sixteenth century

By Jonathan R. J. Drennan

Requiems by Giovanni Croce and Giovanni Rovetta: The Requiem Mass at St. Mark’s, Venice, in the Seventeenth Century (B238) is the inaugural entry in The Requiem Mass at St. Mark’s, a three-part anthology that explores the high (or sung) requiem mass at St. Mark’s, Venice, over the course of four centuries, from the late sixteenth to the last decade of the nineteenth. The anthology, which represents the first-ever attempt to make critical editions of the requiem masses composed by musicians at St. Mark’s, includes abundant new research. There are various objectives here; primarily, I endeavor to tell the story of the Requiem, but the “package,” taken as a whole, serves to provide an engaging musical-cum-liturgical-cum-historical story of St. Mark’s and, ultimately, Venice.

By Paul Walker

“Hey Paul, could you come into my office for a moment? I’ve got something I’d like you to take a look at.”

When I heard the Music Librarian at the University of Virginia, Rya Martin, call to me from behind her desk, I stepped into her office and watched as she pulled a slender, small volume off the shelf. I recognized immediately, based on cleffing, the first page’s elaborate T, and the language, that what she had was the tenor part to a print of twenty-three French chansons, bound in an elaborate nineteenth-century binding. Tipped into the volume, presumably by the person who had had it bound, was a page from a manuscript chansonnier of the time, showing on one side an attractive full-page painting of a shawm player outside a walled city. But what was it, exactly, that we had? Most of the pieces were anonymous, although Willaert, Sermisy, and Lhéritier were named for a few, and there was no title page or colophon, since those would presumably be in the first and last partbooks respectively. Little did I know just how important this small partbook would turn out to be, much less how much effort would be necessary to unlock its secrets.

By Anthony M. Cummings

The thesis implied in the well-known phrase “from frottola to madrigal” has long been contested: Frottole and madrigals were different genres, with fundamentally different stylistic characteristics; they were cultivated by different composers, at different times in history, and in different centers of musical patronage and activity. But the profile of one composer, Don Michele Pesenti da Verona (ca. 1470–1528), complicates our current understanding. Unlike the vast majority of his fellow frottolists, Pesenti composed both frottole and madrigal-like compositions. He stood at a moment of transition between genres, and his career and creative output illuminate the complex dynamics of the moment. Along with my two distinguished co-editors, I am pleased to be able to present Pesenti’s complete surviving oeuvre in modern edition for the first time.