La Cappella musicale di San Marco nell'eta moderna: Atti del convegno internazionale di studi, Venezia, Palazzo Giustiniani Lolin, 5-7 settembre 1994 (review)

La cappella musicale di San Marco nell'età moderna: Atti del convegno internazionale di studi, Venezia, Palazzo Giustinian Lolin, 5-7 settembre 1994. Edited by Francesco Passadore and Franco Rossi. (Serie III, Studi musicologici, B: Atti di convegni, 2.) Venice: Fondazione Levi, 1998. [viii, 630 p. L 80,000.]

This volume is a collection of papers given at an international study conference, The Musical Chapel of San Marco in the Modern Age, organized by the Fondazione Levi in 1994. It complements a study of music sources from San Marco from the eighteenth through twentieth centuries published in 1994-96, also edited by Francesco Passadore and Franco Rossi (San Marco: Vitalità di una tradizione: Il fondo musicale e la cappella dal Settecento ad oggi, 4 vols., Serie III, Studi musicologici, C: Cataloghi e bibliografia, 2 [Venice: Fondazione Levi, 1994-96]). Both topical and historical inquiries are presented in twenty-seven articles (twenty-one in Italian, five in English, one in French). Although they are arranged in five subject groupings, the reader also perceives a roughly equal allotment of essays among three phases: before 1650, from 1650 to 1797, and from 1800 to 1900.

Four articles deal with historiography, memoirs, and chronicles. Elvidio Surian ("Francesco Caffi storico della cappella marciana") evaluates the work of Caffi, pioneering historian and perhaps the first Italian to publish a systematic archival examination of a major regional musico-liturgical establishment. Iain Fenlon ("Music, Ceremony and Self-Identity in Renaissance Venice") notes how Venetian self-concepts, more various and subject to sociological contingencies than generally believed, were embodied in a range of distinctly local ritual forms. Berthold Over ("Notizie settecentesche sulla musica a San Marco: I Notatori di Pietro Gradenigo") examines the richly informative manuscript chronicle of an eighteenth-century patrician, while Gilberto Pressacco ("La cappella marciana nella corrispondenza Candotti-Tomadini") considers selections from the extensive correspondence of two nineteenth-century Friulian lettristi with leading musicians of the Marcian ambience in 1840-70.

Five articles examine the relationship of written musical forms and texts to performance. Antonio Lovato ("Canto fratto e polifonie semplici nella tradizione liturgica della basilica di San Marco") assesses manuscript evidence for the technique--apparently a survival of much older practices--of singing mensural versions of some genres of plainchant, sometimes in a simple two- or three-part form, or alternatim. John Bettley ("Psalm-Texts and the Polyphonic Vespers Repertory of St. Mark's, Venice") identifies local textual variants in basilica music and investigates the relationship between their frequency or decline and Venice's religious and political vicissitudes. Pier Giuseppe Gillio ("Cantanti d'opera alla cappella marciana, 1720- 1800") investigates the working profile of singers in the cappella. Francesco Passadore ("La messa a San Marco nella seconda metà dell'Ottocento") studies masses by nineteenth-century maestros in the context of chapel resources, economics, and environmental stylistic influences. Antonio Carlini ("La tradizione musicale bandistica nelle chiese e nei riti processionali: Il 'caso' di San Marco") investigates nineteenth-century "band" music, noting a new kind of public participation in events in which civic, religious, and military ceremonial intersected.

Five articles deal variously with behavioral and administrative issues. Giulio M. Ongaro ("La musica come professione nelle attività dei musicisti marciani tra la fine del Cinquecento e il primo Seicento") reviews the professional profile of singers and instrumentalists at San Marco, noting their relatively privileged situation and their range of extramural activity. Carlida Steffan ("Tempo del rito, tempo delle devozione") considers what musicians sang and played in basilica liturgies in relation to the type, concept, and form of specific ritual representations. Gastone Vio ("Le confraternite nella chiesa di San Marco") examines the activities of three confraternities associated with the basilica. Arnaldo Morelli ("Concorsi organistici a San Marco e in area veneta nel Cinquecento") documents the working competencies expected of basilica organists in...