Conference Agenda

Over the last two decades, a large corpus of unfigured basses from the eighteenth-century pedagogical tradition of Partimento has been catalogued and made available by scholars, drawing a cohesive picture of the underlying musical schemata that informed improvisation in this discipline. However, issues around the practical processes by which these materials were learned and assimilated have received less scholarly attention, reflecting the scarcity of details in historical sources, which assumed the existence of a living, oral tradition. As argued by Aaron Berkowitz (2010), this aspect is equally relevant to the study of an improvisatory practice, which must account for two modes of knowing: the ‘know-what,’ and the ‘know-how.’ The written corpus of contrapuntal patterns, basses and rules forms an incomplete picture without an account of the study routines through which these would be assimilated in the performer’s procedural memory and made available for real-time performance.

In this paper, I analyze the Gallipoli manuscript, a rare source of written Partimento realizations recently published in modern edition, to examine an eighteenth-century student’s practice strategies and routines. First, I position the manuscript in the context of Francesco Durante’s Partimenti Diminuiti, of which it is a selection, to highlight the pedagogical rationale behind the specific arrangement of the exercises in Gallipoli. I also refer to current models of improvisation to argue that these realizations represent transcriptions of ideal practice sessions in a student’s daily routine, rather than exercises in written counterpoint. Then, I identify three practice techniques found across the volume: a) the generation of melodies based on schemata learned in preparatory exercises; b) the systematic repetition of melodic patterns to consolidate a stylistic vocabulary; c) the prioritization of structure and form over the practice of patterns, in one advanced realization. Finally, I refer to recent articles that call for practical learning activities to equip students with skills and strategies displayed by current practitioners of Western Art Music improvisation, and I lay out ways in which compositional patterns transmitted by Partimento sources can be developed and assimilated, to enable complex, stylistic improvisations in this tradition.

In Guillaume de Machaut’s highly unified multi-media project that is codex F-Pn fr.1584, also known as Machaut A, many seemingly disparate songs are related thematically through text, music, and illustrations. Scholars like Elizabeth Eva Leach, Karen Desmond, and Anna Zayaruznaya have examined the recurrence of animal allusions across the songs, underscoring their symbolic, societal, and cultural meanings. Relatively little research, on the other hand, has focused on visual elements and their related allegorical expression through text and the music, particularly within Machaut’s corpus of ballades. This lacuna is all the more notable since a large, ornamented letter “S'' on folio 454r ushers in Ballade 1 “S'Amours ne fait.” The image depicts an elaborate dragon and two finely detailed lovers embracing within the lower half of the serpentine letter. While the song does not refer to dragons or snakes (the two belonging to the same category in medieval thought), two songs later in the collection explicitly refer to snakes: “Phyton, le mervilleus serpent” and “Une vipere en cuer ma dame maint.”

I argue that the confluence of visual, musical, and textual allusions to serpentine creatures within the ballades section allegorically represents “refusal” and “disdain” as bestial beings preying on young lovers, and, particularly, on women’s hearts. I examine not only the afore-mentioned letter, but also two smaller drawings accompanying the stanzas of “Une vipere en cuer” and “Se pour ce muir qu’Amours,” as well as four ballades that musically evoke ophidian creatures. In this interdisciplinary analysis of visual, textual, and musical material, I have uncovered the poet-composer’s view of his feminine subjects through the lens of ophidian imagery. In Machaut’s combined illustrative, musical, and poetic setting, the serpent entraps the woman addressed in the poem, echoing the Biblical narrative of Adam and Eve. The male lover faults the woman for succumbing to an outside force, implying that in her original state, a woman would never refuse a male lover. The poetry, illuminations, and text painting reinforce the denatured state of the woman by portraying “Refusal” as animalistic. My research not only provides an example of Machaut’s highly affinitive creative process at work, but also contributes to bringing into consideration 14th-century gendered assumptions, their animalistic overtones, and their associated impact on secular music.

Robert Ricard’s The Spiritual Conquest of Mexico chronicles the lamentable decline of the College of Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco, detailing its structural and financial struggles over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Though the college was founded in 1536 with the intention of ordaining indigenous priests, it never realized its goal, mainly owing to the prohibition of indigenous ordination in 1555. And yet, the college’s history was apparently quite long and not entirely penurious. This paper tells the story of the College of Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco as seen through Stanford 734, a choirbook copied there from the 1690s through the early eighteenth century. Long forgotten and lost for over a century in Stanford University’s special collections, the manuscript contains a liturgy for the dead that can be associated with Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco. How could this dilapidated institution afford a remarkable manuscript of 138 vellum folios decorated with such luxurious illustrations?

This paper positions Stanford 734 as a crucial artifact in the college’s history. Despite financial, administrative, and epidemic-related setbacks, the college underwent a reorganization in 1661 that focused on educating friars and instituted new statutes based on those of the College of San Buenaventura in Seville. The connection with Seville is bolstered by another choirbook housed at the Franz Mayer Museum in Mexico City—a book that seems to have originated at a Franciscan convent just one kilometer from the Sevillian college. Examining the institutional histories and melodic relationships between the two manuscripts reveals that the Stanford manuscript uses the Seville liturgy. This finding, in turn, challenges the prevailing view that the liturgy within the diocese of Mexico City was fairly stable and fixed. At the same, the illuminations in Stanford 734 bear a striking resemblance to those found in Mexico City Cathedral choirbooks—whose liturgy is decidedly not based on that of Seville—evincing a common artistic lineage. Studying these sources makes it possible to complicate a narrative that has emphasized the college’s failures by highlighting its deep cultural and institutional ties to a Franciscan network in Spain and colonial Mexico.