Home | Business News | Browse by Publication | N | Notes

Giovanthomaso Cimello. The Collected Secular Works: Canzone villanesche al modo napolitano (1545).(Libro primo de canti a quatro voci (1548))

Article Excerpt
Giovanthomaso Cimello. The Collected Secular Works: Canzone villanesche al modo napolitano (1545), edited by Donna G. Cardamone; Libro primo de canti a quatro voci (1548), edited by James Haar. (Recent Researches in the Music of the Renaissance, 126.) Middleton, WI: A-R Editions, Inc., c2001. [Acknowledgments, p. vii; introd., p. ix-xxi; 4 plates; score, 160 p.; crit. report, p. 161-82. ISBN 0-89579-489-6. $74.]

Giovan Domenico Montella. Primo libro de madrigali a cinque voci. Edited by Chih-Hsin Chou. (Recent Researches in the Music of the Renaissance, 129.) Middleton, WI: A-R Editions, Inc., c2001. [Acknowledgments, p. vii; introd., p. ix-xvi; texts and trans., p. xvii-xxi; 2 plates; score, 73 p.; crit. report, p. 75-77; appendix, p. 79-90. ISBN 0-89579-497-7. $56.]

We tend to associate the Italian madrigal with places like Mantua, Ferrara, and Venice--cities that provided extensive patronage to a host of famed madrigalists such as Adrian Willaert, Cipriano de Rore, Luca Marenzio, and Giaches de Wert, among others. Or perhaps Florence and Rome come to mind as important centers of madrigal composition. But only recently have we really begun to acknowledge the important and rather distinctive madrigal tradition that developed in Naples, one that ultimately had a significant impact on madrigalists in some of the other key Italian cities (among the few studies of this repertory is Keith A. Larson's dissertation "The Unaccompanied Madrigal in Naples from 1536 to 1654" [Harvard University, 1985]). We see evidence of this influence not only in the hybrid madrigal of the latter part of the century, but also in mid-century works modeled on the villanesca napolitana--most notably those by Willaert.

In past scholarship, fifteenth-century Neapolitan music seems to have overshadowed that of the sixteenth century. We find clear evidence of this in The Renaissance: from the 1470s to the End of the 16th Century (ed. Iain Fenlon, Man & Music [Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1989]), for example, where the coverage of musical life in...

View this article FREE - Now for a Limited Time, try Goliath Business News
Free for 3 Days!