STATE OF THE FIELD

Performances of Identity in Early

Modern Italian Music

Andrew DellAntonio, University of Texas at Austin

SINCE THE PUBLICATION of Christopher Smalls provocative book Musicking:

The Meanings of Performing and Listening, musicologists have made much of his
eponymous concept that music is most fruitfully understood as a verb rather than
a noun and as applying to various interactions and activities surrounding the crea-
tion of soundlistening and fostering, for exampleas well as performing.1 This
concept is not news for scholars of early modern Italy, who are well acquainted
with the interconnected multiplicity of modes of engagement with sound events
that characterizes that cultural context; musicology addressing the cinque-seicento
has long been concerned with musicking-as-verb rather than music-as-noun, al-
though it is certainly useful to have the neologism in the discursive mix.
The last decade or so has seen a new interest in how identities that might have
been previously characterized as marginal allowed for modes of musicking that
complicate our picture of the early modern musico-cultural landscape. Scholars
pursuing these lines of research have directed their musicological inquiry beyond
elaborate court events for which we have music-notated documentation to clois-
tered spaces, private rooms, or gatherings far away from ocial chroniclers, nota-
tional literacy, or even desire to record the sonic event. In the process, they have
been challenging us to consider multiple ways of envisioning the sonic traces of
early modern musickingnot rejecting musical partbooks and scores as crucial ar-
tifacts but encouraging a broader set of signifying parameters that intersect with,
and sometimes even contradict, the written traces of notation. These studies under-

Contact Andrew DellAntonio at 2406 Robert Dedman Dr., E3100, University of Texas, Austin,
TX 78712 (dellantonio@austin.utexas.edu).
I owe thanks to the students who joined my graduate seminar Gender, Status, and Identity in
Early Modern Music in fall 2010, where some of these ideas were rst developed.
1. Christopher Small, Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening (Hanover, NH, 1998).

I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance, volume 18, number 1. 2015 by Villa I Tatti: The Harvard University
Center for Italian Renaissance Studies. All rights reserved. 0393-5949/2015/1801-0002$10.00

23

This content downloaded from 129.089.130.081 on September 13, 2016 09:47:39 AM

All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c).
24 | I T AT TI ST UDIES IN T HE IT ALIAN R ENAIS SANCE SPRING 2015

line the importance that the act of musicking enjoyed in the early modern nego-
tiation of the self, especially since regulated self-performance was understood as
necessary to maintaining social order: physical and mental characteristics (whether
of gender/sex, social status, confession, or other crucial parameters of identity)
could be dangerously transitory unless disciplined internally or externally.
The overview that follows is not designed to provide a full list of the most
signicant work of the last decade on early modern Italian musical culture or even
all the essays that provide relevant contributions to the topic sketched out above.
Rather, it highlights some of what I have found to be the most thought-provoking
discussions of musicking and identity across several contexts. Some of these au-
thors draw on their own experiences as performers of early modern repertories,
and on the embodied expertise of their fellow performers in the tradition, as
essential data for their interpretations. This rhetorical-interpretative move is pro-
vocative, since it opens them to accusations of anachronism and subjectivity in
projecting their own bodies into the historical bodies of the musicians whose
actions and motives they aim to interpret. Yet inasmuch as the cultural work
of musicking happens primarily through performed sound, I believe that their
determination to make audible the concerns of early modern bodies is essential
to the intellectual work that musicology can do, distinct from other kinds of in-
tellectual history.
More than twenty years in the making, Suzanne Cusicks Francesca Caccini
at the Medici Court bookends her article on that Florentine singer-composer that
opened the door to the framing of gender identity as a dening parameter in schol-
arly thinking about early modern women musicians.2 In the monograph Cusick
expands on the theme of thinking from womens lives that had informed her
early essay on Francesca Caccini, unfolding intersecting stories of gynocentric mu-
sicking establishments in which Francesca and her patrons built their musico-
rhetorical strategies (of performing but also sponsorship, listening, etc.). As Cu-
sick tells us in her introduction, she sets about reconstructing the relational
world from which Francesca would have made sense of her own experience
making sense of her identity as a complex intersection of roles, some of which
might have seemed incommensurate.3 Drawing from Adriana Cavareros Relat-
ing Narratives, Cusick challenges herself to rethink the signicance of early mu-

2. Suzanne G. Cusick, Thinking from Womens Lives: Francesca Caccini after 1627, Musi-
cal Quarterly 77, no. 3 (1993): 484507, and Francesca Caccini at the Medici Court: Music and the
Circulation of Power (Chicago, 2009).
3. Cusick, Francesca Caccini at the Medici Court, xvii.

This content downloaded from 129.089.130.081 on September 13, 2016 09:47:39 AM

All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c).
 Performances of Identity in Music | 25

sical musicking practices as crucially relationalthe performing of identity as

grounded in the building of local and shifting relationships.4
One of Cusicks most powerful arguments builds on her contention that Fran-
cescas Primo Libro delle Musiche, like her fathers more famous book, was in-
tended as a pedagogical resourceone specically intended to teach noblewomen
(and women from subordinate classes charged with helping them navigate female
spaces) the sonic performances of gender that would be eective in fostering their
rhetorical agency while maintaining the crucial feminine quality of onest. In the
process of building her argument, Cusick worked closely with Emily Van Evera,
one of the most experienced and respected singers of early modern repertories.
Thanks to this collaboration, Cusicks argument is grounded in physical realities
of vocal productionwhich, as she observes, have not changed signicantly in
the four centuries since Francescas career. The CD that accompanies the mono-
graph provides the opportunity for the reader-listener to reect on the sonic
evidence that Van Evera and Cusick bring to their joint reading of the exibility
of self-performance that Caccini shaped through her compositions, whether ped-
agogical or otherwise. Several of Cusicks (and Van Everas) examples dwell on
Caccinis elaborations of the Romanesca, a harmonic formula that was one of the
building blocks of the emerging solo-song style: the signicance of such musical
elaboration as a method of self-presentation and relational negotiation is reected
by Cusicks wry remark that the provisional title of her book was A Romanesca
of ones Own.5
As Cusick observes, Francescas sonic power was fostered by her father,
Giulio, as a direct response to the cultural desirability of the singing women of
the Ferrarese Musica Secreta of the previous generation. Since at least Tony New-
combs The Madrigal at Ferrara, scholars had been aware of the dening role
played by women performers in the signicant cultural and stylistic/aesthetic
shift that took place in the northern Italian courts in the last decades of the 1500s.6
Grounded in reliance on extant music publications, almost entirely in four-to-six
partbooks, musicologists struggled to reconcile the accounts of the virtuosic per-
formances by the Ferrarese concerto di dame with what they saw as the less elabo-
rate musical evidence in printed works by composers associated with that court
and its broader sphere. It took a groundbreaking collaboration between Laurie
Stras and the ensemble Musica Secreta to address the scores inventively, nding

4. Adriana Cavarero, Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood, Warwick Studies in European
Philosophy (New York, 2000).
5. Cusick, Francesca Caccini at the Medici Court, xxiv.
6. Anthony Newcomb, The Madrigal at Ferrara, 15791597, 2 vols. (Princeton, NJ, 1981).

This content downloaded from 129.089.130.081 on September 13, 2016 09:47:39 AM

All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c).
26 | I TAT TI STUDIE S I N T HE ITALIAN R ENAISSANCE SPRING 2015

traces of lost practices through the pragmatic insights of performance. As Stras

and her colleagues ably argued, fully veriable reconstructions of individual per-
formances were beyond the point of their project: the value of what they oered
was in the denition of an interpretative landscape and the deep relevance of
that landscape to the musical language of the ensuing published generation. The
website that Stras and Musica Secreta created with the assistance of an extended
UK Arts and Humanities Research Board grant is regrettably no longer being up-
dated, but their continuing collaboration is documented at http://musicasecreta
.com/a site that also includes links to recordings of the repertory they have ex-
plored.
Stras has continued to work with Musica Secreta (and a linked group, Celes-
tial Sirens) to build insights into musical practices surrounding Ferrarese women,
moving back into previous generations and gathering crucial parallels and in-
terdependencies between sacred and secular spheres, noblewomen and ladies of
the merchant classes, and gynocentric circles of inuence across the Po valley
states. Her monograph on the many facets of Ferrarese female secret music over
the course of almost a century is forthcoming, and it promises to be as momen-
tous as Cusicks.
Shifting performances of identity and gender through musicking in Ferrara
are also a research emphasis for Richard Wistreich, whose explorations focus on
masculinity and generational change in the person of nobleman-warrior-singer
Giulio Cesare Brancaccio, tying practices associated with the Neapolitan and
southern-Italian tradition of Cantar cavalleresco to the later Ferrarese develop-
ments.7 Wistreich explores how Brancaccios career reveals changes over the
course of the later sixteenth century as to how various ways of musicking were un-
derstood as supporting masculine self-presentation. One additional aspect of iden-
tity that Wistreich investigates is that of agespecically, the changes (decrease?)
in ability that accompany the physical aging of the performing body and the in-
herent marginalization that accompanies the age-debilitated body in early mod-
ern culture. While this issue undergirds the nal chapter of Brancaccios story
(which fades into rumor and disrepute, as is the case with many narratives of
professional musicians in early modern timesitself perhaps a commonality
worthy of investigation), Wistreich does not explore it as a central theme. This
leaves open the opportunity for future scholars to dwell on questions of age-
related disability as dening traits of identity, especially at a time when loss of

7. Richard Wistreich, Warrior, Courtier, Singer: Giulio Cesare Brancaccio and the Performance of
Identity in the Late Renaissance (Aldershot, 2007).

This content downloaded from 129.089.130.081 on September 13, 2016 09:47:39 AM

All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c).
 Performances of Identity in Music | 27

physical stamina meant nancial and social disaster for those who relied on their
exceptional physical constitution for their livelihood.
A performer-scholar like Wistreich and Stras, Nina Treadwell also brings her
own applied insight as well as that of a seasoned group of musicians to a system-
atic exploration of the performance of meraviglia through musicking, from the
multiple perspectives of musicians and patron-spectator-listener-chroniclers. Her
case study concerns the 1589 Intermedii for the performance of La Pellegrina at
the marriage festivities of Ferdinando de Medici and Christine of Lorraine.8 Like
Cusick, Treadwell provides a CD of examples that illustrate her insights and broaden
the interpretative possibilities for the reader/listener. (While there are some ex-
cellent commercial releases of the music of the Intermedii, Treadwells interpre-
tation is grounded in her nuanced scholarly thinking and bears comparison with
more widely available recordings.) Addressing the signicance of intersectional
identity in her readings of musicking surrounding the Intermedii, Treadwells in-
troduction provides a mission statement that could very well stand for the chief
concern of all the authors under consideration in this overview: I focus here on
the ways in which contemporary gender ideologies informed [musical] concep-
tions and signied (or were intended to signify) in the context of performance;
in addition, I consider the meaning-process vis--vis gender from the perspective
of the spectator-auditor.9
Performance of identity on the early musico-dramatic stage is also the focus
of Emily Wilbournes work on Virginia Andreini, actress and singer in the early
modern troupe of the Fedeli who were internationally renowned players in the
semi-improvised commedia dellarte tradition at the turn of the seventeenth cen-
tury.10 As with the extraordinary singers discussed by Stras and Treadwell, An-
dreinis role in early modern musicking had been acknowledged in previous
scholarship but subsumed under the ostensibly more documented creativity of
the composers (most notably Claudio Monteverdi) who had provided her with
sonic scripts. Conversely, Wilbourne convincingly argues that the fortune of
Ariannas Lament, an excerpt from a 1608 dramatic production that became
one of Monteverdis most iconic vocal works (one that, according to contempo-
rary chronicler Bonini, was enjoyed so much that there was no household that

8. Nina Treadwell, Music and Wonder at the Medici Court: The 1589 Interludes for La Pellegrina
(Bloomington, IN, 2008).
9. Ibid., 2.
10. In addition to the essays discussed below, Emily Wilbourne is expanding her extraordi-
nary dissertation, La Florinda: The Performance of Virginia Ramponi Andreini (PhD diss., New York
University, 2008), into a monograph that will more broadly address the inuence of the commedia
dellarte tradition in the early decades of the dramma per musica.

This content downloaded from 129.089.130.081 on September 13, 2016 09:47:39 AM

All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c).
28 | I T A T T I ST U D I E S IN TH E I T A LI A N R EN A IS SA N C E SPRING 2015

had a harpsichord or theorbo in the house, which did not also have a copy of
Ariannas Lament), was formed through the performance tradition that Andreini
established, and perhaps she and Monteverdi collaborated in the shaping of
the lament in the rst place.11 Wilbourne further explores the role played by
Andreini in performing various marginalized identities, including that of an Afri-
can slave, and how her performances could have evoked and manipulated early
modern stereotypes of various nations and ethnicitiesfrom regional traditions
on the Italian peninsula (Jewish as well as Christian) to Spanish (both peninsu-
lar and New Spain) and Moorish/African imaginaries.12
The scholars referenced above have made their concerns the musicking ac-
tivities surrounding specic individuals, whose identities and relationships were
driven by their professional engagement with performance. But for much of the
repertory represented in the urry of publications by Italian musical presses in
the latter half of the sixteenth century, the specics of performance are largely un-
known. Scholars working hypothesis is that the madrigals, canzonette, and other
genres were designed for collective performance by amateur vocalists and instru-
mentalists, whose joined voices would negotiate the rst-person poetic texts that
were most commonly set by composers. Susan McClarys Modal Subjectivities:
Self-Fashioning in the Italian Madrigal (recognized by the American Musicological
Society with the Kinkeldey Award for the most outstanding monograph by an
established scholar) grapples with how collective subjectivities were formed through
the performance of these repertories. McClary uses the nuances of sixteenth-century
modal theory (about which she has held expertise for decades) to explicate the
sonic ow and its cultural signicance, providing explanations that are broadly
accessible to scholars with minimal musical training.13
Most of the studies exploring the way musicking developed identity and re-
lationships have focused on vocal music. While this is very reasonable given the
rhetorical focus on vocal expression in commentary about various strands of
new music at the turn of the seventeenth century, this emphasis can obscure

11. An extensive discussion of Ariannas Lament and Andreinis role in its extraordinary early
circulation is in chap. 3 of La Florinda (ibid., 227330); the quote by Bonini is translated on 26970.
12. Emily Wilbourne, Lo Schiavetto (1612): Travestied Sound, Ethnic Performance, and the Elo-
quence of the Body, Journal of the American Musicological Society 63, no. 1 (2010): 144. Wilbourne
addresses Andreinis staged performance of female subjectivity through eroticism in Amor nello
specchio (1622): Mirroring, Masturbation and Same-Sex Love, Women and Music: A Journal of Gen-
der and Culture 13 (2009): 5465.
13. Susan McClary, Modal Subjectivities: Self-Fashioning in the Italian Madrigal (Berkeley, 2004).
McClary narrates how the compelling sonic language of sixteenth-century modes was transformed
in the ensuing decades in her Desire and Pleasure in Seventeenth-Century Music (Berkeley, 2012).

This content downloaded from 129.089.130.081 on September 13, 2016 09:47:39 AM

All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c).
 Performances of Identity in Music | 29

the tremendous role that musical instruments played in those stylistic and cultu-
ral changes. One scholar who is foregrounding instrumental practice, contextual-
izing it within early modern preoccupations with the intersection between tech-
nology and individualism, is Rebecca Schaefer Cypess. Her writing is especially
ingenious in its weaving together of various interdisciplinary concerns and is
designed to speak to a scholarly community that traverses the arts and the social
sciences (and even the history of science, given her intriguing parallel between con-
temporaneous treatises on music/dance and various theories of physics and astron-
omy).14 Cypesss forthcoming monograph is poised to bring about what I consider
the most signicant reconsideration of the broader importance of instrumental
music for early seventeenth-century culture in the last several decades.15
While the authors noted above often reference the erotic potential of music,
and the concomitant danger to the reputation of (especially female) musicians, two
very recent collections take the role of sexuality and eroticism in early modern
musical culture as their focus.16 As the editors of one of the collections observe,
the erotic discourse surrounding musicking was arguably most powerful when
it [was] performed and heard in company. Eroticism was crucial in the construc-
tion of social identity because it was also intrinsically political in support of the
status quo: by revealing the eshly commonality of noble and plebeian, it simul-
taneously [narrowed] the distance and emphasizes the gulf between them.17
One authors work is featured in both of these collections, and her readings
are especially relevant to the topic of identity and musicking, drawing on paired
transgressive situations: subordinate male challenges to social authority and fe-
male sexual/social agency. In both collections Melanie Marshall focuses on a
book of villotte published in 1541 by Alvise Castellino and dedicated to Ercole
DEste, Duke of Ferrara, arguing that these works can be understood as embody-
ing gestures of male homosociality and containing challenges or critiques at a
court in which power dynamics of both gender and rank were understood as

14. Rebecca Schaefer Cypess, Instrumental Music and Conversazione in Early Seicento Venice:
Biagio Marinis Aetti musicali (1617), Music and Letters 93, no. 4 (2012): 45378, Die Natur und
Kunst zu betrachten: Carlo Farinas Capriccio stravagante (1627) and the Cultures of Collecting at
the Court of Saxony, Musical Quarterly 95, no. 1 (2012): 13992, and Memento mori Froberger?
Locating the Self in the Passage of Time, Early Music 40, no. 1 (2012): 4554.
15. Rebecca Schaefer Cypess, Curious and Modern Inventions: Instrumentality and Italian In-
strumental Music, 16101630 (Chicago, forthcoming).
16. Melanie L. Marshall, Linda L. Carroll, and Katherine A. McIver, eds., Sexualities, Textuali-
ties, Art and Music in Early Modern Italy (Farnham, 2014); Bonnie J. Blackburn and Laurie Stras,
eds., Eroticism in Early Modern Music (Farnham, 2015).
17. Bonnie J. Blackburn, Introduction: Encoding the Musical Erotic, in Blackburn and Stras,
Eroticism in Early Modern Music, 12, 4.

This content downloaded from 129.089.130.081 on September 13, 2016 09:47:39 AM

All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c).
30 | I T A T T I ST U D I E S IN TH E I T A L I A N R ENA IS SA N C E SPRING 2015

contentious because of the complexity of Ercoles relationship with his new wife
Rene de France. Performances at court of songs that played out these challenges
could provide embodiment of both inappropriate and appropriate relationships as
well as demonstrations of the princes tolerance and understanding (and thus
control), and their publication was a further display of carefully framed trans-
gression.18
An entirely dierent facet of performance of bodily identity through music-
king connects to the sacred. Musicking as an integral component of salvation and
Christian-Catholic identity was a crucial aspect of the missions undertaken by
the Church Militant in the decades after the Council of Trent, in the New World
but also in locations closer to Rome. One of the projects recently undertaken
by Daniele Filippi connects to the Jesuit development and deployment of sing-
ing methods for Roman catechism in the Indie di quaggithe indies in the
southern hinterlands of the Italian peninsula. As Filippi argues, construction of
Catholic selfhood through sound was as carefully planned as textual exegesis and
considered fully as crucial to the Jesuit missions throughout their global eort.19
Of course the Church Militant was equally concerned with urban activity
closer to its Holy See, and here some of the most intriguing work comes from
Noel ORegan, who has long been exploring the role of musicking in Roman con-
fraternity life from the fteenth century well into the seventeenth.20 A central
element of ORegans most recent work relates to confessional identity and the
role that combinations of vernacular and Latin devotional singing played in un-
derstandings of faith in post-Tridentine Catholic fraternal orders, especially in

18. Melanie L. Marshall, Far quel che mi piacer: Fictional Women in Villotta Voice Resistance,
in Marshall, Carroll, and McIver, Sexualities, Textualities, Art and Music in Early Modern Italy, 83114,
and Imitating the Rustic and Revealing the Noble: Music and Masculinities at the Court of Ferrara, in
Blackburn and Stras, Eroticism in Early Modern Music.
19. Filippis broad research project on early modern Catholic musicking is inventively multifaceted
and elegantly outlined on his web page The Soundscape of Early Modern Catholicism (http://www
.selvarmonica.com/the-soundscape-of-early-modern-catholicism.html).
20. Noel ORegan, Institutional Patronage in Post-Tridentine Rome: Music at Santissima Trinit dei
Pellegrini, 15501650 (London, 1995); among ORegans several more recent explorations of confra-
ternity musicking are Giovanni Maria Nanino and the Roman Confraternities of His Time, in Atti e
memorie della Societ Tibertina di storia e darte: Atti della Giornata internazionale di studio, Tivoli,
26 October 2007, ed. Giorgio Monari and Federico Vizzaccaro (Tivoli, 2008), 11327, Music at Roman
Confraternities to 1650: The Current State of Research, Analecta Musicologica 45 (2011): 13258, and
Confraternity Statutes in Early Modern Rome: What Can They Tell Us about Musical Practice? in Atti
del Congresso Internazionale di Musica Sacra in occasione del centenario di fondazione del PIMS Roma,
26 maggio-1 giugno 2011, ed. Antonio Addamiano and Francesco Luisi (Vatican City, 2013), 487501.
Similar research on musicking related to the Venetian Scuole is reected in Jonathan Glixon, Honoring
God and the City: Music at the Venetian Confraternities, 12601807 (New York, 2003).

This content downloaded from 129.089.130.081 on September 13, 2016 09:47:39 AM

All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c).
 Performances of Identity in Music | 31

the wake of the prominent move to vernacular-congregational sung worship

by the central-European Evangelical and Calvinist reformers.21
ORegans research has also extended to Roman cloistered women religious,
perhaps the identity group for whom the cultural signicance of musicking has
the most established scholarly tradition, concerning the Italian peninsula princi-
pally through the work of Craig Monson, Robert Kendrick, Kimberlyn Montford,
and Colleen Reardon.22 For her part, Cusick also addresses Francescas role in
the shaping of early modern nuns musicking, showing how sacred and secular
spheres were especially intertwined in elite gynocentric Florentine social circles,
and Strass forthcoming work will demonstrate how that link was just as perva-
sive in the courts of the Po valley in earlier generations.
Such scholarly inquiries into (and stories about) sonic performances of iden-
tity provide an increasingly rich accounting of how musicking was both a com-
mon concern and an opportunity for distinction in the early modern creation
of relationship webs, on the Italian peninsula and beyond. The integration of
insights from musical performance as well as cultural history helps us to com-
bine sensual and intellectual understanding of these expressive cultural artifacts,
giving us the opportunity to dwell on the unique and increasingly crucial role
that musicking played in the shaping of culture in the cinque-seicento.

21. My own Listening as Spiritual Practice in Early Modern Italy (Berkeley, 2011) is designed to
address elite concerns with musicking, especially the question of interpretative agency and spiritual
propriety on the listeners part.
22. Noel ORegan, Scandal Averted: The Case of the Papal Singer Giovanni Luca Conforti and
the Nuns of S. Caterina dei Funari, in Early Modern Rome, 13411667: Proceedings of a Conference
on Early Modern Rome Held on May 1315, 2010 in Rome, ed. Portia Prebys (Ferrara, 2011), 20512.
For crucial earlier work on early modern Italian women religious, see Craig A. Monson, Disembodied
Voices: Music and Culture in an Early Modern Italian Convent (Berkeley, 1995); Robert Kendrick,
Celestial Sirens: Nuns and Their Music in Early Modern Milan (Oxford, 1996); Kimberlyn Winona
Montford, Music in the Convents of Counter-Reformation Rome (PhD diss., Rutgers, 1999); Col-
leen Reardon, Holy Concord within Sacred Walls: Nuns and Music in Siena, 15751700 (Oxford,
2001).

This content downloaded from 129.089.130.081 on September 13, 2016 09:47:39 AM

All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c).