Journal of the Alamire Foundation

Coinciding with the rise of chansons with Latin cantus firmi, composers in the 1450s and 1460s started using the tenors of vernacular songs as cantus firmi for masses and motets. These two groups of pieces have significant similarities, and their transmission in three cases has led to the idea that they were often conceived as pairs both in composition and for performance. This theory has oversimplified a rather more complex reality, wherein few if any of these pairs were composed as such. Nevertheless, the interchangeability of structural techniques shows a high level of compositional exchange between genres.

Composers, including Gombert and Manchicourt, brought the eloquent style of the chanson-including its syntactical aspects-into the dense polyphony of the mass through chanson allusions that invoke the charm of a love song and transform it into a Neoplatonic ideal of divine beauty. Composers reaffirmed the ideals of Erasmus, whose goal in Christianizing pagan literature was to combine eloquence with piety to create a rhetorical theology that would replace scholasticism. These practices can be viewed as musical analogues of literary borrowing practices, as analyzed by Gian Biagio Conte and encapsulated in his notion of ‘poetic dimension’ in which an artist expands the traditional ‘code’ within the norms imposed by the cultural content.

The importance of inventories for the study of musical life in Palermo has only recently been recognized. Despite the fragmentary nature of the data, these documents provide remarkable information about musical editions, instruments, the material culture that produced them, and the circulation of music. Considering the lack of surviving Sicilian musical sources from between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries, Palermo’s inventories offer evidence of the presence in the city of no-longer-extant music books, particularly printed music, but also manuscripts and liturgical books.

This essay focusses on two significant inventories from the sixteenth century. The first is the inventory of Giovanni Santoro, a Palermo bookseller, who in 1550 owned dozens of volumes, including antiphoners, breviaries, as well as polyphonic music prints (madrigals, motets, canzoni villanesche). The second inventory was compiled in 1595 after the death of Luis Ruiz, a Spanish musician documented as maestro di cappella at the Royal Chapel of St. Peter (or Cappella Palatina), the most important musical institution in sixteenth-century Palermo. Ruiz’s inventory is particularly important because it includes reference to several music sources used at the Cappella Palatina. Indeed, this is the sole source of information about the repertory performed by this institution during the period.

Until 1545, the See of Mexico was suffragan to that of Seville. While it would be easy to assume that the customs and traditions primarily utilized in the early Mexican cathedral choir were those of the cathedral of Seville, the archival evidence suggests otherwise. In 1538, an attempt was made to institute the rules of the choir in the early Mexican cathedral, but the following year individualized entries began to appear in the actas capitulares mandating specific reforms within the choir. Subsequently related entries in the actas are separated by months or in some cases years; yet a collected form of rules for the choir was not assembled until the 1560s under the auspices of Alonso de Montúfar, the second archbishop of Mexico. While the universal rules of silence and obedience-as opposed to conversations, jokes, or games in the choir-are clearly and immediately stated, there are several others that break away from strict protocol and begin to intrude upon social niceties. This raises the questions of how these become rules, and of whether the rules were really being enforced.