This book offers an overview of all facets of musical life in sixteenth-century Venice. It addresses the city’s institutions (churches, confraternities, and academies) against the background of public and private occasions of music making. Supported by a generous collection of archival, literary, and iconographical sources, it treats both ceremonial life in the Serenissima and private forms of patronage. The Companion also addresses the dense web of musical activity (from chapel masters and singers to instrumentalists and instrument makers to music printers and theorists) and the rich variety of styles and musical genres (the frottola, the madrigal, motets and masses, instrumental music, polychoral music, Venetian-language polyphony), broadening the geographical perspective beyond the Veneto to Istria and Dalmatia. Contributors are Rodolfo Baroncini, Sherri Bishop, Bonnie J. Blackburn, David Bryant, Ivano Cavallini, Paolo Da Col, Daniel Donnelly, Rebecca Edwards, Iain Fenlon, Jonathan Glixon, Don Harrán (†), Jeffrey Kurtzman, Giulio M. Ongaro, Francesco Passadore, Elena Quaranta, Katelijne Schiltz, Eleanor Selfridge-Field, and Giovanni Zanovello.

This volume examines the commerce of music and its connection to the printing and publishing industry in mid-sixteenth century Venice. It presents a broad portrayal of the Venetial music booktrade and explores business strategies.

This volume discusses the commerce of music and its connection to the printing and publishing industry in mid-sixteenth century Venice. Music printers occupied a unique niche in the Renaissance printing world because their product appealed to those with sophisticated taste and was not readable by the entire literate public. Bridging the gap between music and other disciplines, Bernstein demonstrates here that the role of a music printer can be discussed as part of the larger cultural and economic question of the success of a commercial enterprise.

Explores the role of music in the cultural, religious, and political upheavals of late Renaissance Italy, revealing how musical activity of all kinds was instrumentalized by those in power. Italian culture did not lose its vigour after 1530, but underwent a transformation.

This interdisciplinary volume gathers essays by leading international scholars in the fields of Italian Renaissance literature, music, history and history of art to address the fertile question of the relationship between religious change and shifting cultural forms in sixteenth-century Italy. Each contribution examines the effects of the profound religious changes that took place in the period on cultural forms, seeking to establish an 'aesthetics of reform' for the sixteenth century.

Eminent music historian H.C. Robbins Landon and acclaimed historian John Julius Norwich combine their talents in examining the unique role of music in the life of Venice and Venice in the life of music. A lavishly illustrated celebration that truly captures the spirit and music of this beautiful city. 200 illustraions, 49 in full color. Discography.