Journal of the Alamire Foundation

Information on Willaert’s early career is sparse, but what survives is especially rich. Anecdotes from Zarlino’s treatises and Spataro’s correspondence paint a picture of a young man on the make, but fall somewhere between interesting fact and convenient fiction. The source situation is also intriguing: Willaert’s music enjoyed only very limited circulation before the mid-1520s, with the exception of the important motet manuscript of 1518 known as the Medici Codex in which his profile is extremely high. The contextual circumstances of Willaert’s early career are no less interesting: a decade of almost incessant war and upheaval on the Italian peninsula, impacting heavily upon his employers, the Este. This article reviews the available information on the first few years of Willaert’s career in Italy, seeking to understand how he went about building his reputation, working within the systems and preoccupations peculiar to Italian courtly culture.

The Liber quinque missarum Adriani Willaert was published in September 1536 in Venice by Francesco Marcolini. It contained five masses, each an imitation or parody mass based on a motet, and each for four voices. It was the first print solely devoted to the music of Adrian Willaert, and thus occupies a most important position in his career. It was also published at a time when Willaert was still establishing himself as a figurehead in the musical life of the city of Venice. This study examines the context for the publication of this print, its dedication to Duke Alessandro de’ Medici, the association of Pietro Aretino with Marcolini, Duke Alessandro, and Willaert, and the significance of the print itself for Willaert’s career in Venice.

Although the Holy Shroud has always attracted attention, musical traces of this relic are rare. Willaert’s hymn O iubar, nostrae specimen salutis, however, is an exception. The piece was published in Hymnorum musica (Venice, 1542), ten years after the Shroud was miraculously saved from a fire in the Sainte-Chapelle of Chambéry. A close investigation of O iubar reveals a series of anomalies, such as its place in the church calendar and in Willaert’s collection. Furthermore, the provenance of its text and melody is unclear. In this article, I present hypotheses that might help us to contextualize the hymn and to explain its presence in Willaert’s Hymnorum musica.

Adrian Willaert’s madrigal Ne l’amar’e fredd’onde appeared in Rore’s third book of five- voice madrigals in 1548, eleven years before Willaert’s famous Musica nova madrigals were published but well after they were composed. As Martha Feldman has shown, the text of Ne l’amar’e fredd’onde was written by Lelio Capilupi as a tribute to Helena Barozza, likely by commission of her husband, the Venetian patrician and numismatist Antonio Zantani. Antonio and Helena were prominent personages in Venice with multiple ties to the arts and literature. Antonio’s failed attempt to publish madrigals from Musica nova, his documented interactions with Willaert’s circle, and the presence of certain technical affinities I find between the Musica nova madrigals and Ne l’amar’e fredd’onde raise interesting questions concerning the relationship between Zantani and the social context of Musica nova. The essay examines what the madrigals’ similarities and differences tell us about the private and privileged status of Willaert’s Musica nova style in connection with Venetian society and artistic patronage. Overall Ne l’amar’e fredd’onde adopts a more widely approachable style than the serious academic weightiness that characterizes the Musica nova madrigals. Yet it includes a harmonic language and expressive musical codes developed for, and prized by, the elite Venetian cultural circle for which Musica nova was intended, and apparently meant to speak specifically to Zantani, Ne l’amar’e fredd’onde’s probable patron, as well. Some technical features of the intensely private style Willaert cultivated in the Musica nova madrigals later became emblematic of Venetian madrigal style more generally.

Through an examination of images, texts, artists, composers, and the lives of royal figures, the original owners of the chansonnier London, British Library, Ms. Royal 20 A. XVI are determined in this study. Earlier scholarship suggested that the chansonnier was commissioned by Louis d’Orléans, and compiled in two parts, the first in 1483 while he was still duke, and the second approximately fifteen years later when he was betrothed to Anne of Brittany and crowned king. A fresh review of the evidence, including the pages of borders with wings (the symbol of Bourbon), indicates that the manuscript was prepared for Anne de Beaujeu (Anne of France) and her husband Pierre de Bourbon around 1488 when they gained their positions as duke and duchess of Bourbon.

Within published scholarship on the music of Alexander Agricola, the significance of the manuscript Augsburg, Staats- und Stadtbibliothek, 2^o Cod. 142a has been virtually confined to its unique transmission of one of his most popular works in the modern period, the six-voice setting of Fortuna desperata. Building on unpublished research by Joshua Rifkin, this study re-evaluates the gathering in the source containing Agricola’s music. In addition to reviewing the codicological evidence, it offers close stylistic analyses of another of the Augsburg source’s unica, a four-voice setting of the tenor of Du Fay’s chanson Le serviteur, and of the setting of Dulces exuviae, endorsing Martin Staehelin’s published suggestion of Agricola’s authorship of both works. An edition of the Le serviteur setting is included as an appendix. From all this it emerges that AugS 142a ought to be viewed as a privileged witness to the later stages of Agricola’s career.

Ample iconographic evidence exists to demonstrate that small strung keyboard instruments were quite common in medieval times. A number of surviving texts either state or imply that one manner of exciting the strings was by striking them with some kind of hammer mechanism. Chief among these sources is Arnaut de Zwolle’s well-known manuscript, which describes a number of different instrument layouts as well three different plucking actions and a simplistic hammered action. Arnaut’s text has provided a great source of inspiration for modern makers wishing to recreate such instruments, due to its relatively high degree of detail. However, precisely because it is the only such source, his solitary vision has also acted as a conceptual straightjacket, essentially discouraging any serious consideration of credible alternatives. The purpose of this study is to explore the territory beyond Arnaut, with the ultimate aim of imagining a new design for a hammered keyboard instrument not based on any one extant source, but nonetheless within the confines of medieval musical instrument making. The primary aspects of such an instrument—the stringing, the action, and the structure—are considered from two different angles: first, in the light of what hints the scant extant information provides about what probably was done; and second, in terms of what would have been possible considering what is known about general medieval mechanical and structural technology and metallurgy. This dual-pronged approach opens up the field to a broader range of possibilities, from among which one particular set of solutions has been chosen for a hypothetical reconstruction.