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.
