The Museum of Renaissance Music offers readers a florilegium of delights born of a vast set of international scholarly collaborations. Taking its readers through wildly diverse musical objects, it also invites them to encounter a great diversity of authors whose loving relationships to musical materialities guide our journeys through new Renaissance histories. Yet it’s not just musical objects as such that we discover here, but music as metaphorized, desired, utilized, emplaced, and displaced, and by a whole range of networked historical subjects, literate and illiterate, subaltern and elite, African, Arabic, Japanese, and Mexican along with European. Not merely artefactual, the histories these subjects tell are pliant and porous. With imaginative verve, The Museum of Renaissance Music thus contributes to a current explosion of material studies whose cacophony remakes our understanding of the Renaissance via “history by collage,” in this case understanding Renaissance musicking through the spatial affordances of the gallery with its multitude of “rooms” (travels, psalters, domestic objects, instruments, and much more), rather than through the traditional edited collection. The results are mesmerizing, indispensable. – Martha Feldman, University of Chicago – Like a veritable pop-up book, The Museum of Renaissance Music surprises its readers with the multidimensional quality of its content. Presenting a hundred diverse objects organized in different themed rooms, Borghetti and Shephard’s volume offers readers the experience of walking through an imaginary museum where objects “speak out” their complex web of allusion connecting texts, images and sounds. A veritable tour de force, this book brings history, art history, and musicology together to highlight the pervasive nature of music in Renaissance culture, and does so in a direct and effective manner that can be enjoyed by experts and amateurs alike. – Martina Bagnoli, Gallerie Estensi, Modena – This imaginary museum of Renaissance music, through a collection of one hundred exhibits, returns a proper share of sonority to objects, images, artworks and spaces. A fascinating reference book, offering a transformative vision of music in Renaissance culture, from domestic space to the global dimension. – Diane Bodart, Columbia University, New York – The history of music should be told through works, composers and performers? Not quite. In this book, Borghetti and Shephard demonstrate that exhibits such as paintings, administrative documents, domestic objects, or entire rooms may tell us something about European music of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries that music books and instruments cannot. The high-quality reproductions together with the knowledgeable commentaries are a treat for the eyes and mind of the reader. An entirely new type of music history book, this wonderful volume will appeal to scholars, music lovers, and students alike. – Melanie Wald-Fuhrmann, Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, Frankfurt –
Collection « Épitome musical »
Vincenzo Borghetti & Tim Shephard
Tim Shephard is Professor of Musicology at the University of Sheffield. He is the co-author of Music in the Art of Renaissance Italy (Harvey Miller, 2020), and co-editor of the Routledge Companion to Music and Visual Culture (2013), as well as numerous other books and essays on Italian musical, visual and material cultures in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
Centre d’études supérieures de la Renaissance
The Museum of Renaissance Music | A History in 100 Exhibits
Vincenzo Borghetti is Associate Professor of Music History at the University of Verona. His research centres on Renaissance music, especially issues of culture, ideology, intertextuality and historiography; the presence of Renaissance music in contemporary media; and opera and music theatre of the early twentieth century. His critical edition of Rossini’s Elisabetta regina d’Inghilterra was published in 2016, and an accompanying volume on the opera’s libretto and its literary sources in 2019.
This book collates 100 exhibits with accompanying essays as an imaginary museum dedicated to the musical cultures of Renaissance Europe, at home and in its global horizons. It is a history through artefacts—materials, tools, instruments, art objects, images, texts, and spaces—and their witness to the priorities and activities of people in the past as they addressed their world through music. The result is a history by collage, revealing overlapping musical practices and meanings—not only those of the elite, but reflecting the everyday cacophony of a diverse culture and its musics. Through the lens of its exhibits, this museum surveys music’s central role in culture and lived experience in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Europe, offering interest and insights well beyond the strictly musicological field.
Contributors
The Museum of Renaissance Music A History in 100 Exhibits
Edited by Vincenzo Borghetti
Jane Alden || Linda Phyllis Austern || Barbara Baert || Geoffrey Baker || Katie Bank || Samantha Bassler || Frédéric Billiet || Bonnie J. Blackburn || Zdravko Blažeković || M. Jennifer Bloxam || Vincenzo Borghetti || Kathryn Bosi || Katherine Butler || Lorenzo Candelaria || Antonio Cascelli || Camilla Cavicchi || Lisa Colton || James Cook || Karen M. Cook || Sophia D’Addio || Anne Daye || Flora Dennis || Scott Lee Edwards || Barbara Eichner || Martin Elste || Iain Fenlon || David Fiala ||
& Tim Shephard
Daniele V. Filippi || Alexander J. Fisher || Paweł Gancarczyk || Giuseppe Gerbino || Marianne C.E. Gillion || Ortensia Giovannini || Elisabeth Giselbrecht || Donald Greig || John Griffiths || Inga Mai Groote || Eleazar Gutwirth || Alexandros Maria Hatzikiriakos || Lenka Hlávková || Louisa Hunter-Bradley || Sylvia Huot || Árni Heimir Ingólfsson || David R. M. Irving || Jonathan Katz || Moritz Kelber || Robert L. Kendrick || Andrew Kirkman || Martin Kirnbauer || Tess Knighton || Franz Körndle || Gundula Kreuzer || Matthew Laube || Ayla Lepine || Jeffrey Levenberg || Birgit Lodes || Mattias Lundberg || Javier Marín-López || Diana Matut || Ascensión Mazuela Anguita || Laura Moretti || Zuleika Murat || Bernadette Nelson || Marina Nordera || Jessie Ann Owens || Emily Peppers || Gretchen Peters || Klaus Pietschmann || Pamela M. Potter || Massimo Privitera || Nuno de Mendonça Raimundo || Sanna Raninen || Eugenio Refini || Eleonora Rocconi || Emilio Ros-Fábregas || Katelijne Schiltz || Paul Schleuse || Serenella Sessini || Tim Shephard ||
Centre d’études supérieures de la Renaissance Collection « Épitome musical »
Laura Ştefǎnescu || Ennio Stipčević || Laurie Stras || Jane H. M. Taylor || John J. Thompson || Emanuela Vai || Kate van Orden || Laura S. Ventura Nieto || Philip Weller || Beth Williamson || Magnus Williamson || Jonathan Willis || Richard Wistreich || Jessica Lee Wood || David Yearsley || Giovanni Zanovello || Carla Zecher