Giovanni Paolo Di Stefano
Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, Decorative Arts, Department Member
- Organology, Musical Instruments, Musical Instrument Technology, History of music, Piano, Organ And Historical Keyboards (E.G., Harpsichord), and 19 moreEarly Keyboard Instruments, Harpsichord, Violin Making History, Organology - Nineteenth Century Piano Studies, Musicology, Museums, History of musical instruments makers, History of musical instruments, Pianoforte, Organologly, Violin Making, Organología, Keyboard Instruments, Dendrochronology Musical Instruments, Violin, Historically Informed Performance (HIP), Early Music, Baroque Music, and music in XVII centuryedit
- Giovanni Paolo Di Stefano is the curator of musical instruments at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. His research interes... moreGiovanni Paolo Di Stefano is the curator of musical instruments at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. His research interests focus on the history and technology of musical instruments, in particular the piano. He has published widely and has taught organology at Italian universities and conservatories for more than ten years. He is an Advisory Board Member of CIMCIM, the International Committee of Music Museums of ICOM (The International Council of Museums).edit
Questo volume, dedicato alla storia del pianoforte in Italia, è il frutto di un progetto di ricerca ventennale, culminato in un convegno internazionale presso il Museo di San Colombano – Collezione Tagliavini di Bologna. Inventato a... more
Questo volume, dedicato alla storia del pianoforte in Italia, è il frutto di un progetto di ricerca ventennale, culminato in un convegno internazionale presso il Museo di San Colombano – Collezione Tagliavini di Bologna. Inventato a Firenze intorno all’anno 1700 dal celebre cembalaro padovano Bartolomeo Cristofori, il pianoforte ha avuto un enorme impatto sulla storia della musica degli ultimi tre secoli. Il testo analizza, per la prima volta in modo unitario, il ruolo che le attività manifatturiere legate alla fabbricazione del pianoforte hanno ricoperto nella cultura e nell’economia italiana tra gli anni successivi all’invenzione dello strumento e l’età contemporanea. Largo spazio è dedicato allo studio delle caratteristiche tecnologiche dei pianoforti storici di costruzione italiana, di cui si conservano numerosi esemplari presso musei e collezioni in tutto il mondo. I diciotto saggi che compongono questo libro hanno dunque l’effetto di riscrivere — sulla scorta di un cospicuo scavo documentario e di significativi aggiustamenti critici — un importante capitolo della storia di uno degli strumenti musicali più diffusi e amati nella moderna cultura occidentale.
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Bartolomeo Cristofori is one of the most famous musical instrument makers. He is renowned for the invention of the piano. His sophisticated hammer mechanism was taken up by his pupil and follower, Giovanni Ferrini. This book presents the... more
Bartolomeo Cristofori is one of the most famous musical instrument makers. He is renowned for the invention of the piano. His sophisticated hammer mechanism was taken up by his pupil and follower, Giovanni Ferrini. This book presents the proceedings of the international conference held in 2017 in Bologna during which international experts analysed the work of Cristofori, Ferrini and their followers, presenting them in relation to contemporary sources.
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Il volume (edito in italiano e inglese) illustra la storia e le caratteristiche costruttive di cinquantacinque antichi strumenti musicali a corde della collezione del Conservatorio Luigi Cherubini oggi custoditi presso la Galleria... more
Il volume (edito in italiano e inglese) illustra la storia e le caratteristiche costruttive
di cinquantacinque antichi strumenti musicali a corde della collezione del
Conservatorio Luigi Cherubini oggi custoditi presso la Galleria dell’Accademia di Firenze.
Di questa importante raccolta fanno parte anche rari strumenti provenienti dalle
collezioni fiorentine Kraus e Bardini, mai descritti in precedenti pubblicazioni.
Tra gli esemplari analizzati spiccano la spinetta ovale del 1690 realizzata dal
celebre cembalaro Bartolomeo Cristofori (prima opera nota di questo costruttore),
il pianoforte a coda verticale del 1739 di Domenico Del Mela (il più antico
pianoforte verticale del mondo) nonché pregevoli mandolini, mandole, chitarre,
salteri e rari strumenti extraeuropei.
Il testo, secondo volume della serie dedicata al catalogo completo della collezione
del Conservatorio di Firenze, è corredato da un ricco apparato fotografico di oltre duecento immagini.
di cinquantacinque antichi strumenti musicali a corde della collezione del
Conservatorio Luigi Cherubini oggi custoditi presso la Galleria dell’Accademia di Firenze.
Di questa importante raccolta fanno parte anche rari strumenti provenienti dalle
collezioni fiorentine Kraus e Bardini, mai descritti in precedenti pubblicazioni.
Tra gli esemplari analizzati spiccano la spinetta ovale del 1690 realizzata dal
celebre cembalaro Bartolomeo Cristofori (prima opera nota di questo costruttore),
il pianoforte a coda verticale del 1739 di Domenico Del Mela (il più antico
pianoforte verticale del mondo) nonché pregevoli mandolini, mandole, chitarre,
salteri e rari strumenti extraeuropei.
Il testo, secondo volume della serie dedicata al catalogo completo della collezione
del Conservatorio di Firenze, è corredato da un ricco apparato fotografico di oltre duecento immagini.
Research Interests: Organology, Musical Instrument Technology, Stringed Instruments, Musical Instruments, History of musical instruments makers, and 9 moreCT scanning, Dendrochronology Musical Instruments, Organologly, Musical Instruments Classification Organology Hornbostel-Sachs Museum Electronic, Organología, Ethnomusicology, Anthropology of music, Organology, Stringed Instrument Acoustics, Early Stringed Instruments, and Baroque Bows and Stringed Instruments
This volume gives on overview on the history of musical instruments in Sicily from Ancient Times to the Present. It includes essays by Giovanni Paolo Di Stefano (Musical instruments in Sicilian Collections), Sergio Bonanzinga (Traditional... more
This volume gives on overview on the history of musical instruments in Sicily from Ancient Times to the Present. It includes essays by Giovanni Paolo Di Stefano (Musical instruments in Sicilian Collections), Sergio Bonanzinga (Traditional Sicilian Musical Instruments), Angela Bellia (Archaelogical Musical Instruments in Siciliy), Selima Giuliano and Sandra Proto (The Decoration of Musical Instruments in Sicilian Collections). Furthermore, the catalogue includes 100 entries of instruments in Sicilian museums and collections (idiophones, membranophones, woodwind and brass instruments, necked bowed and plucked-string instruments, keyboard instruments, mechanical instruments). 256 pages; c. 250 colour photographs and drawings; texts in Italian (the book is available for free, please contact me for further information).
Research Interests: Musicology, Organology, Musical Instrument Technology, Etnomusicology, Musical Instruments, and 11 moreEarly Musical Instrument Iconography, History of musical instruments makers, Ancient Greek Musical Instruments, Etnomusicologia, Etnomusicología, Organologly, Organología, Ethnomusicology, Anthropology of music, Organology, Organologia, Historical Etnomusicology, and Archaeo-Organology
Tra il 1767 e i primi decenni del secolo successivo, il monumentale organo costruito dal napoletano Donato Del Piano per la chiesa del convento benedettino di San Nicolò l’Arena di Catania, con le sue tre consolles che consentono a tre... more
Tra il 1767 e i primi decenni del secolo successivo, il monumentale organo costruito dal napoletano Donato Del Piano per la chiesa del convento benedettino di San Nicolò l’Arena di Catania, con le sue tre consolles che consentono a tre organisti di suonare contemporaneamente, fu uno strumento unico nel suo genere in Italia e nel mondo. In breve tempo, questo organo «meraviglioso» divenne una delle principali attrazioni turistiche della città di Catania e attirò presso il grande convento benedettino viaggiatori, letterati, musicisti e semplici curiosi che ebbero la ventura di ascoltare il suono di questo mirabile strumento musicale.
Questo libro, grazie all’apporto di storici, organologi, storici della musica, storici dell’arte, restauratori, esecutori e attraverso la disanima di documenti e di materiali inediti, ripercorre le vicende umane e professionali di Donato Del Piano, uno dei più grandi organari del Settecento, analizza le caratteristiche tecnologiche dei suoi strumenti e descrive l’impegnativo lavoro di restauro che nel 2004 ha consentito il ripristino funzionale del grandioso organo di San Nicolò l’Arena.
Il volume è il XII numero della Collana d’arte Organaria edito dall’Associazione Giuseppe Serassi di Guastalla (RE): di 320 pagine, è corredato da un apparato fotografico di oltre 200 immagini a colori.
Questo libro, grazie all’apporto di storici, organologi, storici della musica, storici dell’arte, restauratori, esecutori e attraverso la disanima di documenti e di materiali inediti, ripercorre le vicende umane e professionali di Donato Del Piano, uno dei più grandi organari del Settecento, analizza le caratteristiche tecnologiche dei suoi strumenti e descrive l’impegnativo lavoro di restauro che nel 2004 ha consentito il ripristino funzionale del grandioso organo di San Nicolò l’Arena.
Il volume è il XII numero della Collana d’arte Organaria edito dall’Associazione Giuseppe Serassi di Guastalla (RE): di 320 pagine, è corredato da un apparato fotografico di oltre 200 immagini a colori.
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The book describes the musical instruments preserved at Palazzo Mirto in Palermo. The collection includes a grand piano by Mathias Jakesch (Vienna, 1827), a mechanical organ by Anton Beyer (Naples, c. 1840), a grand piano by Pleyel... more
The book describes the musical instruments preserved at Palazzo Mirto in Palermo. The collection includes a grand piano by Mathias Jakesch (Vienna, 1827), a mechanical organ by Anton Beyer (Naples, c. 1840), a grand piano by Pleyel (Paris, 1858), an upright piano by Koelliker & Grammer (Zurich, c. 1870).
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The Rijksmuseum, the Dutch national museum of art and history, boasts over one million objects, including a major collection of early musical instruments. The documentation relating to the collection, which has been scattered among... more
The Rijksmuseum, the Dutch national museum of art and history, boasts over one million objects, including a major collection of early musical instruments. The documentation relating to the collection, which has been scattered among different archives and databases until recently, includes a massive amount of analogue and digital data that are not interconnected or cross referenced. The size and long history of the Rijksmuseum collection and the resulting heterogeneity of the information resources related to it, make its access particularly challenging. Although most of the physical files can be accessed on site upon request, the Museum sees the digitisation of these documents as a high priority. To this end, in the last few years, the Museum has been focusing on projects that aim to sort, optimise, and make digitally accessible the entire corpus of object documentation in an efficient way. The digitised files have been exported to JOIN, a standard, cloud-based records-management application.
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The collection of musical instruments belonging to the Florence Conservatory, housed today at the Galleria dell’Accademia, includes a piano action known as the Gatti-Kraus action, ostensibly by Bartolomeo Cristofori, that belonged to the... more
The collection of musical instruments belonging to the Florence Conservatory, housed today at the Galleria dell’Accademia, includes a piano action known as the Gatti-Kraus action, ostensibly by Bartolomeo Cristofori, that belonged to the Florentine collector Alessandro Kraus. Around 1900, Kraus was held to be the expert on Cristofori; he owned five Cristofori instruments: the spinetta ovale of 1693, the spinettone da orchestra, the harpsichords of 1722 and 1726 and, most importantly here, the piano of 1726. These he sold in 1908 to Georg Heyer in Cologne.
Kraus appears to have acquired the Gatti-Kraus action at about the time he sold his Cristofori instruments. After the sale, he expressed his pride in owning the only remaining witness of Cristofori’s work as a piano maker in Italy: the Gatti-Kraus action. The action has been shown to comprise only a few items by Cristofori and that most of it is concocted, copied from the action of the 1726 piano. Authentic parts, including a key lever and a damper, must have been taken from the 1726 piano before it left Florence. Kraus must have commissioned the new action and the incorporation in it of the parts from the 1726 piano.
In the 1870s, Kraus was one of those involved in what may be seen as an intellectual fight to establish Cristofori as the piano’s inventor. The background to this was the growing sense of nationalism after the consolidation of the unification of Italy in 1861. The invention of the piano had been ascribed by others to the ‘German’ Schröter and the French Marius. To establish the ‘Italian’ Cristofori was clearly a matter not only of Kraus’s personal pride but also of national pride.
The 1720 piano by Cristofori had already been sold to the USA and the one of 1722 had not yet surfaced when Kraus decided to sell his 1726 piano to Heyer. For Kraus, this decision to renounce the last remaining vestige of a Cristofori piano would have needed compensation. This must have been the reason he had the Gatti-Krauss action made. Perhaps by retaining parts of the 1726 action and using them in a copy, he could tell himself that he still owned something of a Cristofori piano. His story to the world was a different fairy-tale: he had found the action in a dilapidated instrument at an antique dealer’s shop.
Kraus appears to have acquired the Gatti-Kraus action at about the time he sold his Cristofori instruments. After the sale, he expressed his pride in owning the only remaining witness of Cristofori’s work as a piano maker in Italy: the Gatti-Kraus action. The action has been shown to comprise only a few items by Cristofori and that most of it is concocted, copied from the action of the 1726 piano. Authentic parts, including a key lever and a damper, must have been taken from the 1726 piano before it left Florence. Kraus must have commissioned the new action and the incorporation in it of the parts from the 1726 piano.
In the 1870s, Kraus was one of those involved in what may be seen as an intellectual fight to establish Cristofori as the piano’s inventor. The background to this was the growing sense of nationalism after the consolidation of the unification of Italy in 1861. The invention of the piano had been ascribed by others to the ‘German’ Schröter and the French Marius. To establish the ‘Italian’ Cristofori was clearly a matter not only of Kraus’s personal pride but also of national pride.
The 1720 piano by Cristofori had already been sold to the USA and the one of 1722 had not yet surfaced when Kraus decided to sell his 1726 piano to Heyer. For Kraus, this decision to renounce the last remaining vestige of a Cristofori piano would have needed compensation. This must have been the reason he had the Gatti-Krauss action made. Perhaps by retaining parts of the 1726 action and using them in a copy, he could tell himself that he still owned something of a Cristofori piano. His story to the world was a different fairy-tale: he had found the action in a dilapidated instrument at an antique dealer’s shop.
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The paper here described focuses on the conservation treatment and reconstruction of a muselaar virginal, built in 1640 by the famous Ioannes Ruckers of Antwerp, which is preserved at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. The ongoing Ruckers... more
The paper here described focuses on the conservation treatment and reconstruction of a muselaar virginal, built in 1640 by the famous Ioannes Ruckers of Antwerp, which is preserved at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. The ongoing Ruckers Muselaar Project aims to develop a new approach to the eternal problem of balancing the three goals of understanding the instrument's original state, of determining how to preserve it better, and of finding a way to give its original function as a musical instrument new life without compromising its preservation.
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This contribution analyses the Cristofori piano action which is preserved at the Galleria dell'Accademia in Florence and reveals a new incredible discovery regarding its link with the 1726 piano which is preserved in the Museum of Musical... more
This contribution analyses the Cristofori piano action which is preserved at the Galleria dell'Accademia in Florence and reveals a new incredible discovery regarding its link with the 1726 piano which is preserved in the Museum of Musical Instruments in Leipzig.
Research Interests: Musicology, Organ And Historical Keyboards (E.G., Harpsichord), Piano, Organology, Musical Instrument Technology, and 8 moreHarpsichord, Musical Instruments, History of musical instruments makers, Musical Instrument Design, Early Keyboard Instruments, Pianoforte, Musical Instrument Making, and History of musical instruments
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Vincenzo Trusiano Panormo is usually considered to be one of the finest violinmakers of the second half of the 18th century. However, much of what has been written on his early life is not based on any documentary evidence. This paper... more
Vincenzo Trusiano Panormo is usually considered to be one of the finest violinmakers of the second half of the 18th century. However, much of what has been written on his early life is not based on any documentary evidence. This paper reveals new documentary findings concerning the biography of this important instrument maker and on other members of the Panormo family in Italy.
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The article gives on overview on the history of musical instruments in Sicily from the fifteenth to the twentieth century (idiophones, membranophones, woodwind and brass instruments, necked bowed and plucked-string instruments, keyboard... more
The article gives on overview on the history of musical instruments in Sicily from the fifteenth to the twentieth century (idiophones, membranophones, woodwind and brass instruments, necked bowed and plucked-string instruments, keyboard instruments, mechanical instruments).
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The article provides an overview of the Pleyel company during a fifty-year period, starting at the time of the 1855 Exposition Universelle in Paris and the death of the well-known piano maker Camille Pleyel. During this period, the famous... more
The article provides an overview of the Pleyel company during a fifty-year period, starting at the time of the 1855 Exposition Universelle in Paris and the death of the well-known piano maker Camille Pleyel. During this period, the famous French firm was directed by Auguste Wolff (from 1855 to 1887) and Gustave Lyon (from 1887 to the beginning of twentieth century). The entrepreneurial talents, scientific abilities and musical skills of Pleyel’s two successors made this company the biggest and most innovative French piano producer of the second half of the nineteenth century. Both Wolff and Lyon played leading roles on the occasion of universal exhibitions in which they promoted their renowned pianos as well as many of their new inventions which are described in the article: the piano à double percussion, the piano-pédalier, the clavier transpositeur, the pédale tonale, the harpe éolienne, the new-designed clavecin, the piano-double, the harpe chromatique, the harpe-luth, the Pleyela.
Research Interests: Piano, Organology, Musical Instrument Technology, Exhibition, Museum, Expositions and Worlds Fairs, Musical Instruments, and 7 moreHistory of musical instruments makers, Expositions and World's Fairs, Universal Exhibitions, Pianoforte, International Expositions, Universal Expositions, and World’s Fairs and Other Expositions
Research Interests: Organ And Historical Keyboards (E.G., Harpsichord), Piano, Organology, Musical Instrument Technology, Musical Instruments, and 5 moreHistory of musical instruments makers, Dendrochronology Musical Instruments, Organología, Pianoforte, and Historic development of keyboard instruments organ pianoforte harpsichord piano
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This volume traces the diffusion of pianos with a tangent action through and beyond the eighteenth century. Some are primitive harpsichord-to-piano conversions but others are refined pianos with a Stossmechanik with non-pivoting vertical... more
This volume traces the diffusion of pianos with a tangent action through and beyond the eighteenth century. Some are primitive harpsichord-to-piano conversions but others are refined pianos with a Stossmechanik with non-pivoting vertical hammers. Apart from the simple models of Jean Marius around 1716, Christoph Gottlieb Schroeter before 1739 probably designed the first sophisticated action with non-pivoting hammers propelled by intermediate levers. However, the most refined eighteenth-century tangent pianos are those known as Tangentenflugel, built by Franz Jacob Spath and Christoph Friederich Schmahl from Regesburg, and by their followers, such as Johann Wihlhelm Berner. Tangent pianos were possibly exported from Germany. Pianos of this type made in England and Italy during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries may be traceable to the German tradition, but are probably not related directly to the school of Spath and Schmahl. In Italy, pianos with a tangent action were made until the mid-nineteenth century. The volume includes a detailed catalogue of 42 pianos with a tangent action in public and private collections in Europe, the Usa and Japan, including Tangentenflugel by Spath and Schmahl.