Conference Agenda

Pipe organs were widespread in Venice’s many Catholic churches, both within the lagoon city and across its Mediterranean territories, as noted in many seventeenth-century accounts. In Crete, a Venetian territory for over 500 years, archival evidence shows that the Saint Titus Cathedral in Heraklion consistently maintained a pipe organ, and limited but extant sources indicate that some Greek Orthodox churches also employed portable organs. The multiconfessional function of the organ extends further when in 1628, Venetian authorities attempted to install, unsuccessfully, a pipe organ in the Spanish Synagogue of the Venetian ghetto to reinforce the musical celebrations for Simhat Torah. These episodes emerged during a critical time for the Republic following the Ottoman conquest of Cyprus in 1571. In its aftermath, Venice adapted its sociopolitical strategies toward non-Catholic subjects in its maritime territories, because Ottoman victory depended largely on the allegiances of the local, Orthodox and Muslim populations. The Republic relaxed its previously draconian control over the Greek-Orthodox population in Crete, encouraging benevolent interactions cross-confessionally. The organ symbolized Venice’s revised strategies of imperial control that they achieved through the juxtaposition of a Catholic worship instrument and soft power over other confessions.

I argue that, after the 1571 cessation of Cyprus prompted Venice to adjust its treatment of non-Catholic subjects in Crete, the pipe organ came to function not only as a liturgical instrument but a political and pedagogical tool through which Venice asserted its new cultural policy while maintaining hegemony over the remaining maritime territories. I examine Girolamo Diruta’s 1593 treatise, Il Transilvano, to show the political and ideological significance of the organ for Venice. Diruta links musical practice and political theory and demonstrates how organ pedagogy afforded a model of disciplined embodiment, civic virtue, and affective control that resonated with the Republic’s philosophies. In particular, Diruta’s anthropomorphic language casts the organ as a body and the organist as its “tongue”; this anthropomorphization generates a microcosmic relationship between Venice and its subjects, and articulates a political vision of civic unity that encapsulates all Venetian subjects, regardless of confession, through the Diruta’s metaphorical language applied to the pipe organ.