A Reevaluation of Musical Imitatio in the Late 15th and Early 16th Centuries. Presentated at a conference entitled, "The Musical Humanism of the Renaissance and its Legacy" at the University of Warwick's Palazzo Pesaro Papafava in Venice, 2-4 June 2016

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.