Tasso in Music Project: Digital Edition of the Settings of Torquato Tasso's Poetry, c. 1570-1640

FAIN: RQ-249857-16

University of Massachusetts, Amherst (Amherst, MA 01003-9242)
Emiliano Ricciardi (Project Director: December 2015 to December 2021)

Preparation of a digital critical edition of over 650 musical settings of the Italian poet Torquato Tasso (1544-1595).

The goal of the Tasso in Music Project is to provide the first complete digital edition of the late 16th- and early 17th-century settings of Torquato Tasso's poetry. Over two thirds of these are currently unavailable in modern editions, preventing an assessment of the musical reception of Tasso's works, the most prominent poet of early modern Italy. Realized by a team of scholars, the musical edition will be available through an open-access digital platform developed by University of Massachusetts-Amherst and Stanford University. The platform will also feature search tools for musical analysis and transcriptions of the poetic texts as they appear in the musical settings and in contemporaneous literary sources. Through its interdisciplinary scope, the Tasso in Music Project will address a wide audience encompassing music historians, performers of early music, literary scholars, and more generally anyone with an interest in the intersection of early modern music and poetry.