Renaissance music, like its sister arts, was most often experienced
collectively. While it was possible to read Renaissance polyphony
silently from a music manuscript or print, improvise alone, or
perform as a soloist, the very practical nature of Renaissance
music defied individualism. The reading and improvisation of
polyphony was most frequently achieved through close co-operation,
and this mutual endeavour extended beyond the musicians to include
the society to which it is addressed. In sixteenth-century Milan,
music, an art traditionally associated with the court and
cathedral, came to be appropriated by the old nobility and the new
aristocracy alike as a means of demonstrating social primacy and
newly acquired wealth. As class mobility assumed greater
significance in Milan and the size of the city expanded beyond its
Medieval borders, music-making became ever more closely associated
with public life. With its novel structures and diverse urban
spaces, sixteenth-century Milan offered an unlimited variety of
public performance arenas. The city's political and ecclesiastical
authorities staged grand processions, church services,
entertainments, and entries aimed at the propagation of both church
and state. Yet the private citizen utilized such displays as well,
creating his own miniature spectacle in a visual and an aural
imitation of the ecclesiastical and political panoply of the age.
Using archival documents, music prints, manuscripts and
contemporary writing, Getz examines the musical culture of
sixteenth-century Milan via its life within the city's most
influential social institutions to show how fifteenth-century
courtly traditions were adapted to the public arena. The book
considers the relationship of the primary cappella musicale,
including those of the Duomo, the court of Milan, Santa Maria della
Scala, and Santa Maria presso San Celso, to the sixteenth-century
institutions that housed them. In addition, the book investigates
the musician's role as an actor and a functionary in the political,
religious, and social spectacles produced by the Milanese church,
state, and aristocracy within the city's diverse urban spaces.
Furthermore, it establishes a context for the numerous motets,
madrigals, and lute intabulations composed and printed in
sixteenth-century Milan by examining their function within the
urban milieu in which they were first performed. Finally, it
musically documents Milan's transformation from a ducal state
dominated by provincial traditions into a mercantile centre of
international acclaim. Such an important study in Italian
Renaissance music will therefore appeal to anyone interested in the
culture of Renaissance Italy.
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