Daniel Rogers

Relatively recently a number of modern musicologists have offered intriguing conclusions concerning compositional tools and techniques in the Renaissance. Despite this body of research, a number of questions remain about how composers approached their craft. This paper explores this lacuna by placing musical composition within the larger context of artisanal production, concluding that musicians made compositional decisions within culturally recognized paradigms of making—here called creative frameworks. Broadly speaking, two frameworks are present in Renaissance conceptions of making: the first positions the maker’s body as a central part of artisanal production and the second favors the role of the mind, imagination, or intellect. Musical composition uniquely appears to occupy a place in both of these creative approaches. Practicing musicians engaged their physical body and senses in the production of a musical work while theorists insisted on a compositional approach that favored the adherence to abstract and intellectually based musical systems.

In his lauded work In the Footsteps of the Ancients: The Origins of Humanism from Lovato to Bruni, Ronald Witt describes the growth of a new aesthetic in the early modern period. In an attempt to revise some misconceptions about humanism, he recognizes that "revived interest in Latin grammar and ancient literature could not on its own have fostered Italian humanism." Instead, the real catalyst of this cultural phenomenon was a "classicizing aesthetic driven by a serious effort to imitate ancient models." For Witt, then, humanism is fueled by a particular aesthetic, an appreciation for a specific creative mode.
Musicians and music scholars of the early modern and modern periods alike have struggled to identify this creative mode in music. In the late fifteenth century, composers and writers of music, unlike their counterparts in poetry and literature, had very little evidence of ancient musical practice, frustrating any attempt to imitate their musical style. In addition, modern scholars have demonstrated that there exists a wide intellectual divide between the process of early modern musical composition and the creative literary production of humanists.
In part, this struggle to identify a humanistic aesthetic in musical composition results from problematic attempts to demonstrate similarities in the creative procedures in literature and music. Despite the enlightening conclusions from a number of scholars, musicologists have generally failed to clearly identify or quantify the role that the imitation of a pre-existing model plays in musical composition in the late fifteenth century. Instead, in this paper, I propose that imitation of this sort is a framework in which artists of various disciplines made compositional decisions. Thus, even while composers, artists, poets, or authors employ disparate procedures in composing new works, they produce those works within a common aesthetic that is characterized by intertextual references and displays of erudition.

Stefano Landi’s first opera, La morte d’Orfeo (Venice, 1619), seems at first a compilation of cultural curiosities. Unlike other operas of the period, no documents survive relating to the work’s original commission, audience, or performance. The opera’s exclusive focus on the death of Orpheus stands in stark contrast to the earlier operatic settings of the myth, each of which omits Orpheus’s tragic demise. Additionally, the plot of Landi’s opera includes several significant mutations from its classical form. This paper proposes an explanation for these oddities, by drawing on evidence from contemporaneous literature, philosophy, art, and music. 
By the time Landi’s opera was circulated, the figure of Orpheus had come to signify a number of related and culturally powerful ideals in the work of poets, writers, artists, and composers. For some he was a Christ figure, for others he was the personification of the Harmony of the Universe, for still others he symbolized the ideal diplomat, nobleman, or ruler. The depiction of Orpheus’s death in Landi’s opera dramatizes the violent upheaval of these ideals by women manipulated, infuriated, and propelled to their deed by Echo, whose disembodied voice is clearly volitional and subversive. Throughout these events, Orpheus remains true to Eurydice, happily anticipating their joyous reunion in the Underworld. Nevertheless, in a unique mutation to the traditional myth, Orpheus’s constancy in love is unrewarded, and he must drink from the Lethe to forget her. In its depiction of the dangers of unchecked female speech and the triumph over love, Landi’s opera forecasts the trajectory of later operas associated with the powerful Venetian Accademia degli Incogniti.

Stefano Landi’s first opera, La Morte d’Orfeo (Venice, 1619), seems at first a compilation of cultural curiosities. Unlike other operas of the period, no documents survive relating to the work’s original commission, audience, or performance. The opera’s exclusive focus on the death of Orpheus stands in stark contrast to the earlier operatic settings of the myth, each of which omits Orpheus’s tragic demise. Additionally, the plot of Landi’s opera includes several significant mutations from its classical form. This paper proposes an explanation for these oddities, by drawing on evidence from contemporaneous literature, philosophy, art, and music. 
The librettist’s mutations to the myth suggest an attempt to reference earlier staged productions of the Orpheus story, particularly Claudio Monteverdi and Alessandro Striggio’s L’Orfeo, reprinted in Venice in 1615. Furthermore, the figure of Orpheus had come to signify a number of related and culturally powerful ideals in the work of poets, writers, artists, and composers. For some he was a Christ figure, for others he was the personification of the Harmony of the Universe, for still others he symbolized the ideal diplomat, nobleman, or ruler. The depiction of Orpheus’s death in Landi’s opera dramatizes the violent upheaval of these ideals by women manipulated, infuriated, and propelled to their deed by Echo, whose disembodied voice is clearly volitional and subversive. Echo’s ability to speak and to manipulate without a physical body engages with the philosophy and cultural criticism of Cesare Cremonini, an influential professor at the University of Padua. As a cathartic representation of Cremonini’s well-known warnings, Echo’s invisible presence and volitional voice demonstrate the dangers inherent in the belief of the immortality of the soul and of unchecked female speech. In its engagement with these topics, Landi’s opera forecasts the trajectory of later operas associated with the powerful Venetian Accademia degli Incogniti.