New Perspectives on 16th-century Venice

The Calabrian composer Giandomenico Martoretta's third book of madrigals (Venice: Gardano, 1554) is best known for its connections to Cyprus, which have recently been explored in work by Balsano, Pecoraro, and Kitsos. The book is dedicated to the Cypriot nobleman Piero Singlitico, with whom Martoretta reportedly stayed while returning from a trip to the Holy Land, and ten of its twenty-eight compositions are dedicated to important members of the Cypriot nobility. It also contains a musical setting of a Petrarchan poem in Cypriot Greek dialect, with a concordance in an important MS collection of Cypriot Petrarchan poetry.  Although Martoretta's time in Cyprus clearly dominates the volume, comparatively less attention has so far been paid to the book's other contents. The dedicatees of the non-Cypriot madrigals-aside from several reprints from Martoretta's first book (1548)-clearly lay out the rest of Martoretta's travel itinerary from Cyprus back through Venetian holdings in Crete, Dalmatia, and Istria to the city of Venice itself, where the composer was reportedly present at the time of its 1554 publication. The importance of the geographic and dedicatory elements as organising principles for the collection is further underlined by the publication history of Martoretta's only long madrigal cycle-a setting of Luigi Tansillo's canzone 'Amor, se vôi ch'io torni al giogo antico'. The cycle was split up for publication between the composer's second (1552) with the parts out of sequence. This paper examines the circumstances that likely led to the the piecemeal publication of the cycle, which was likely initiated without Martoretta's permission while he was away on his voyage to the east, and treats the cycle analytically for the first time as a complete work.

Scholars have known that sixteenth-century Venice was highly cosmopolitan, but the city's spoken environment has proven difficult to recover, not least because the output of Venetian presses projects a linguistic monoculture: Of the 15,000 Venetian vernacular editions printed from 1500-1600, very few were in Spanish (120), French (78), or German (3) (ustc.ac.uk). Consequently, the printed record obscures a vibrant soundworld of polyglot residents, travelers, and foreign merchants, drastically flattening our understanding of cultural diversity in the capital of this multi-ethnic empire. As Mikhail Bakhtin framed the problem, heteroglot realities were being suppressed by moves "toward the critical monoglossia characteristic of modern times" (_Dialogic Imagination_).


Vernacular songs are an exception: the hundreds of greghesche, moresche, villancicos, tedesche, French chansons, and multilingual songs printed in Venice aptly channel the city's verbal riches. But they are rarely read as evidence of local speech communities. What if we follow Emily Wilbourne's lead (_JAMS_2010) and take these songs to be a "sonic record" of past voices? Instantly, they bring into earshot Venice's large minority communities-Greek, German, Jewish-and the "intense interanimation of languages" that fascinated Bakhtin. 


I begin by charting the social geography of Venice, but I also argue against simply identifying splintered constituencies and assigning songs to them, for more complex questions are raised by the totality of this generic hodgepodge: How did people communicate across languages in the city? How are heteroglot realities registered in song? In answering, I turn to sociolinguistics, showing how the verbal strategies of specific songs mirror the urban polyglottism currently being theorized as "metrolingualism": "the ways people of different and mixed backgrounds use, play with, and negotiate identities through language" (Otsuji/Pennycook_2015). In another group of songs by Janequin, I show how nonsense passages communicate using sonic codes and cospeech languages defined as "grammelot" (Jaffe-Berg_2001). 


By crediting early moderns with the linguistic resourcefulness of metrolinguals, we can understand why vernacular songs circulated beyond the linguistic borders of proto-nation-states and begin to invent critical frameworks that-likewise-go beyond "national" languages and literatures. Boisterous and polyvocal, metrolingualism promises big gains for future studies of cultural mobility and song.

Much has been written about the role Venice assigned to music in her ceremonial life (Bryant, Cumming, Fenlon, Rosand). This discussion has concentrated on the "myth of Venice," whose magnificent expressions in civic ritual stemmed from a sense of invulnerable self-government and grandeur. This confidence, however, was not immune to threats. The century-long fight against the Turks can surely be listed among the historical circumstances that corroded the Venetian spirit, deeply affecting the social and cultural life of the whole state. The escalation in the conflict during the 1560s generated an atmosphere of collective apprehension that was only reversed when the Turks were defeated at Lepanto in 1571. In his research on the repertory of celebratory pamphlets, poems, and music that followed the long-awaited victory, Iain Fenlon identified two recurrent _topoi_: the interpretation of Lepanto as Christ's victory and the assimilation of the Venetians to the Israelites as the "chosen people." My paper aims to extend this investigation to the period that preceded the victory, when the Serenissima was gripped in gloomy foreboding. 
Between 1569 and 1570, Venice experienced dreadful calamities, such as a terrible famine that exacerbated the anxiety around the growing Turkish pressure. In this desperate situation, the publication of a book of masses by Ippolito Baccusi and Giovanni Battista Falcidio (1570)-whose collaboration continued with two canzoni to celebrate Lepanto-can be seen as a response to contemporary events. All four masses, in fact, manifest non-casual insistence on the two aforementioned _topoi_ discussed by Fenlon, sometimes associated with images of ruin and despair. In Baccusi's mass _Aspice Domine_, based on a motet by Nicolas Gombert, the text of the model replaces the text of the Agnus Dei in the cantus and alto. A paraphrase of excerpts from the Lamentation of Jeremiah and Zechariah, _Aspice Domine_ is a prayer for the salvation of Jerusalem, desolate city once mistress of nations. The resulting modified Agnus Dei is a polytextual motet that combines this Old-Testament reference with the litanic prayer to Christ from the Gospel of John, providing a profound musical expression of Venice's spiritual dismay.