By Cory M. Gavito
The three guitar song anthologies collected by Giovanni Stefani (fl. 1618–26) open us to a world in which musical performance and music editing collide in ways that reveal much about the circulation of music in the early seventeenth century. According to the Milanese printer Filippo Lomazzo, writing in a letter to the readers of his 1621 edition of Stefani’s Scherzi amorosi, “many times [in my bookshop] the present canzonettas of Sig. Gio. Stefani have been asked of me; these very beautiful pieces are played and sung with the Spanish guitar . . . the reasons for which they have had a great distribution in the world.”[1] As materials that served performers, Stefani’s anthologies document much more than the textual circulation of the popular songs they contain; they also record the performing practices and traditions of the numerous musicians who consulted them. From our modern editorial standpoint, however, Stefani’s settings present a number of challenges for those interested in charting their circulation to and from the anthologies. Most notably, Stefani does not include any composer attributions in his anthologies, only an admission that they were composed or performed by the most excellent virtuosos of his time. This living and (re-)performable repertory renders the task of reporting concordances and their “variants” a perplexing one for the editors of Stefani’s work, since all of his settings are versions, replicas, and simulacra of other, mostly anonymous songs. To complicate matters, some of Stefani’s settings may have acquired an “authorial” status after they were published, as indicated by manuscript concordances that cannot be firmly dated; this leaves open the possibility that they were copied from Stefani’s anthologies. In such cases, Stefani’s settings served as the “originals” on which later versions were based, shrouding their sources of origin, even though these were presumably familiar to Stefani. Most significantly, many of Stefani’s songs carry the imprint of oral transmission, most notably in songs that reproduce or allude only to the refrains of other songs, or those that circulate in poetry anthologies without musical notation but include textual notes that they can be sung. Furthermore, some of Stefani’s songs are based on stock formulas like the romanesca, folia, and ciaccona, whose origins are irretrievable from oral and unwritten practices.
Thus for many (but not all) of Stefani’s settings, a classic analysis of “variant” or “corrupt” sources to produce a filiation of an “archetypal” or “original” song offers editors limited help in establishing a critical report of concordances and variants. Moreover, this approach does not effectively accommodate the character of anonymity that freely circulated among the songs of Stefani’s anthologies and their concordant settings. This is true even for songs that are attributed in outside sources. Tim Carter, in dealing precisely with these issues regarding the complex and widespread transmission of “Amarilli, mia bella” from Giulio Caccini’s Le nuove musiche (1602), warns that even though the song can be clearly attributed to Caccini, the study of variants, corruptions, and other stemmatic data that emerge from the concordant versions of the song throws a shadow over the fact that it may have existed “equally well” in several guises, including anonymous ones for which the song’s “aria”—that is, the quality of its melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic character—may have been valued more than knowledge of its “authorship.”[2]
In editing the Stefani anthologies, I was tasked with the challenge of offering a transparent and authoritative report of concordances while still acknowledging the openness, variability, orality, and anonymity that characterizes the transmission of these songs to (and from) Stefani’s books. With the help of my house editor at A-R, Alexander Dean, I arrived at a solution that dealt with concordances as they emerged along a spectrum linking Stefani’s settings to their counterparts outside the anthologies. The concordances chart relationships among the sources ranging from those that show evidence of written transmission on one end to those marked by a strong degree of orality on the other, with a middle ground category indicative of some combination of these two modes of circulation. Some of Stefani’s settings, for example, appear as carbon-copy replicas of previously printed (and attributed) songs, an obvious indication that written transmission was responsible for their appearance in the anthologies. Some, however (as mentioned), concord with poetry anthologies that lack musical notation altogether but include a textual indication that they reference the same song (e.g., “per cantare sopra l’aria x,” or “to sing to the aria x”). As the nature of the concordances moves across the scale from written transmission toward orality, the more difficult it becomes to detect similarities, since a song’s “identity” is not entirely dependent on writing and is subject to change—even when written down—by virtue of its mobility through oral channels.
Many of the concordances fall in the “middle ground” category mentioned above, showing evidence of an integration of oral and written transmission. My interpretation of these concordances is indebted to scholars of oral poetry such as Adam Fox, Jack Goody, and especially Ruth Finnegan, who firmly argues that “there is no clear-cut line between ‘oral’ and ‘written’ literature, and when one tries to differentiate between them—as has often been attempted—it becomes clear that there are constant overlaps.”[3] Several of the concordances show evidence of a complex, wide-ranging, and collaborative interplay of written and oral transmission, which in turn complicates the task of sorting and tracking their circulation. One example is the song “Quella bella amor” from Stefani’s Affetti amorosi (see example 1), found variably concordant in nineteen manuscript sources and thirteen printed sources and known alternatively as “Poiché vuol amor” in some of its concordances. Already in 1618 (the same year the Affetti amorosi was published), Remigio Romano in his Prima raccolta di bellissime canzonette provided the lyrics for the poem “Poiché vuol amor,” along with the note “per cantare sopra l’aria, che incomincia Quella bella Amor” (to sing to the aria that begins “Quella bella Amor”). From this citation, it is evident that the tune was already in circulation and presumably known through oral channels, since Romano did not find it necessary to provide musical notation as he did for other poems in his anthology. This does not preclude, however, the role that written transmission may have played in the circulation of the song to and from Stefani’s anthology. For one, Romano might have had access to Stefani’s book, mining it for source material for his own anthology. Secondly, Stefani’s setting appears nearly verbatim (but without guitar tablature) in a manuscript that has been dated ca. 1600–1620,[4] and thus it cannot be ruled out that Stefani had access to this manuscript or to a now-lost printed version of the song. To make matters even more complicated, in one concordant manuscript, the song appears scored for voice and guitar with the subtitle “Gagliarda di Mantova”[5]—the name of an anonymous dance that circulated independently in instrumental sources, unearthing new/old layers of circulation likely originating in the ephemeralities of instrumental practice.
Example 1. “Quella bella amor,” Affetti amorosi, ed. Giovanni Stefani (Venice: Giacomo Vincenti), no. 5, from Giovanni Stefani’s Song Anthologies, ed. Cory M. Gavito (B213).
A final and complex layer in the concordant spectrum of “Quella bella amor” materializes in the form of what I call “partial concordances” in the critical report, in which an outside setting does not match Stefani’s entirely but contains enough similar material to mark a correspondence. The partial concordance in question is found in Claudio Saracini’s setting of “Poiché vuol amor” from his Le musiche varie (1614), where only the A section is concordant with Stefani’s “Quella bella amor”; the B section, on the other hand, bears little resemblance to Stefani’s setting, both musically and textually. Saracini might indeed be the composer of “Quella bella amor/Poiché vuol amor,” in which case the alternative B section that made its way into Stefani’s version might be attributed to the variants culled from the performance tradition of the song, one or more lost intermediary written sources, or some combination of both. These multiple scenarios of origin and circulation place Stefani’s setting in some untenable position between “original” and “version,” leaving the editor with no sensible choice other than to acknowledge this ambiguity and present the reader with a list of concordant sources, a bibliography, and a listing of specific variants that can help clarify any problems in the primary source (missing accidentals, clashing harmonies, rhythmic inaccuracies, spelling errors, etc.).
In selecting this editorial method, I was pressed to reconsider previously assigned composer attributions to some of Stefani’s songs (including my own), as the traces of orality that emerged from these concordances revealed something more compelling about their circulation than authorship. In fact, the fervent and at times perilous search for “authors” of anonymity might be a case of barking up the wrong tree, at least in the case of Stefani’s repertory, where anonymity appears to have circulated freely and without much cause for alarm. As editors of performed repertories like Stefani’s, we might be better served, instead, by paying closer attention to the readers of Stefani’s books: performers, who, eager to get their hands on Stefani’s anthologies (according to Lomazzo), played a significant role in the dispersal of this popular and enduring repertory.
Cory M. Gavito (Ph.D. University of Texas at Austin) studies the early guitar in Italy (1580–1700), focusing on how it engages with improvisation, music pedagogy, the transmission of song repertories, and the cultural landscape of the early modern Mediterranean world. His articles are published in Recercare, The Journal of Musicology, Early Music, and Early Music History. He is the editor of Giovanni Stefani’s Song Anthologies (A-R Editions, 2020) and a contributing author to Seachanges: Music in the Mediterranean and Atlantic Worlds, 1550–1800, edited by Kate van Orden (I Tatti, 2021) and Avec discrétion: Rethinking Froberger, edited by Andreas Vejvar and Markus Grassl (Böhlau, 2018). He has served as a research fellow at the Newberry Library, Harvard University (Lauro De Bosis fellow), and most recently Villa I Tatti, The Harvard Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, where he was a full-term residential fellow for the 2016–17 year.
[1] “Perché molte volte mi sono state ricercate le presente canzonette del Sig. Gio. Steffani, quali suonate & cantate tanto nella chitarra alla spagnuola . . . sono di molto vaghezza; perciò havendo esse gran ricapito in mo[n]do.” Giovanni Stefani, Scherzi amorosi, canzonetta ad una voce sola . . . libro secondo (Milan: Lomazzo, 1621), ii.
[2] Tim Carter, “Caccini’s Amarilli, mia bella: Some Questions (and a Few Answers),” Journal of the Royal Musical Association 113, no. 2 (1998): 272, https://doi.org/10.1093/jrma/113.2.250.
[3] Ruth Finnegan, Oral Poetry: Its Nature, Significance, and Social Context, rev. ed. (Eugene, Ore.: Wipf & Stock, 2018), 2.
[4] Florence, Biblioteca del Conservatorio Luigi Cherubini, C.F. 83 (“Codice Barbera”).
[5] Florence, Biblioteca Riccardiana, Ms. 2804.
