Music and the Courtly in Early Modern Bologna

FAIN: FT-54647-06

Gregory Richard Barnett
Rice University (Houston, TX 77005-1827)

This project seeks to recover the influential culture of aristocratic celebrations in seventeenth-century Bologna that inspired its famous repertory of instrumental music. Drawing on both this music and archival sources, I focus on the tradition of self-celebration among Bologna's nobility who saw themselves as the founders and upholders of the city's distinctive culture: their births, weddings, and other signal events furnish the contexts for which the extant music was created. The larger picture depicts a surviving phase of Renaissance courtly culture in which a plentiful but fading Bolognese aristocracy bent its energies toward ever more elaborate courtly refinement and ceremony.

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