The Online Program of events for the 2025 AMS-SMT Joint Annual Meeting appears below. This program is subject to change. The final program will be published in early November.
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The Baccusi Files: Digital Forensics of a New Corpus of Renaissance Imitation Masses
Time:
Saturday, 08/Nov/2025:
2:15pm - 3:45pm
Location: Greenway Ballroom C-H
Session Topics:
AMS, SMT
Presentations
The Baccusi Files: Digital Forensics of a New Corpus of Renaissance Imitation Masses
Chair(s): Remi Chiu (Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University,)
Presenter(s): Richard Freedman (Haverford College) , Alessandra Ignesti (University of Pavia) , Mark Janello (Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University,) , Megan Long (Oberlin) , Peter Schubert (McGill University) , Remi Chiu (Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University,)
This roundtable aims to explore the creative process of musical modeling through the lens of the Renaissance imitation Mass. In such cases of polyphonic borrowing, we ask: where does the Mass composer’s own style and creativity lie? Is it in what they use, discard, and alter from the model? Can style be discerned in the non-modeled portions of the Masses? How do we speak of individual style against the general language of Renaissance polyphony and against the generic exigencies of the Mass?
Our case study focuses on the first two books of Masses by the Mantuan Ippolito Baccusi (c.1545-1609), a composer almost unknown today whose contrapuntal skills, widely acknowledged by his contemporaries (eg., Zarlino and Ludovico Zacconi), make him a paradigmatic late Renaissance composer. Because his corpus has only recently been made available in modern editions and has not yet been extensively studied, there is no preconceived notion of what his style might be. This choice also aims to fill the gap of scholarly attention for imitation Masses composed in the last decades of the sixteenth century, a period that witnessed gradual yet marked stylistic transformations.
The methods we use include traditional and computer-assisted analysis, the latter in order to process large amounts of data and to minimize the subjectivity of the observer. We rely extensively on computational tools made available by CRIM Intervals—a Python library that rapidly finds, counts and visualizes vast numbers of contrapuntal patterns (from soggetti to points of imitation to cadences).
In the first half of the session, following a brief introduction of Baccusi and CRIM, panelists will give short lightning talks on:
How Baccusi adapts models to the formal and rhetorical requirements of his Kyries
The influence of model interval prevalence
The non-repeating materials of Baccusi’s masses
Discerning style with “stock” melodic and contrapuntal material
How to discern modelling in a “sine nomine” mass
The second half of the session will be an open discussion with the panelists and audience, putting into dialogue the views of editors, performers, music historians, music analysts, computational music researchers, and pedagogues.
