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.

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.

The sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries - the so-called Golden Age of Polyphony - represent a time of great change and development in European music, with the flourishing of Orlando di Lasso, Palestrina, Byrd, Victoria, Monteverdi and Schütz among others. The thirty chapters of this book, contributed by established scholars on subjects within their fields of expertise, deal with polyphonic music - sacred and secular, vocal and instrumental - during this period. The volume offers chronological surveys of national musical cultures (in Italy, France, the Netherlands, Germany, England, and Spain); genre studies (Mass, motet, madrigal, chanson, instrumental music, opera); and is completed with essays on intellectual and cultural developments and concepts relevant to music (music theory, printing, the Protestant Reformation and the corresponding Catholic movement, humanism, concepts of 'Renaissance' and 'Baroque'). It thus provides a complete overview of the music and its context. Contributors: GARY TOMLINSON, JAMES HAAR, TIM CARTER, GIULIO ONGARO, NOEL O'REGAN, ALLAN ATLAS, ANTHONY CUMMINGS, RICHARD FREEDMAN, JEANICE BROOKS, DAVID TUNLEY, KATE VAN ORDEN, KRISTINE FORNEY, IAIN FENLON, KAROL BERGER, PETER BERGQUIST, DAVID CROOK, ROBIN LEAVER, CRAIG MONSON, TODD BORGERDING, LOUISE K. STEIN, GIUSEPPE GERBINO, ROGER BRAY, JONATHAN WAINWRIGHT, VICTOR COELHO, KEITH POLK

This title combines historical research into the architectural and liturgical traditions of 12 Venetian churches with the results of a parallel series of scientific surveys of the acoustic properties of the chosen buildings.