Palestrina

This paper presents a corpus study that identifies the number of statistically distinct modes used in sacred and secular genres from 1400–1750. Corpora used for the study include Masses, motets, and secular songs from the Franco-Flemish School, works by Palestrina, secular Italian songs with alfabeto guitar tablature from the early seventeenth century, and works by J.S. Bach. A k-means cluster analyses of key profiles determine the number of distinguishable modes in each corpus. The results of this study show that the number of modes present in a corpus depend not only on date of publication but also on the genre of a composition.. . .

Already at the publication in 1648 of his Geistliche Chor-Music Heinrich Schütz seems to have had a sense of foreboding concerning the alien Basso continuo part imposed on him for mercantile reasons. And rightly so. The mere existence of this very part has led editors to far-reaching and highly questionable decisions, not least the use of metrical barring.

This article shows how these editorial decisions change the musical content by crucially influencing and changing essential structural and performative parameters, hence e. g. inhibiting carefully composed intrinsic phrasing mechanisms.

With reference to the “Deklamationsrhythmik” the article proposes an alternative reading of horizontal structures in stile antico, thus opening an analytical view to possibly disregarded poetic-semantic aspects and complementing the traditional solely vertical comprehension of the genesis of dissonances which tends to lock the performance practice in a position contradicting Schütz’ explicit wish that “this kind of music shall increasingly reach the fulfillment of its desired ‘Effect’ ”.

In poche righe, si cerca di dare sintetica informazione sulla vita del Santo Martire, patrono della città di Palestrina e della Diocesi Suburbicaria prenestina, sui luoghi che lo hanno visto protagonista all'interno del territorio prenestino, edificati in sua memoria dalla popolazione nel tempo.

In occasione della conferenza inaugurale "Verso il IX Centenario della Basilica Cattedrale di Sant'Agapito Martire" presieduta da S.E. Rev.ma il Card. Gianfranco Ravasi, la Diocesi di Palestrina e il Capitolo dei Canonici hanno scelto di redigere un breve compendio sulla storia della Cattedrale, in previsione della pubblicazione del volume monografico.

Tomás Luis de Victoria’s and Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina’s motets are surprisingly understudied. On the other hand, recent analytical comparisons have clearly (and intriguingly) demonstrated that Victoria knew Palestrina’s music, reworked it, modelled his own works on it in different ways and in different phases of his career, but most notably in his first published collection of 1572. Thus, the aim of the article is twofold: to study Palestrina’s motets published before 1572 and Victoria’s motets of the same year focusing on formal design and sonic architecture; and to shed new light on the compositional relationship between the two masters. Palestrina’s "Motecta festorum totius anni" (1563), "Liber primus motettorum" (1569), "Motettorum … liber secundus" (1572), and Victoria’s "Motecta" (1572) are taken into consideration. Issues of imitatio and originality, the problem of form in the motet, and questions regarding the definition of sonic styles in late sixteenth-century polyphony are discussed. The results of this analytical survey confirm Palestrina’s role as a ‘great inspirer’, and at the same time show that Victoria, while setting up an enduring compositional dialogue with his senior colleague, used and developed his own, highly individual voice.

In the introduction of the paper, the components of tonality, its emergence in the Renaissance period and also important concepts from the tonal theories of last three centuries will be explained, in order to provide a background for the theory.
The next chapter, which constitutes the main body of the study, is the presentation of the octatonic system. The construction of the system from components like tritone and minor third relationship, its connection with the concept of function and diatonicism will be explained in detail. After that, analytical examples from the common practice period will be presented in order to demonstrate the approach of the theory for typical tonal idioms.
In the third chapter, the system will be applied to musical examples from Guillaume de Machaut, Alexander Agricola, Pierluigi da Palestrina, Carlo Gesualdo, Claudio Monteverdi, Giacomo Carissimi and Arcangelo Corelli, in order to investigate the relationship between harmonic motion and the emergence of tonality.
In the final chapter, the evaluation of the theory will be made, in the context of the preliminaries from the first chapter also with the data from the analyses.

This dissertation investigates harmonic properties of Italian secular songs with Baroque guitar accompaniment in alfabeto tablature, which was a system of letters and other symbols that represented a chord shape to be strummed using all five courses. All of the resulting chords form major or minor triads. These letters were printed in songbooks for guitarists to accompany secular songs. This triadic accompaniment has significant implications for understanding harmonic practices during the seventeenth century.

The purpose of this dissertation is to use computational methods to better understand the harmonic features of the alfabeto song repertoire, which can perhaps be a window through which we can understand the broader harmonic practices of secular genres in the early seventeenth century. Machine learning algorithms are employed to understand the modal framework and harmonic function of the alfabeto corpus. K-means clustering is used to determine how many modes are present within the corpus, building upon the recent work of Albrecht and Huron. To understand the harmonic function within the alfabeto corpus, hidden Markov models analyze the number of functions and which chords belong to each of those functions using a similar methodology to Quinn and White.

The analyses also compare the alfabeto corpus to corpora of other genres and eras such as J.S. Bach, Palestrina, and Franco-Flemish composers. The alfabeto corpus is also compared with itself to better understand its style and any changes over time. This dissertation provides a fresh look at harmonic practice in the seventeenth century by using statistical models that are informed by historical performance practice.

Il capitano Deane Keller, della Sottocommissione ai Monumenti, Belle Arti e Archivi (MFAA) del Governo Militare Alleato, fu il primo "Monuments Man" a mettere piede ai Castelli Romani il 3 giugno 1944 (Velletri era stata liberata il giorno prima). In questo articolo viene raccontata la breve storia dei suoi sopralluoghi nei vari centri dei Castelli, attingendo direttamente dai rapporti ufficiali che redasse in quei giorni. Detta documentazione d'archivio viene presentata qui per la prima volta.

Sono state prese in esame le xilografie 49 e 50 dell’Hypnerotomachia Poliphili di Francesco Colonna, raffiguranti l’una il parto di Leda e la presentazione al padre delle due uova e l’altra l’oracolo di Apollo. Attraverso lo studio della loro iconografia che ha portato ad identificare per la prima volta in una pianta la flammula caratterizzante un uovo di Leda, è stato individuato uno stretto legame con le rappresentazioni della Fortuna Primigenia di Praenestre (l’antica Palestrina, città di cui Francesco Colonna è signore), il leitmotiv del racconto dell’ Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, l’iconografia cristiana ed il Neoplatonismo, rilevando quindi una rilettura della cultura antica, attenta alla natura spiegata attraverso il mito, influenzata dal Cristianesimo e, nello stesso tempo, aperta ad una nuova rinnovata attenzione verso l’uomo ed il suo ambiente come riflesso dell’intellegibile.

In June 1944, during the Second World War, the city of Palestrina was bombed. The damage to the Cathedral’s facade was irreversible. In 1957, the architect Furio Fasolo was in charge of its restoration. His first hypothesis for the loggia’s reconstruction was denied, so he proposed its partial demolition, equally rejected; then, the demolition of the loggia was ratified. Today, fragments of the ancient masonry devices characterize the façade, scratched in a dense network of grooves; they are the result of a “liberation” intervention combined with exacerbated additions to the strict adherence to the principle of distinguishable and the use of reinforced concrete. At the beginning of the Seventies, Fasolo was also in charge of Sant’Agapito crypt’s restoration, never completed. His project was based on the static conditions of the building, which required the demolition of the crumbling modern structures of the crypt in iron beams, corroded by oxidation. The reconstruction of the roof slab was carried out a reinforced concrete framework consisting of four pillars and beams, and a brick-cement slab of about 30 cm. During the work, further new changes to the project were needed: the pillars became five, and the roof was translated into a lowered barrel vault. The desire to make the intervention distinguishable suggested the choice of exposed concrete. The exhaustion of funding dues the interruption of the restoration works, and still today the crypt shows its unfinished structure.

(* The crypt was opened to the public in August 2020 after a "restoration" intervention, which obliterated Fasolo's work behind a dark grey paneling. So, the here described 1970s unfinished Fasolo's intervention is unfortunately no longer visible).

Nilotic scènes were a popular decorative motif in the Roman world, as may be seen by many examples which have been preserved in Pompeian houses. Their meaning is variously understood, either as scènes of an exotic, colonised world, comparable to the genre of Chinoiserie in later Europe, or as propaganda for the Egyptian cults. From a study of the Nile Mosaic of Palestrina, the earliest and richest of the extant examples, it appears that the essential motif of these scènes is the Nile flood and its beneficial effects on Egypt, which are given by Isis and Osiris. The meaning of these scènes as symbols of welfare and divine providence made them generally acceptable as decorations for surroundings where a festive mood was required, such as dining rooms and gardens, just like Dionysiac motifs.

The practical and theoretical engagement with Palestrina’s music is the basis for the music-theoretical innovations of Francesco Antonio Calegari (1656–1742), founder of the Paduan ›Scuola dei rivolti‹. His transcription and adaption of the offertory Ad te levavi from the autograph collection of the Sing-Akademie zu Berlin will be analysed from the vantage point of the seventeenth- and early eighteenth-centuries.

Cinquecento Rome was the cradle of one of the most influential syntheses of Western music, the one that is usually labeled with the name of Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina. In the following centuries, this synthesis – no matter if misinterpreted or subjectively reshaped – would become a myth.
How did this peculiar and multifaceted formulation of a paneuropean polyphonic style come into being? What kind of influences turned a chapelmaster of provincial origins into the supreme arbiter of Roman musical style?
This paper explores from a broad perspective the confluence of international and local musical trends towards Rome during the Sixteenth century, and the subsequent global dissemination of the new Roman music. And since music was a crucial factor in city life, it also address the unmistakable coincidence of this process with the powerful renewal of “l’image de Rome” (Labrot) in the post-Tridentine era, trying to capture the evolving soundscape corresponding to this image.

edited by Galliano Ciliberti, Turnhout, Brepols Publishers, 2021 (Studies on Italian Music History, 15), pp. xviii+492 , ISBN 978-2-503-59544-3

During the Renaissance and throughout the Baroque and Classical periods, musical production is linked to patronage. There are essentially two types of patronage. The first relates to political institutions, to public life, and aims to promote musical events that highlight the wealth and power of the patron in the eyes of rival courts and subjects – hence the birth of the court chapels.

The second type belongs to the private sphere, in which the patron, of noble birth and as such in possession of high moral and intellectual virtues, possesses a discriminating artistic sensibility — hence the promotion of chamber music activities, the collecting of rare and valuable musical instruments, and the compilation and collection of musical manuscripts, possibly in deluxe or personalized copies. This musical production system, as described, lasted until the middle of the nineteenth century, when the advent of capitalism and the rise of the bourgeois class caused the decline of patronage. This book focuses on the various aspects of music patronage in Italy from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century.

The papers collected here deal with musical patronage and its relations with contemporary society from different points of view, offering new reserch perspectives.

In most cases the compositional process of late-sixteenth-century music can be reconstructed only by analysis of the final musical text. The technique of imitation (in the traditional sense of ‚fuga‘) has recently become a topic of renewed interest. John Milsom and Peter Schubert examined (in different ways) repeating contrapuntal combinations as the focal points of the construction that should have served as starting points of the compositional process. This contribution seeks to develop a complementary view by examining repeated soggetti in the sense of a complete melodic phrase for the complete relevant text section. This will be done with Palestrina’s five-voice offertory motets as example, concentrating on sections of the ‚minimal‘ type with two subsections.

Il Comune e il Museo Diffuso di Castel San Pietro Romano, in collaborazione con la Soprintendenza Archeologia Belle Arti e Paesaggio per l’area metropolitana di Roma, la provincia di Rieti e l’Etruria Meridionale, ha allestito nel centro visitatori di Palazzo Mocci l'esposizione dei contributi universitari che hanno coinvolto il patrimonio architettonico del Borgo di Castel San Pietro Romano, sia come oggetto di tesi di laurea che come esercitazioni di laboratorio dei corsi di laurea in architettura e in ingegneria edile-architettura dell’Università Sapienza di Roma e dell’Università di Roma Tor Vergata.
Durante il pomeriggio di presentazione, dopo un primo momento di approfondimento sulle recenti scoperte archeologiche effettuate sul territorio di Castel San Pietro e un inquadramento storico dei beni architettonici oggetto di studio, si svolgerà una tavola rotonda all’interno della quale le diverse istituzioni coinvolte, gli esperti professionisti del settore e i docenti universitari, si confronteranno sul tema:
“Il contributo universitario alla tutela e alla valorizzazione del territorio di Castel San Pietro Romano".
L’obiettivo della mostra è quello di sollevare un confronto tra le istituzioni, il territorio e i tecnici, attraverso le proposte dei contributi universitari degli studenti, piccolo ma importante passo verso la valorizzazione e la riqualificazione del territorio.
La mostra sarà visitabile fino al 15 gennaio 2017 negli orari di apertura del Centro Visitatori del Museo Diffuso di Castel San Pietro Romano.

This paper presents a corpus study that identifies the number of statistically distinct modes used in sacred and secular genres from 1400--1750. Corpora used for the study include Masses, motets, and secular songs from the Franco-Flemish School, works by Palestrina, secular Italian songs with alfabeto guitar tablature from the early seventeenth century, and works by J.S. Bach. K-means clustering of key profiles are used to determine the number of distinguishable modes in each corpus. The results of this study show that the number of modes present in a corpus depends not only on date of publication but also on the genre of a composition. Secular genres are more likely to cluster into two modes while sacred genres cluster into several modes. This paper also explores the differences between systems of notation and musical practice and suggests other ways in which machine learning techniques can be in dialogue with the study of harmonic practice in early music.

Modern archaeological history of Palestrina, city of ancient origin near Rome, started in the mid 1700s, when the first discoveries of tombs and archaeological materials were carried out in the territory; after a successful brackets linked to the promulgation in 1820 of one of the first laws of Italian protection, the Pacca’s Edict, in the second half of the ‘800 the city became a popular destination of Italian and foreign antique dealers, in particular French and Germans, who devoted to systematic excavations, almost never scientific, to recover the precious fabric of the Colombella necropolis. This pirate-logic excavations and recovery of materials went on until the middle of ‘900, when, after World War II, the city, like the whole of Lazio Region, was the scene of uncontrolled speculation that put a strain on the protection of Archaeological Heritage, especially in so-called Low-city and in the countryside: in the 1960s Palestrina became famous in the newspapers as an example of poor land protection, culminating in the 1970s, with the opening of a painful legal case, which led to important arrests of staff of the Ministry of Culture too, turning the spotlight on the low, even zero, control that had threatened to destroy the heritage of the city and its territory. Since then a wiser management of the municipality, with a plan that has managed to create buffer zones in areas considered at archaeological risk, has allowed a more fine-grained control of the territory and the execution of archaeological excavations in areas hitherto little studied or known. Being the city that threatened to destroy his goods in the 1960s, with the last elections in 2013 the Municipality chose a young archeologist as Commissioner for Culture and now it’s rediscovering the importance of its archaeological and
natural heritage as an economic resource.
The paper, which has started from a doctoral thesis that will be defended later this year, will tell this story using historical
maps, aerial photographs and archaeological charts and presenting statistics from the research, focusing the turning points of a policy that can mean a change of course for the city and an example for the whole Region.

Il volume ripercorre la storia che ha caratterizzato il borgo di Castel San Pietro Romano a partire dalle origini fino ai giorni nostri. Una sezione apposita traccia una breve storia dei monumenti principali ed una serie di approfondimenti mettono a fuoco le opere d'arte più importanti del territorio.

Il circuito poligonale delle Mura dell’antica Praeneste risulta ancora oggi in fase di studio, soprattutto per quanto riguarda la datazione storica.
Studi recenti (Sandra Gatti, Le mura Poligonali di Praeneste, in Atlante Tematico di Topografia Antica, 21/2011) collocano la nascita del circuito difensivo tra la fine del VI secolo e gli inizi del V secolo a.C.
La particolarità di questo circuito, di cui ne rimangono percepibili più di quattro chilometri, è il fatto che comprenda due cittadine: Palestrina e Castel San Pietro Romano; un tempo questi due comuni facevano parte di un unico sistema, di cui Castel San Pietro Romano ne rappresentava l’acropoli e l’area del centro storico prenestino la città alta.
Durante il periodo sillano si costituì un’ulteriore appendice della quale non rimangono resti visibili, ma è percepibile ancora la suddivisione cardo – decumano degli accampamenti romani se si seguono i tracciati regolatori delle vie antiche: l’attuale viale Pio XII, via degli Arcioni, via Prenestina Antica e il braccio di quest’ultima che si immette in via Pedemontana da viale Pio XII.
L’eccezionale posizione geografica della città, così vicina al mondo romano e collocata tutta sul fianco del Monte Ginestro, ha permesso un curioso sviluppo delle Mura che probabilmente perdevano la conformazione anulare in corrispondenza dell’acropoli proprio per la protezione naturale proveniente dallo stesso monte, difficilmente accessibile.
Il lavoro preliminare che è stato fatto in questo studio, nato in seguito all’invito a partecipare al convengo: Città Mura e Spazio Pubblico, svoltosi all’interno della facoltà di Architettura La Sapienza di Roma, nell'ambito della Biennale dello Spazio Pubblico, il 23 maggio 2019, presenta una nuova ottica per affrontare le problematiche della programmazione del territorio, proponendo azioni e proposte di ricucitura del rapporto tra città storica e città contemporanea attraverso metodi compartecipati.

Sul blog di OFF Rome tour ripercorro la biografia di una convinta suffragista che, fin da subito, capì l'importanza per le donne di essere soggetto attivo della politica italiana. Venne eletta all'Assemblea Costituente tra le prime 21 donne e fu sindaca di Palestrina per ben 12 anni.