This double album accompanies the eponymous book by Anthony M. Cummings, Music in Golden-Age Florence, 1250-1750 (University of Chicago Press, Chicago & London 2023). They are designed to enable readers and listeners to enter the sound world of late-medieval and early-modern Florence.Despite the enviable place Florence occupies in the historical imagination, its music-historical importance is not as well-understood as it should be. Yet if Florence was the city of Dante Alighieri, Niccolò Machiavelli, Michelangelo Buonarroti, and Galileo Galilei, it was also the birthplace of the Renaissance madrigal, opera, and the piano. Our goal in assembling this set of recordings, which survey the principal surviving genres of music in Florence in the half-millennium between c. 1250 and c. 1750, was to provide a “virtual” evocation of the extraordinary musical culture of golden-age Florence, one of unsurpassed importance. Through the integration of the contents of the book and the CDs, and leveraging text, image, musical notation, and sound, we offer our listeners the possibility of a fascinating metaphoric time travel.
Works:
• anon.: Aria di Fiorenza
•anon.: Verbum caro factum est
•anon.: Vergine donzella imperadrice
•Agricola, A: In mijnen sin
•Bedyngham: Umil madonna
•Brunelli: Di quel nudo pargoletto
•Brunelli: La pastorella mia spietata e rigida
•Brunelli: Quando il sol apparisce
•Brunelli: Splendete serene
•Cavalieri: Godi turba mortal
•Corteccia: Sacerdos et pontifex
•Feroci: Pastorale
•Ferrini, G B: Aria di Fiorenza
•Firenze, A: Astio non morì mai
•Firenze, Gherardello: I’ vo’ bene
•Foscarini: Aria di Firenze per la C, for guitar
•Frescobaldi: Aria di Fiorenza
•Gagliano: Sull’affricane arene
•Malvezzi: I’ vo piangendo i miei passati tempi
•Marenzio: Se nelle voci nostre
•Peri, J: Ricercar del primo tuono del Zazzerino
•Razzi: Stabat mater dolorosa
•Striggio: Nasce la pena mia
•Verdelot: Si bona suscepimus
•Zipoli: Al Post Comunio
•Zipoli: All'Eleazione
•Zipoli: All'Offertorio
•Zipoli: Pastorale