AMS Philadelphia 2009 Abstracts - American Musicological Society

80 Friday afternoon AMS Philadelphia 2009
Men AnD Music
Alexandra Amati-camperi, university of san francisco, chair
THE GIUSTINIANA AS EVERYDAY PRACTICE:
MALE CONVIVIALITY IN VENETIAN LIFE
Shawn Keener
University of Chicago
From the 1560s on, three-voice polyphonic works called giustiniane or veneziane were published
alongside other genres, in anthologies of their own, and in madrigal comedies. Scholars
have interpreted the flurry of giustiniane published in the 1560s and 1570s as gestures of local
musical pride. In this line of thinking, the publication of these dialect works not only
had appeal to Venetians owing to the genealogy of the giustiniana rubric (traceable to the
fifteenth-century Venetian poet Leonardo Giustinian), as well as to a roster of Venetian composers,
but also paid homage to a vigorous musical past—a past worthy of commemoration,
particularly in the wake of Willaert’s death and the subsequent ascendancy of Venetians to
positions of power in local musical circles.
This paper recognizes the importance of local appeal to pieces collected as “giustiniane”
but argues from new networks of primary texts, prints, documents, and authors that the
late-sixteenth-century genre represented inseparably gestures of civic pride and expressions of
convivial relationships, defined through performative idioms. These networks range over the
different genres of dialect literature, theater, and vernacular song, some printed and circulated
as commodities in book markets and others confined to manuscript. The resulting entity was
sometimes an ephemeral performance and sometimes a written score (still extant or not). In
either case, it invariably represented an extension of a practice deeply embedded in a culture
of convivial that united poetry, theater, and music along with conversation, intellectual pursuits,
and games.
Combining this new evidence with the results of a few recent studies, mainly literary, I
cast the playful intertextuality indigenous to the late-cinquecento giustiniana in a new light.
The “fellowships of discourse” established among literary men of sixteenth-century Venice
were built through the exchange of dialect poetry, whose language and ribald subjects marked
these men as insiders and helped them form social bonds. The play of public and private so
characteristic of these fellowships is set in high relief by the anonymous publication of works
by members of Domenico Venier’s academy in the dialect anthologies La caravana (1565) and
Versi alla venitiana (1613). The extensive web of textual concordances I have discovered in and
around the giustiniana repertoire locate it at the ephemeral edge of this long-lived tradition,
where the lightest dialect verse slips easily into comic portrayals of venezianità in the guise of
the Venetian Magnifico or Pantalone.
I will demonstrate how these threads converge by taking as a case study the Libro secondo
delle giustiniane of 1575 by the Trevisan composer Giuseppe Policreti (c. 1548–1623). Drawing
on the writings of the his lifelong friend, the physician, writer, and social-climber Bartholomeo
Burchelati, including correspondence between the two, I will argue that the Libro secondo
betrays an interest in Venetian literary and social “fellowships of discourse” on the part of the
young composer and his circle.