THE TURBULENT 1620S

In 1629, Bergamo was facing its second famine in a decade. The Venetian-appointed podesta Giulio Valier left the city at the end of April that year, pelted by fruit rinds and other garbage as the population blamed him for mismanagement of grain reserves.Footnote ¹ At the famine's height in June, wheat prices soared to unattainable heights, leading to a desperate situation within the city walls. On 9 June 1629, in cooperation with the new podesta Giovanni Grimani, city officials, lay authority, and the local bishop, and at the expense of the city, the cathedral's relics of Saints Fermo, Rustico, and Procolo were carried throughout the city in a solemn procession. The exhibition of the sacraments in churches throughout Bergamo culminated in a sung mass at the cathedral. Saints Fermo and Rustico were third-century Christians of probable African descent, although local legend depicts them as Bergamasque citizens, martyred in Verona. Their relics were translated to Bergamo in the ninth century by local merchants, and there is a deep-rooted local veneration of these saints. Following a public procession, church-by-church displays of the sacrament, and the sung mass, the relics were moved to the basilica Santa Maria Maggiore, where they were displayed from June 15–25, exposed two hours in the morning and two hours in the evening.Footnote ² In the morning the men came, in the evening the women, two by two, praying and crying in hope of relief from famine. Finally, a solemn office for the dead was made, set to music, along with a large number of masses, once again at the city's expense. A public decree stipulated the musical requiem to continue every ensuing year to protect against famine, war, and death.Footnote ³

The city's decision to culminate these events at Santa Maria Maggiore speaks to the church's importance to Bergamo, considered a locus of civic identity since the communal era in the thirteenth century and the symbolic heart of the civic body. Even the bishop took part in the decision during this calamitous time, noteworthy as Santa Maria Maggiore's ruling body, the confraternity Misericordia Maggiore (hereafter MIA) had long since separated itself politically from the diocese.Footnote ⁴ Considering the crisis presented by the 1629 famine, with citizens starving in the streets, precious resources were nonetheless allocated for music, a product considered to be crucial to the spiritual health of the community, even—or perhaps especially—in times of crisis. Nourishment of the soul was seen as equally important to that of the body.

Drawn from archival documents in Bergamo's MIA archives, a picture emerges of music's importance to civic life. At times when conventional wisdom might suggest reallocating precious resources, the civic authorities—particularly those in charge of Santa Maria Maggiore—continued to support musical and artistic activity to a staggering degree. Taken together, the archival documents show a brief period when Bergamo succumbed to larger trends of involuntary musical and artistic spartanism, especially from 1618 to 1620. Even while operating a skeletal choir, however, receipts and payment slips show large expenditures for musical activities surrounding the Assumption celebration, held yearly on August 15. Between 1619 and 1622, the entire European economy suffered a severe collapse that affected industry, agriculture, money markets, and demographic development.Footnote ⁵ Bergamo was not immune to these trends. Like many institutions throughout the region, Santa Maria Maggiore shifted to a small core group of musicians and slashed the salary of Giovanni Cavaccio, the maestro di cappella since 1598. However, after local pushback and Cavaccio's threat of departure, the MIA reversed course, and in 1620 rehired many of the fired musicians—a stark reversal in musical austerity in direct opposition to the vast majority of contemporaneous institutions.Footnote ⁶ Even after the musical roster reverted to previous levels, the 1620s remained a particularly turbulent time. The first crisis can be traced to the mid-1610s with the outbreak of the Uskok War, which led directly to cuts in musical expenditure. Bergamo dealt with food shortages in 1622/23, and Cavaccio's sudden death four days before the 1626 Assumption presented unique challenges for the MIA. The tenor singer Giacomo Cornolto assumed duties for that year's Assumption, earning a sizeable bonus from his employers and continuing as maestro di cappella until the esteemed Venetian composer Alessandro Grandi arrived in 1627 to take over. Food shortages beleaguered the city once again in 1627/28, leading to the aforementioned famine of 1629; finally, 1630 saw the onset of the plague that swept through much of Northern Italy, killing 10,000 people in Bergamo, approximately 40 percent of the town's population of 25,000.Footnote ⁷ And yet, until the plague year of 1630, the MIA allocated enough funds throughout this turbulent decade to produce music on an opulent scale on par with that of San Marco in Venice. In a decade marred by war, austerity, death, famine, and plague, the continued and robust institutional support for music underscores its importance to the emotional and spiritual well-being of the community. The archival records also support a supposition that military and political events in Venice had a direct impact on every aspect of life throughout the Serenissima. The effects of policy in the capital on cities throughout the Terraferma—Venice's mainland empire—have been little studied.

Why would Bergamo, not usually considered a major center of musical production, keep such a priority in the face of challenges on multiple fronts? Considering the resources set aside for music despite such tumult, Bergamo surfaces as a heretofore neglected center of musical interest, and further serves as a microcosm of the historiographic neglect of supposedly old-fashioned genres during a time of rapid musical stylistic change. Connections to musical expenditure reveal the larger economic impacts of war, famine, and plague and, in so doing, reveal the centrality of civic music to everyday life throughout the region. The situation at Santa Maria Maggiore in Bergamo stands out, however, as this institution chose to continue their robust support for music in the face of a series of crises with significant financial impact that strained the civic budget. The MIA maintained a sizeable, expensive regiment of professional musicians capable of performing large-scale polyphony, led by maestri di cappella Giovanni Cavaccio (who held the post from 1598–1626) and Alessandro Grandi (1627–30), with the Assumption of Mary, the patron saint of the basilica, serving on August 15 as the most important musical feast day of the year.

THE USKOK WAR, 1615–18

The Uskok War, a series of short, costly, and ultimately undeclared violent skirmishes, emerged as a precursor to the larger geopolitical catastrophe known as the Thirty Years’ War. Its economic repercussions indirectly affected the musical chapel in Santa Maria Maggiore, Bergamo.Footnote ⁸ This war left civic organizations throughout the Terraferma with depleted coffers, including in Bergamo, leading to drastic changes in the structural of Santa Maria Maggiore's musical program. Present-day Bergamo is bifurcated into an upper and lower portion of the city by the Venetian Walls, built from 1561 to 1623 to discourage Milanese northward expansion and limit contraband trade. The town submitted to Venetian rule in 1428, and there is a long history of military and commercial importance due to its location between Friuli, the Alps, and the commercial centers of Milan and the greater Po Valley. As a Terraferma fortress, Bergamo was one of the most important of the strong points fortified by the Venetian state in the sixteenth century, though its status as defender of the Western front was never truly tested until the Uskok War of 1615 to 1618. This event began the series of crises that occurred in quick succession throughout the 1620s. By 1617, Venice's involvement in the war had begun to effect Bergamo economically. “Despite the present troubles, the Council is aware of the wish of citizens of the city that there should be music for the honor of God and Bergamo's reputation,” states a December 1617 motion of the MIA council.Footnote ⁹ This battle fit into the broader context of Venetian geopolitical anxiety in the seventeenth century—Spanish Habsburgs on the Republic's western border; Austrian Habsburgs, or archducal territory on the northeastern Friulian border; and the Ottoman Empire bordering the Venetian maritime holdings of the eastern Adriatic.

During the war, Venice was trying to combat Uskok piracy in the Adriatic. The Uskoks were a small population of Christian refugees from Ottoman Bosnia who had been resettled in Senj by Austrian forces. This resettlement was done to protect the Austrian-Habsburg defense zone on the Ottoman frontier. The Uskoks were thus part of Habsburg Croatia and vassals of Archduke Franz Ferdinand at the Styrian court of Graz. Piracy was technically forbidden under Habsburg law, though Ferdinand allowed the Uskoks to operate their swift boats unchecked in order to avoid paying owed subsidies.Footnote ¹⁰ It was out of desperation that the Uskoks resorted to mercenary work and piracy, the latter of which skill they developed to a high degree, particularly considering their low numbers.Footnote ¹¹ By the onset of the war, the Uskok threat had preoccupied Venice for three generations. Their piracy was moderately tolerated as long as the targets remained Ottoman or Jewish, though Venice was still responsible for safe trade through the Adriatic and quibbled with Austrian authorities over responsibility for Uskok activity deemed disadvantageous to Adriatic stability. Senj, on what is now Croatia's Dalmatian coast, had grown a reputation as “the Sherwood Forest of the Mediterranean.”Footnote ¹² This reputation is evidenced by the scocchi (Uskok) characters in a 1587 commedia dell'arte play by the Venetian Giovanni Francesco Loredano titled La malandrina comedia, or “a comic play about dishonest rogues,” and set in Buccari (presently Baker, Croatia), part of the Militärgrenze, the Habsburg militarized zone on their Ottoman border.Footnote ¹³ At one point, an Uskok character plans to not only rob two of the Italians but to sell them into slavery in Bosnia in exchange for horses.Footnote ¹⁴

Battling the Uskoks pitted the Venetian Republic directly against Archduke Ferdinand, the future Holy Roman Emperor, who was simultaneously one of the great patrons of Venetian musicians and composers. Ferdinand was a known Italophile, and the dichotomy between his Venetian musical predilections and his role as political adversary of the Republic is a fascinating yet untold story. Venice enlisted the support of England and the Dutch Republic to help combat Spain-allied Austria. By 1617, Venice's mainland armies were overstretched at the frontiers and, as the Spanish became more involved, Venice increasingly feared a Habsburg-led invasion on the Lombard border, potentially putting Bergamo on the front line. To combat this threat, Venice exploited the resources of the Terraferma as it had never done before, including the enlistment of 4,700 foot soldiers.Footnote ¹⁵ The Venetian Senate called 9,200 additional infantry by the end of 1615, and 2,400 select militiamen from the Terraferma.Footnote ¹⁶ The 2,400 of these “stoutest, most competent” militiamen were sent to Friuli and Istria and were among 12,000 total Terraferma soldiers.Footnote ¹⁷ Mainland subjects were also responsible for providing room and board to garrisoned troops, satisfying requests for horses, and providing labor services as requested by auxiliary forces.Footnote ¹⁸ Half the funds for these efforts came from municipal governments.Footnote ¹⁹ To give some perspective, garrison numbers oscillated between 650–825 soldiers in the years 1605–07. Those numbers topped 2,000 following the Uskok War.Footnote ²⁰ To make matters worse, these infantries were plagued by desertion, poor command, lack of proper armament, and inadequate bureaucratic oversight. Simply put, this was an extraordinarily costly venture. In The Military Organization of a Renaissance State, Mallet and Hale write, “There had probably never been a Venetian war in which more money had been handed out to captains for so few men actually fit to serve, or so much spent but unaccounted for . . . out of 7,737 infantry paid in Friuli in November 1616 only 2,700 could be found in camp in December.”Footnote ²¹ All of this money represented resources that had to be rerouted from other fronts, the burden laid upon Terraferma subjects. In the end, a Lombard invasion never came, and a peaceful settlement eventually took place involving the removal and decimation of Uskok pirates by Austrian forces, while Venice respected Habsburg trading rights in the Adriatic. The Uskok harbors were destroyed, their ships burnt, and surviving Uskoks were transported to inner Croatia, where they slowly intermarried.Footnote ²² I offer this description of the Uskok War and the unhappy fate of the Uskoks not only because historians seldom touch this period but also because it directly affected the musical life of Santa Maria Maggiore in Bergamo.

THE MUSICAL ROSTER AT SANTA MARIA MAGGIORE BEFORE THE USKOK WAR

To fully understand the financial impact of the Uskok War, it is necessary to examine the state of music at Santa Maria Maggiore outside of the crises of the 1620s, beginning with payments made to the Santa Maria Maggiore cappella (musical chapel) in 1601, the first year that full musician salary records exist from the MIA archives. In 1601, 5,823 lire was spent on musician salaries (fig. 1).Footnote ²³ In addition to Cavaccio's salary of 840 lire, this paid for twenty-four professional musicians: nine instrumentalists and fifteen singers.Footnote ²⁴ There is some distinction between seminary students training in the MIA academy—who were expected to sing regularly as part of their studies, as musical education was a large part of their curriculum—and fully professional musicians. In this period, musico indicated the distinction of a professional or trained musician, rather than an amateur. Horatio Marzolo, for example, received a salary of 196 lire and 10 soldi with the title of D. Pre Horatio cap[p]ellano residente in S.ta Maria maggiore et musico.Footnote ²⁵ Marzolo was a chaplain, for which he received 628 lire in 1601, and also a trained musician who served as the vice maestro di cappella. For comparison, many other priests on the sacerdoti payroll— salaried members of the clergy—were expected to sing regularly, as were the seminary students known as chierici (more on the chierici below), but those without the title of musico would receive far lower wages.Footnote ²⁶ For example, the alto Geronimo Posetto was paid just 42 lire per year for singing in Santa Maria Maggiore, in addition to one bushel of wheat.Footnote ²⁷ Besides the maestro di cappella, the highest salary for a musician was 588 lire for Giulio Cesare Celani, a cornettist from Verona.Footnote ²⁸ The cornetto, which was the primary virtuoso instrument of the seventeenth century, often allowed the cornettist to earn the highest pay among musicians, occasionally surpassing even the organist in terms of compensation. Underscoring the specialty nature of such an instrument, Celani had no religious duties as part of his salary and was expected to perform far less often than the regular singers. The other highest paid musicians included the organist, the contralto trombonist, and bass singers. The salary lists do not include the many musicians hired for additional forces on important feast days, such as the basilica's titular festival, the Assumption of Mary, celebrated every year on August 15. In 1600, for example, Cavaccio hired twelve additional performers to complement the full cappella—six singers and a violone player from the cathedral, one singer and one violone player from the church of San Alessandro, a German cornettist, and a tenor violinist—for a combined total of 41 lire for the day.Footnote ²⁹ As part of his duties, Cavaccio was responsible for hiring and managing these musicians.Footnote ³⁰

Figure 1. 1601 musician salaries, Santa Maria Maggiore. MIA 1149, fol. 216^v. Courtesy of the Biblioteca Civica Angelo Mai, Bergamo.

These archival records suggest an institution committed to a significant amount of large-scale polyphony throughout the year, more so than many other comparable churches and cathedrals. This allowed the basilica to continue performing large-scale polychoral repertoire long after many other institutions transitioned to small-scale motets, sometimes earning music in Bergamo the anachronistic reputation of artistic conservatism. To offer some perspective, a printed broadside found in the MIA archive outlines the duties and responsibilities of the basilica's singers, as well as a list of punitive measures put in place for transgressions such as truancy or inappropriate behavior during services.Footnote ³¹ The document also reveals how often singers were required to perform in the church. This includes all Sundays of the year, with a few exceptions (the Sundays from Septuagesima to Palm Sunday, and the Sunday of the autumn holidays), as well as Compline after the noon hour every day during the forty-day Lenten period. Additionally, there is a full list of forty-six specific feast days throughout the year, totaling approximately 138 services.

Although San Marco in Venice was still far and away the most opulent and noteworthy institution in Northern Italy for performances of large-scale sacred polyphony, Bergamo emerges as extraordinarily neglected when this evidence is taken into account. James Moore's research has shown that singers had to be present for around two hundred Vespers services at San Marco, as well as all feasts of duplex rank when they were expected to sing polyphony at one or both Vespers.Footnote ³² For comparison, large scale polyphony at the Gothic church of San Francesco in Milan, where the composer Giovanni Ghizzolo worked as maestro di cappella, was limited to five feast days per year.Footnote ³³ The Milanese ducal chapel of Santa Maria della Scala led by Orfeo Vecchi held a regiment of six adult singers, one organist, and sopranos hired as needed; the only truly large-scale polyphony was when Vecchi would join forces with the Duomo for four-choir music during events such as the funeral for Philip II.Footnote ³⁴ Treviso followed a liturgy similar to that of Venice, but the cathedral there had nowhere near the same frequency of polyphonic performance as Bergamo. Bonnie Blackburn's meticulous research has determined that polyphony was performed thirty-two days of the year in Treviso.Footnote ³⁵ To reiterate the above figures as outlined in this paper, polyphony was performed 138 times per year at Santa Maria Maggiore in Bergamo, and on at least thirty-four of those days the basilica heard large-scale—and expensive—polychoral repertoire. In this light, relegating Bergamo to the Venetian periphery is a disservice to the sheer scale of musical production at Santa Maria Maggiore.

Indeed, Cavaccio's posthumous reputation as a composer is hampered in part by the nature of this oeuvre. Jerome Roche, one of the only musicologists to have significantly engaged with the composer, cursorily dismisses his entire output as “rather dull.”Footnote ³⁶ Roche can be forgiven for his disinterest, particularly considering that Roche was writing in 1966, when there was scant scholarship on Alessandro Grandi and other figures surrounding the avant-garde of the Seicento.Footnote ³⁷ At a time when inventive concertato motets were flourishing, Cavaccio was producing Franco-Flemish polyphony in the tradition of Palestrina and Orlando di Lasso, as well as polychoral repertoire for use at Santa Maria Maggiore—genres a generation out of date by 1620 when viewed in teleological terms. The historiographic trend towards teleology has shifted musical histories towards the innovators, most specifically in regional centers of power such as Florence and Venice, anachronistically relegating Bergamo to peripheral status. It was only after the MIA was forced to reevaluate its fiduciary duties that those responsible for music in Santa Maria Maggiore began to embrace the emerging concertato idiom out of necessity.

THE EMERGING CONCERTATO IDIOM

In the early years of the Seicento, composers throughout the cities of Northern Italy adopted the small-scale, few-voiced concertato motet as their primary idiom for setting sacred texts to music. There were both financial and musical reasons for this stylistic shift. A full account of the idiom's emergence and dissemination can be found elsewhere and is beyond the scope of this article.Footnote ³⁸ However, a brief overview of this genre's development will help contextualize Bergamo's disinterest, embrace, and subsequent abandonment of the concertato motet amidst the larger geopolitical realities discussed in this article. The closing quarter of the sixteenth century saw an enormous output of published polyphonic psalm collections in Italy, the vast majority using falsobordone, a relatively simple harmonization technique built on an existing melody.Footnote ³⁹ Right around the year 1600, many of these compositions exhibited a drastic change in character. In much of Northern Italy, the polychoral style so associated with San Marco in Venice style gave way to small-scale concertato motets using a small group of soloists. The onus of the harmony shifted to the continuo, and the vertical elements of the music slowly undermined the horizontal counterpoint. Looming large in studies of this emerging few-voiced genre in early modern Italy is the work of composer Lodovico Viadana. One of Viadana's most influential prints was published in 1602: Cento concerti ecclesiastici, a collection of ninety-six sacred motets for one to four voices. The work was partly a reaction to spreading and diversifying practice of a style he saw as his own. The Cento concerti ecclesiastici was the first published example of basso continuo with figured bass, which has earned him the spurious title of the musical device's inventor, an erroneous attribution that persisted in music scholarship until the twentieth century.Footnote ⁴⁰ By introducing the independent basso continuo into a sacred context, composers began breaking away from the traditional concept of doubling the vocal parts on the organ.Footnote ⁴¹ Viadana explains that he developed his new style of small-scale concertato motets while sojourning in Rome some five or six years before the book was first printed.Footnote ⁴² He mentions in his preface an impetus behind this publication: “Since others are starting to steal my style, I better get these things out there, so to speak.”Footnote ⁴³ In an effort to preserve an emerging sense of authorial control, Viadana unleashed what was to be among the most influential musical products of his era. Cento concerti ecclesiatici was especially popular in German-speaking lands, where it was published for the first time in 1609.Footnote ⁴⁴ A second German print in 1625 included a vernacular translation of Viadana's lengthy preface. Buoying the popularity of this style in Germany was the Thirty Years’ War; the small-scale performance possibilities especially suited the needs of impoverished German chapels. The dates of these two editions of Cento concerti ecclesiatici roughly coincide with Heinrich Schütz's two visits to Venice. The German composer first went to the city in 1609 and studied with Giovanni Gabrieli for roughly three years. Upon his second visit in 1629, he found the newer concertato idiom fully entrenched, and the influence of this drastic stylistic change can be seen in Schütz's Symphoniae Sacrae I (1629). As Roche notes, the smaller few-voiced idiom was not only a financial necessity, especially in a landscape deeply mired in a vicious war, but also gave composers an opportunity to experiment with more subtle modes of text expression.Footnote ⁴⁵

The influence of Italian music north of the Alps has largely been described as arising via personal connection and apprenticeship with Gabrieli and other Venetian superstars. However, the popularity and availability of prints such as Giulio Caccini's Le nuove musiche and Viadana's Cento concerti ecclesiatici are equally important to the story of the dissemination of Italian music abroad, especially considering locations apart from cities where Venetian-born and Venetian-trained composers emigrated. Metoda Kokole, for example, has shown how circulation of Viadana prints and anthology collections contributed to the emerging concertato idiom in Austrian territory. The 1625 edition of Cento concerti ecclesiatici paved the way for the concertato style in the inner Austrian lands at a time when Italian music was mostly known only at the imperial court at Graz.Footnote ⁴⁶ Contributing to the widespread use of the idiom was the reality that this genre was the most versatile of its time, as shown by Anthony Cummings's foundational 1981 essay.Footnote ⁴⁷ In the post-Tridentine era, the balance between liturgical codification and local tradition contributed to the genre's popularity. Unlike the strict liturgical genres, motets made use of a wide range of liturgical and paraliturgical texts.Footnote ⁴⁸ However, because the MIA continued to lavishly fund music in Santa Maria Maggiore during the early Seicento, polychoral repertoire sustained its performance regularity. This resulted in the paradoxical situation of Bergamo simultaneously being deemed musically conservative by modern scholarship in terms of its reliance on high-Renaissance idioms and performing forces, and radical in its emancipation from the shackles of fashion. What others have found to be retrograde music because the composers and their music did not fit into the teleology of Seicento musical development, I find to be singular in its freedom from austerity-driven stylistic modification. Bergamo represents the deep tension in the post-Tridentine era between innovation and tradition. However, the financial realities of the expensive Uskok War finally forced the MIA to make some difficult choices.

THE EFFECTS OF THE USKOK WAR ON MUSICAL ACTIVITY AT SANTA MARIA MAGGIORE

The economic impact of the war affected everyone throughout the region. Lacking a central authority, the MIA was Bergamo's de facto court, and their operating budget comprised land holdings, rent, and agricultural production, as well as major bequeathments. Venetian authorities demanded resources to pay for the war, and they had to be diverted from somewhere. 1615 was the peak of the Santa Maria Maggiore cappella's numbers, when twenty-seven musicians were employed in the basilica at a cost of 6,312 lire, 14 soldi (fig. 2).Footnote ⁴⁹ A comparison of the rosters from 1601 and 1615 shows remarkable stability (appendix 1). The only major change was an increase in pay for professional performers, including Cavaccio's Reference Cavaccio1605 raise to 1,000 lire per year.Footnote ⁵⁰ In 1601 there were fifteen singers, just as in 1615; five of these singers remained on the roster for the entire period in question, including Francesco Bazino, who continued singing as a contralto after his soprano voice broke. Additionally, both years include six wind musicians—a combination of different trombones and cornetto, as well as a string player. Four of these instrumentalists were mainstays through these fourteen years, as well. Cavaccio and the two organists were another constant, and would remain even after the roster cuts, though at reduced pay. The large ensemble was a firmly established reality by the time the crises hit Bergamo. With this in mind, the drastic effect of the Uskok War in 1618 is unmistakably evident, as the MIA reduced spending for the basilica all around, slashing the musical budget by nearly 60 percent. Remaining on the musical payroll were only Cavaccio (at a 40 percent pay cut), the two organists, and four singers.Footnote ⁵¹ The MIA had been wanting to restructure the makeup of the cappella, sensing that thirty-six musicians was an inordinately large number compared to other, nearby institutions.Footnote ⁵² Musician salaries were not the only causalities in these budget cuts. While essential expenditures for the basilica remained relatively steady—covering items such as candles and wax, sacramental wine, and necessary masonry work—the salaries for the chierici, or the seminary students, as well as the predicatori, were drastically reduced (appendix 2). The newly pared-down musical ensemble would have been well equipped to handle much of the concertato repertoire emerging from Venice, though Cavaccio was evidently not expecting this new direction, nor was it welcome.

Figure 2. 1615 musician salaries, Santa Maria Maggiore. MIA 1152, fol. 556^v. Courtesy of the Biblioteca Civica Angelo Mai, Bergamo.

A supposition that this move away from large performing forces was unexpected is supported by Cavaccio's purchase of music books in January 1611. Cavaccio added six collections to the basilica's musical library, representing new compositions from Brescia, Mantua, Milan, and Orvieto. Five of the six music books listed on this document were published in 1610, one of them in 1609, showing Cavaccio was keeping up to date with the newest publications, but was nonetheless favoring so-called conservative books of sacred polychoral music, even if from more adventurous composers like Monteverdi (fig. 3).Footnote ⁵³ The information provided in documents such as this do not always reveal enough to definitively point to a specific publication; in this case, luckily, the receipt offers enough to identify the specific items with certainty.

• • Ghizzolo, Giovanni. Integra omnium solemnitatum psalmodia vespertine. Mediolani: Simonis Tini, 1609.

• • Gussago, Cesario. Psalmi ad vesperas solemnitatum totius anni. Venetijs: Ricciardum Amadinum, 1610.

• • Lambardi, Girolamo. Psalmodia vespertine omnium solemnitatum cum Cantico Beatae Mariae Virginis . . . liber secundus. Venezia: Caenobio, 1610.

• • Monteverdi, Claudio. Sanctissimae Virgini Missa senis vocibus ac Vesperae pluribus decantandae, cum nonnullis sacris concentibus, ad Sacella sive Principum Cubicula accommodata. Venetiis: Ricciardum Amadinum, 1610.

• • Mortaro, Antonio. Primo choro à quattro voci del Secondo Libro delle Messe, Salmi, Magnificat, Canzoni da suonare, & Falsa Bordoni, à XIII. Milano: Tini, Simone, eredi e Filippo Lomazzo, 1610.

• • Piccioni, Giovanni. Concerti ecclesiastici . . . a una, a due, a tre, a quattro, a cinque, a sei, a sette, & a otto voci, con il suo basso seguito per l'organo. Venezia: Giacomo Vincenti, 1610.

Figure 3. 1611 document listing five newly acquired music books, plus a trombone and used mouthpiece, signed by Giovanni Cavaccio. MIA 1538, fol. 32^r. Courtesy of the Biblioteca Civica Angelo Mai, Bergamo.

Cesario Gussago and Antonio Mortaro were both Brescian composers, and Cavaccio maintained a close network with musicians from Brescia, particularly those associated with the cathedral.Footnote ⁵⁴ These two books contained music for polychoral ensembles for up to twelve and thirteen individual parts. The contents include Magnificat settings, masses, Vespers psalms, and falsobordone. Gussago served as organist at Santa Marie delle Gratie where Pietro Lappi was the maestro di cappella.Footnote ⁵⁵ This church, like Santa Maria Maggiore, was a site of Marian devotion built around a venerated image of the Virgin that had come to prominence during the 1452 plague.Footnote ⁵⁶ The Mortaro book included falsobordone at the end of the volume, and Cavaccio would publish his own similar work the following year as part of his Messe per i defunti with the same Milanese publishing firm.Footnote ⁵⁷ The polychoral offerings of Piccioni's Concerti ecclesiastici are modeled after the polychoral compositions of Andrea and Giovanni Gabrieli, according to the composer's prefatory remarks.Footnote ⁵⁸ Piccioni was working in Orvieto, but also had been employed as the organist at the cathedral in Gubbio, recently shown to have been one of the neglected centers of polychoral development.Footnote ⁵⁹ The Monteverdi volume is none other than the so-called Vespers of 1610. It is remarkable to see Cavaccio purchase these partbooks hot off the presses, before Monteverdi even took up his post at San Marco in Venice.

While it is easy to focus on the startling and radical concertato motets in Monteverdi's 1610 publication, it truly was a malleable collection, much like many of Viadana's publications. The musical contents were pliable enough to be of use throughout the liturgical calendar year and in many different types of institutions. Decades of scholarship focused on deciphering the specific liturgic context for the unusual program found within, but the concept of performing an entire publication in one sitting was an alien concept, too often anachronistically superimposed upon early modern publications. The literature on Monteverdi's Vespers is vast, and further investigation is beyond the scope of this article. Suffice it to say, this eccentric publication can easily be explained as a portfolio of a musician in search of stable, well-paying work.Footnote ⁶⁰ For a Marian Vespers, the same psalms were sung at all of the feasts: Purification (February 2), Annunciation (March 25), Visitation (July 2), Our Lady of the Snow (August 5), Assumption (August 15), Nativity (September 8), and Conception (December 8). The antiphons varied according to the feast. If Monteverdi was publishing for a practical reason, why would he limit their use to one day? Therefore, he then inserted sacred songs—as is said in the title page—to make this collection versatile and useful. One could substitute the appropriate antiphons for the day or use the songs separately. In this sense, it is a collection very much at home with Cavaccio's expanding library for Santa Maria Maggiore. Monteverdi's 1610 Vespers has been codified into a unified concert work today through staged concerts and audio recordings. As such, it is easy to overlook the masses, composed in a high Renaissance idiom closer in style to Palestrina or Cavaccio. The fact that Monteverdi's masses were Marian likely strengthened their cachet within Santa Maria Maggiore.

The same document also lists the acquisition of a trombone and a used mouthpiece, for the use of performance in the church.Footnote ⁶¹ I use the term acquisition because no prices are listed in this document, and the MIA itself owned the musical instruments in cases such as this. Cavaccio included an addendum at the bottom of the document on 9 September 1616 indicating his return of the instrument and mouthpiece to Marc Antonio Benaglio, an MIA official.Footnote ⁶² Giovanni Cavaccio presumably acquired the instrument for use by his son Ludovico Cavaccio, for whom he successfully lobbied a paid position in the cappella in a 1610 letter of request.Footnote ⁶³

The newly reduced musical ensemble forced upon Santa Maria Maggiore's cappella in 1618 would have been well equipped to handle a great deal of concertato repertoire, but the music acquired by Cavaccio in 1611 would have been rendered mostly unplayable after the roster purge, other than several isolated motets. Up until this time, Cavaccio almost exclusively composed large-scale polyphony or five-voiced masses and motets in an imitative polyphonic style in line with Orlando di Lasso and his circle—unsurprising, as Cavaccio was once a young pupil of Lasso during his time in Munich.Footnote ⁶⁴ Cavaccio had published no new volumes since 1611 after the blistering pace of his early career, while he was still pushing for a better post and salary. The new and uncomfortable position in which he found himself in 1617/18 may have spurred a newly invigorated program of composition, designed for a few-voiced concertato ensemble. This may explain the striking departure found in Cavaccio's Nuovo giardino (1620).Footnote ⁶⁵ This publication stands out in Cavaccio's sole-authored output, consisting of mostly of two-voice motets, which comprised thirty-one out of forty-one compositions. These motets are both liturgic and paraliturgic—a malleable repertoire for a diverse set of circumstances.

The dedicatee of Nuovo giardino was a Bergamasco figure named Sillano Licino: a lawyer, government official, and author. Detailed biographical information on Licino remains elusive, though there is at least one other publication of music dedicated to Licino—a 1599 lute publication by the Bergamasco composer Giovanni Terzi.Footnote ⁶⁶ This was Terzi's second book of lute intabulations, following a 1593 volume. Terzi's dedicatees contain commonalities with Cavaccio; Terzi's Reference Terzi1593 publication is dedicated to another Bergamasque figure: the cavalier Bartolomeo Fino, also the dedicatee of Cavaccio's Hinni correnti (1605).Footnote ⁶⁷ Terzi includes intabulations of Cavaccio compositions in both of his lute books, as well.Footnote ⁶⁸ Licino was not only the author of the epitaph on Cavaccio's tombstone but also of an oration in praise of Ottavio Rinuccini for his tomb.Footnote ⁶⁹ Terzi and Cavaccio evidently ran in similar social circles, though the lute seems not to have been favored as a continuo instrument in Santa Maria Maggiore. It is more likely that Terzi was part of the private musical life within the noble households of Bergamo, a topic for another project. Both Hinni correnti and Nuovo giardino came at crucial junctures in his career, and they are the only volumes to offer specific Bergamasco dedicatees since Cavaccio's elevation to maestro di cappella of Santa Maria Maggiore in 1598. Nuovo giardino also disproves the notion that Cavaccio was unable (or unwilling) to compose in the newer concertato idiom; rather, he only did so when the financial circumstances of his musical chapel dictated as such.

The shift in 1618 was perhaps too drastic and did not sit well with the general population, not to mention the musicians. There was fierce debate over the restructured musical chapel; after much back and forth, it was decided that four additional singers should be rehired, though at a reduced rate.Footnote ⁷⁰ In October 1618 the council noted that

Meanwhile, Cavaccio's reputation had continued to grow, both within and outside the walls of Bergamo—a reputation he was able to leverage into a competing job offer. In a December 1618 letter to the MIA, Cavaccio wrote that he had been offered the post of maestro di cappella of Brescia Cathedral, a job he would take unless immediately reinstated at his original salary of 1,000 lire.Footnote ⁷² The MIA acquiesced and reinstated Cavaccio's previous salary, even allowing him to scale back his pedagogical duties, eventually teaching just four boys at his home for an additional stipend.Footnote ⁷³

A CHIERICO'S PLEA AND THE 1622 FOOD SHORTAGE

By 1621, the MIA had fully reversed course, paying nearly 7,000 lire per year for sixteen full-time musicians: six instrumentalists and ten singers.Footnote ⁷⁴ This was an even higher operating budget than before the recent cuts. Still, the food economy was extremely susceptible to weather fluctuation in the form of either too much or too little rain. Starting in 1622, one year after the restoration of Santa Maria Maggiore's cappella, food shortages beleaguered Bergamo, leading to increased petitions to the MIA for both pay raises and help in the form of household staples. It was not uncommon for Bergamasque citizens from all walks of life to seek support from the MIA, the main source of charity in the city. However, the petitions certainly increased surrounding food shortage years. In a 1622 letter to the MIA council, Bernardino Rossi wrote that he had been singing soprano in Santa Maria Maggiore for two years without a salary (fig. 4).Footnote ⁷⁵ Rossi, like many of the singers who sang daily, was a chierico on the ecclesiastic payroll. According to the Grande dizionaro della lingua italiano, a chierico at this time and place referred to a young person preparing for priesthood and who had already worn the habit—essentially, a seminary student.Footnote ⁷⁶ The MIA founded the Accademia dei chierici in 1566, modeled in many ways on its grammar school (in operation since 1506), albeit with a more religiously orthodox structure in line with Tridentine reform.Footnote ⁷⁷ Applicants had to be at least twelve years old (though they could be older), and the MIA demanded an eight-year commitment for any enrollee.Footnote ⁷⁸ The MIA supported the chierici in the form of housing, food, haircuts, and education, but the program suffered from mismanagement, financial struggles, and student disobedience.

Figure 4. 1622 letter from Bernardino Rossi to the MIA. MIA 1452, fol. 41^r. Courtesy of the Biblioteca Civica Angelo Mai, Bergamo.

A new Academy of Clerics was formed in 1617, and this is where Bernardo Rossi, our letter writer, would have been trained. The academy was designed for sixty students, twenty of whom were designated as chierici and served on a weekly basis in Santa Maria Maggiore in exchange for a salary of 20 lire, six bushels of grain, and two vats of wine.Footnote ⁷⁹ Many of the students came from less privileged families and were often attending the MIA's academy on a scholarship. Dating to the fourteenth century, the MIA would distribute a fixed amount of scholarship money to a limited number of students who met their criteria; for other poverty-stricken students, the MIA would allocate limited amounts of food, money, clothing, etc., deemed necessary upon request.Footnote ⁸⁰ Unlike the first academy, however, the MIA indicated a distinct preference for more noble—that is to say, monied—students in the restructured Accademia dei chierici. According to Christopher Carlsmith, this underscored a larger supraregional trend towards aristocratization, imitating the Colleges of Nobles established in Milan and Parma.Footnote ⁸¹

However, letters such as Rossi's indicate that a number of less wealthy families still managed to send their children to the MIA's academies. The chierico Rossi was initially awarded payment in the form of one year's housing in exchange for his services as a vocalist. His talents as a soprano allowed him to move from the second soprano role to the first. While all chierici received musical instruction, Rossi's role as soprano primiero indicates an above average talent. The challenges brought on by food shortages and the ensuing price hikes likely spurred him to finally write to the MIA. In his plea, Rossi urged the MIA to consider his talent and conduct in their determination of a salary, rather than the individual needs brought on by the external crisis. For its part, the MIA seems to have made efforts to support, or at least placate, these requests when the need was justified. In this case, the ledger books show Rossi receiving an additional 84 lire the following year for his singing, a significant increase from the 20 lire he received as a chierico.Footnote ⁸² The archival records are unclear about Bernardino Rossi's ensuing musical career. Cavaccio would often pay unnamed chierici for special events and on days requiring large numbers of musicians, and it is impossible to know the specific singers’ names. The only other record of Bernardino Rossi is for a payment of 14 lire for singing a solo role inside Santa Maria Maggiore on an undefined day in 1628.Footnote ⁸³

THE 1629 CRISIS PROCESSION AND CIVIC IDENTITY

This large, festive musical event for Assumption took place just two months after the June 1629 crisis procession discussed in this article's opening paragraphs. If the timing seems inappropriate for lavish spending, the calendric realties of these two events stipulated an elaborate musical celebration for the Feast of the Assumption in August. Much as the sounds of the bells served as temporal markers in the daily life of an early modern Italian citizen, the calendric rituals and celebrations served as temporal markers on a macro scale. In the words of Edward Muir:

The feast of 1629 not only marked a transition from scarcity to plenty, but from starvation to survival. Although detailed information illuminating the Bergamo procession is lacking, Remi Chiu's investigation into processional music during times of plague, famine, and pestilence provides insight into sound that might have been present during the event on 9 June 1629. Chiu writes about the first pestilential procession in 590 with Pope Gregory I:

According to Benaglio's account of the crisis procession in Bergamo, the procession route began inside the cathedral, since the relics were housed therein, moved outside and into the city streets (stopping in various churches along the way), and ended at the entrance to Santa Maria Maggiore. The standard procession formula in the post-Tridentine catholic world was an antiphon, versicle, and response, then a collect (oratio).Footnote ⁸⁶ For Venetians (and Venetian subjects) who preferred Marian devotion for crisis processions, they ended with a Salve Regina. One such example for use in Bergamo is the Salve Regina in Cavaccio's Messe per i defunti (1611), the final antiphon in the collection for five voices with no continuo: a perfect ensemble for a procession pausing at the entrance of the basilica. Particularly on days of special petition, such as the so-called crisis procession, litanies to the saints were sung in the streets. Chiu refers to these as the iconic sound of these public devotions, the term litany itself serving as synecdoche for the procession.Footnote ⁸⁷ The Greater Litanies were associated with April 25, the old pagan day for blessing the growing crops, and as such were particularly appropriate during a procession for famine.Footnote ⁸⁸ These were solemn events, not meant for spectatorship. Participation was total, and if one was not taking part, the expectation would be to remain sequestered away from view.Footnote ⁸⁹ This attempt at totality was an aggregate act of civic cooperation and gave the impression of a shared communal goal.

An example of the musical litany of the saints is Cavaccio's Litanie . . . a doi chori (1587) (figs. 5–6).Footnote ⁹⁰ The collection is dedicated to the Gonfalone of San Croce, but the mention of a number of specific names of MIA officials in this dedication is striking, as well as a reference to the year in which the MIA was founded. Without specifically mentioning the confraternity, this is not only a laudatory musical praise to the MIA, the organization Cavaccio was actively courting at the time, but also a dedication to the city of Bergamo itself. Cavaccio walks a political tightrope here, as evidenced in the inclusion of the Venetian-appointed bishop in the list of names. Additionally, Cavaccio's litany draws from a specifically Bergamasque version of the traditional version. One of the oldest liturgical offices in the Roman Catholic tradition, only minor additions have been made in over a thousand years, and the insertion of local saints was forbidden to prevent deviation from the norm, even before the push towards universal practice in the post-Tridentine era of reform. Nonetheless, Bergamo had always held fast to local variations independent from episcopal oversight, as previously shown, and there was significant deletion and insertion of local saints in the Bergamasque litany, as discussed by Gary Towne in his exploration of Gaspar de Albertis's funerary works.Footnote ⁹¹

Figure 5. Title page, Giovanni Cavaccio, Litanie in doi modi. Venetia: Gardano, 1587. Courtesy of the Biblioteca del Conservatorio di Musica Giuseppe Verdi, Milan.

Figure 6. Cavaccio, Litanie in doi modi, opening musical page of the sole surviving partbook. Courtesy of the Biblioteca del Conservatorio di Musica Giuseppe Verdi, Milan.

Remi Chiu argues that the litany was, on account of its very structure, the perfect musical tool against the communal scourge of plague and famine.

Even if the Cavaccio examples were not the exact musical selections heard on June 9, pairing the composer's published litanies with the Salve Regina setting provides an auditory sample of what the soundscape of procession may have been. Besides the Salve Regina, the three other Marian antiphons that would have been appropriate were Alma redemptoris mater, Ave Regina caelorum, and Regina caeli.

The decision to have the procession culminate at Santa Maria Maggiore—and to display the sacraments there for ten days—speaks to the basilica's status as a symbol of communal unity. Edward Muir speaks of cities in general as mosaics of overlapping sacred and secular spaces that could imbue civic ritual with hidden meaning.Footnote ⁹³ There is no better example than the space in front of Santa Maria Maggiore in Bergamo, shared not only by the cathedral directly next door but also by the town hall (fig. 7). In 1561, the Venetian Republic began construction on the fortified walls that still divide Bergamo into the città alta and città bassa (upper and lower cities). The massive engineering project resulted in the destruction of a number of churches, including Sant'Alessandro, one of two Bergamasque churches that historically claimed cathedral status. Each of these presumed cathedrals had its own separate chapter of canons, giving rise to a long series of bitter disputes.Footnote ⁹⁴ After the destruction of Sant'Alessandro, the relics were translated to the now undisputed cathedral of San Vincenzo in the center of the città alta and adjacent to Santa Maria Maggiore. Additionally, the chapter canons were merged, though deep divisions remained between the two former rival factions, the displaced members generally opposing Venetian rule. The backdrop of this conflict was the ongoing project of post-Tridentine reform. Milanese Archbishop Carlo Borromeo, the powerful reformer, controlled an episcopal jurisdiction that extended beyond the Milan/Venice border and into Bergamo. In fact, despite the papal bull guaranteeing Santa Maria Maggiore freedom from episcopal interference, Borromeo wielded one of the more powerful tools of the Counter-Reformation bishop in the form of a 1575 pastoral visit to the basilica.Footnote ⁹⁵ As might be expected, this caused significant friction with the MIA and the city government, which had enjoyed a continued measure of freedom in self-governance under Venetian jurisdiction. The former Sant'Alessandro canons, however, supported Milanese oversight due to their sour feelings towards Venice regarding their unilateral solution to the two-cathedral problem. For Borromeo and the MIA, the key disagreement was whether the 1453 papal bull or the decrees of the Council of Trent carried more authority. Bergamo's Bishop Ragazzoni was a close ally to Borromeo in matters of reform, placing him at direct odds to the MIA. Thus, Cavaccio's back-to-back dedications to Ragazzoni and the MIA officials in his first and second book of Magnificats represent overtures to politically misaligned bodies. While the apostolic visit did take place, the MIA won a significant victory by convincing Borromeo to cease spreading doubts of the MIA's legitimacy to rule the basilica as they saw fit. More detail regarding this situation is outside the scope of this article, though this summary serves to highlight the delicate balance between Venetian and Milanese partisans within Bergamo's urban space—a situation with which Cavaccio would have to reckon. The full story and the MIA's response inside Santa Maria Maggiore is the subject of a thorough and informative article by art historian Giles Knox.Footnote ⁹⁶ Knox notes that no document records the precise reason for Borromeo's recant, but it seems most likely that the close connection between the MIA and the Venetian government was an important factor.Footnote ⁹⁷

Figure 7. Entrance to Santa Maria Maggiore on the left, and the Colleoni chapel to the right. Photo by author.

To add to this crowded ideological space is the Colleoni chapel, violently forced upon Santa Maria Maggiore's facade itself in a direct act of political aggression.Footnote ⁹⁸ Built as a personal funerary chapel to the condottiere Bartolomeo Colleoni in the late fifteenth century, Knox concludes that the chapel expressed a visual representation of Colleoni's political ideology, one that contrasted with Santa Maria Maggiore's program of communal harmony. Colleoni was from Bergamo but was known as a Venetian military hero; locally, he represented a populace grappling with a compartmentalized memory of communal self-rule and submission to Venetian control. Thus, Santa Maria Maggiore served as a symbol of Bergamasque independence while the Colleoni chapel, foisted upon its facade, served as a symbol of territorial subjugation. The two buildings shared a wall and a piazza but remained administratively and ecclesiastically separate (fig. 8). A procession aiming to unify the population needed to navigate through the complicated urban space that conjoined the cathedral, the civic town hall, the Colleoni chapel, and, of course, Santa Maria Maggiore.

Figure 8. Bird's-eye view of cathedral, basilica, and surroundings. According to plan of early modern Bergamo: 1) Cathedral San Vincenzo; 2) Santa Maria Maggiore; 3) Colleoni chapel; 4) town hall. Image source: Google Earth.

EPILOGUE SINGING FROM THE BALCONY: CIVIC MUSIC DURING THE 2020 COVID-19 CRISIS

At the time of this writing, July 2022, the world is still grappling with the global COVID-19 pandemic. As of 22 July 2022, the pandemic has claimed at least 6,400,105 lives, and that may be a conservative estimate. When I first drafted the essay in the spring of 2020, I was under a shelter-in-place order from my governor and mayor, while Italy was on nationwide mandatory lockdown. In the early days of the pandemic, Italy's crisis was particularly devastating, with Bergamo at the epicenter of the original European outbreak. Italy's lockdown began with several towns in Lombardy and the Veneto going under quarantine on 23 February 2020. On March 8, all of Lombardy and the Veneto went under quarantine, extending nationwide the following day. The situation in Bergamo was particularly grim, with doctors and nurses forced to make the unimaginable choice of deciding which patients to treat given the limited resources of an overwhelmed system. During the plague outbreaks in the early modern period, quarantine orders from temporal officials were sometimes ignored by ecclesiastic bodies in order to conduct the processions and community-wide religious pleas for healing. Knowledge of modern epidemiology prevents such large gatherings, yet Italians have shown during the current crisis—much like during the Seicento, as shown in this article—that the spiritual need for communal contact through music is a powerful tool, even an essential need. As videos of Italians singing and playing instruments from their balconies began to sweep through social media, I was struck by the civic nature of the chosen melodies. Whereas my neighborhood attempted a Billy Joel singalong through Facebook invite that was poorly attended, residents of Siena began an impromptu moonlit singalong across empty streets of Il canto della Verbena, a folk song with uncertain origins but certainly at least a few centuries old, traditionally sung by members of a contrada, districts set up in the Middle Ages to supply troops. Also known as “While Siena Sleeps,” it has become, in modern times, the unofficial anthem of Siena. Amazingly, the singers employ falsobordone, the same basic improvised harmonization technique that would have been used by singers in a Bergamo procession circa 1629.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ The Siena video is but one example, and many of the videos exhibit explicitly local expression of civic identity. In Milan, a viral clip showed a trumpeter regaling his neighbors with a textless Oh mia bèla Madunina, another unofficial city anthem.Footnote ¹¹⁰ The song was written in 1934 by Giovanni D'Anzi, and the “little Madonna” referred to in the title is the one on the spire of the duomo. While a lovely melody for those viewing from around the world, this is a deeply impactful, unambiguously local expression of communal identity with implied textual knowledge in the ears of the trumpeter's Milanese neighbors. The above examples are old melodies, typically sung at football games in modern Italy. In the context of this health crisis, the melodies take on a profound significance, accumulating new layers of meaning as they serve to unite communities and nourish the soul. It becomes evident, once again, that music's importance is on par with that of essential bodily necessities, reaffirming its vital role in sustaining humanity during challenging times.

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