong—a real shame in a book of this importance. Nor does the index seem to be exhaustive. The important singer and publisher of ornamentations, Giovanni Battista Bovicelli, gets just one index reference (to his Regole, passaggi of 1594), but there are at least three other pages in the book, where he is discussed in his role as singer at the cathedral and at S. Maria presso S. Celso, which are not indexed. That said, the book is extensively endnoted and carries a comprehensive bibliography, as well as useful appendices providing information on the musical items of the Ambrosian liturgy and a calendar of feste di precetto with information on processions and the location of the main liturgical celebrations.

Quibbles aside, this is a highly significant work of musical scholarship. Robert Kendrick has provided the definitive guide to Milanese music for his chosen period but, much more than that, he has once again made a hugely important contribution to the writing of music history: Milan is the workshop in which he has honed a whole new approach to the study of early modern musical culture in the urban context, one which will form a model for a long time to come.