Please join us for the second workshop of this winter. Shawn Keener (music history) will present a chapter of her dissertation on fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Venetian song.
The workshop will take place at 4:30 pm in Logan 801. The respondent will be PhD candidate Kelli Wood, from the Art History Department.

The document is available on the Downloads page, with the password Venice.

 

Shawn writes:

Naming the giustiniana
In this chapter, I’ll be accounting for the popular song style (or form, or genre) known as a giustiniana in its new, Cinquecento guises. Taking its name from the Venetian patrician, humanist, poet, and singer Leonardo Giustinian (c.1388-1446), the aria giustiniana flourished in the Quattrocento. Also known as the aria veneziana and most at home in the unwritten tradition, the giustiniana largely goes to ground in the Cinquecento, erupting into now-visible written and printed forms only sparingly over the course of the century.
As a frame for understanding how the genre continued to carry meaning as an index of venezianità, I’ll consider how composers, writers, and editors described and deployed this sort of song. Giustinian himself, whose eponymous aria was most often in the form of a canzonetta (long and strophic), came to be rebranded in print from the 1490s to about 1520 as a strambottist, even while notated giustiniane make their first published appearance in 1505 (before disappearing again for sixty years).
When the giustiniana appears in print in the 1560s, it does so in the context of a reinvigorated interest in dialect literature as well as the emerging professional theater known as commedia dell’arte. Though the terms aria veneziana and aria giustiniana were synonymous for most of the phenomenon’s two century arc, the first examples in print actually cast them as very different animals. Another name crops up in the course of things in 1570… “zorziana” which also has a story to tell.
Hung upon this framework is a discussion the music, focusing on the two anthologies of 1570 and 1575. Just as the names seem a simple matter but actually have more to tell us than meets the eye, so too does the unprepossessing music reveal something of the social contexts both public and private in which the genre was renewed.