Periodic Reporting for period 1 - BEMUS (Pietro Bembo's soundscape: a musical tour in the early modern Italian peninsula)
Reporting period: 2021-04-01 to 2023-03-31
The humanist Pietro Bembo (Venice, 1470 – Rome, 1547) was a key figure of the Italian and European Renaissance. His literary works are widely known, and his rich epistolary attests to both his contacts with all the most important figures of his time and the variety of his interests, ranging from literature to the arts. The project aimed at restoring the missing musical dimension in the scholarly portrait of Bembo, exploring the soundscape in which he was immersed and his involvement in the musical milieu, and mapping the dissemination of musical settings of his literary works. Although starting from a particular angle, this project also offers a better understanding of the cultural networks of the time.
The work consisted in collecting and elaborating as much information as possible (from Bembo’s works, Bembo’s and his friends’ letters, musicological literature, and archival research) concerning Bembo’s links with music to provide a picture of his interest in this subject, of the soundscape that surrounded him, and of the musical settings of his poetry. From this research, new data emerged that have merged into the project website and the publications. For example, it is well known that Bembo opposed the request of his daughter Elena to learn to play the clavichord since Bembo himself addresses the subject in his letters. A letter written to him by his friend Cola Bruno, however, reveals that Bembo’s son Torquato had a lute master, whom Bembo never mentions (and therefore this information had not yet been taken into account by musicologists).
As for the musical settings of Bembo’s texts, around 450 different settings have been recorded in the database, which is part of the project website. The database was specially conceived to meet the needs of both musicologists, who can search for different types of data (for example, composers, editions, and manuscripts), and Italianists, who may want to know how many times a poem (or specific lines of it) was set to music. A few music scores (some of which regard pieces not available in modern editions) are downloadable from the website and may be used for both further musicological research and music performance.
The results of the project were presented at nine national and international conferences and incorporated into the project website. Two articles on specific topics were published in two international peer-reviewed journals. The study day Music and Culture in Pietro Bembo’s Padua, organized within the project, gathered scholars of different disciplines (musicology, art, literature) and contributed to making the project known to a wider audience; most of the interventions of this study day are contained in the volume of the conference proceedings.
As for the musical settings of Bembo’s texts, around 450 different settings have been recorded in the database, which is part of the project website. The database was specially conceived to meet the needs of both musicologists, who can search for different types of data (for example, composers, editions, and manuscripts), and Italianists, who may want to know how many times a poem (or specific lines of it) was set to music. A few music scores (some of which regard pieces not available in modern editions) are downloadable from the website and may be used for both further musicological research and music performance.
The results of the project were presented at nine national and international conferences and incorporated into the project website. Two articles on specific topics were published in two international peer-reviewed journals. The study day Music and Culture in Pietro Bembo’s Padua, organized within the project, gathered scholars of different disciplines (musicology, art, literature) and contributed to making the project known to a wider audience; most of the interventions of this study day are contained in the volume of the conference proceedings.
Unlike Bembo’s interest in the arts, which has aroused great interest among scholars in the last few years, the musical dimension surrounding him had not attracted enough attention so far. Bembo was usually mentioned in passing for the indirect influence of the ideas contained in his Prose della volgar lingua on the texts of madrigals, but his involvement with music has never been deeply explored. This is even more evident compared to the attention given by scholars to two other great literates of the Italian Cinquecento, Ludovico Ariosto and Torquato Tasso, whose links with music have been under investigation for years. This project tried to fill this gap, as far as Bembo’s life is concerned, based on all available documents. As for the musical settings of his texts, which – besides being hundreds – are included in collections spanning almost two centuries (from 1507 to 1687), only some case studies have been taken into account during the project. The database, therefore, provides copious material for further study. Moreover, the structure of the database was specifically designed for the project and might be used as a model for further projects dealing with musical settings of literary texts.