Orality, literacy, and the learning of instruments: professional instrumentalists and their music in early modern Italy

The literacy of instrumentalists underwent a revolution in the sixteenth century. Previously, musicians who specialized in instrumental performance were often excluded from literate musical cultures: they were artisans operating within oral traditions of improvisation and formulaic playing. As a result, relatively few written compositions survive from instrumentalists prior to 1500. By the end of the sixteenth century, instrumentalists were benefitting in many regions from a vast growth in general literacy, and were frequently intersecting with the educated cultures of churches and courts—as a result, they could notate with precision the music that they played and created. This trend contributed to the pedagogical methods used to train instrumentalists. As instrumentalists transitioned from a largely artisanal and oral culture into a musically literate mainstream, new printed repertoires and pedagogical materials offered a complement to traditional teaching methods, necessitating the acquisition of new skills and vastly broadening the musical experiences of student instrumentalists. Although existing studies have probed in detail the emergence of print culture in the early modern period, there remain important issues to be considered about the intersections between printed objects and literacy, the relationships between writing, printing, and oral cultures, and the ways in which these developments shaped the ways musicians thought about and created music. In this dissertation, I argue that the emergence of a literate musical culture among instrumentalists in sixteenth-century Italy had far-reaching implications. The acquisition of literacy coincided with instrumentalists’ entries into and participation in the literate musical milieus of churches and courts, and newly literate instrumentalists provided a bridge between earlier oral practices and an expanding written culture. Through writing down or codifying previously oral practices and taking advantage of the new possibilities of writing and print, instrumentalists began to open new pedagogical possibilities for students, and reshape instrumentalists’ thought processes and musical understanding. I propose that instrumentalists trained in late sixteenth-century Italy developed a new compositional consciousness as a result of this, and tensions between the oral and written cultures of these musicians are responsible for some key characteristics of progressive instrumental compositions in the early baroque period.Ph.D.Includes bibliographical referencesby Lynette Bowrin