Tartini Trio Sonatas in the Berkeley Collection

The purpose of the presentation is to shed some light on the characteristics of the collection and establish its im- portance as part of the tartinian trio repertoire. The manuscripts’ collection of Eighteenth-Century Italian instrumental music of the University of Berkley (CA) contains more than one thousand documents that date back to the contemporary and the immediately post-Tartini Paduan environment. In the collection we find fifteen trios of the same copyist, among which five are comprised of cycles of four movements, as a result of the grouping of two different sonatas. Moreover, the fifteen manuscripts can be differentiated in three subgroups: “sonata a tre” (trio sonata), “sinfonia a tre” (trio symphony) and “trio”. The presentation will showcase the guidelines and preliminary results of the investigation on the respective manuscripts: First and foremost, the authorship degree and the role of the present collection as part of the whole tartinian trio repertoire will be established through a recensio of the respective sources. Secondly, the most probable considerations that might have led to the grouping in cycles of four movements will be suggested, through an analysis of the environment of reference and of the stylistic evolution of the repertoire. Finally, the most plausible reasons why the manuscripts were named in three different ways (sonata, symphony and trio) will be presented, through various types of analysis: of writing, morphological, of the instrumental technique, harmonic and melodic. Through this analysis the author hopes to frame the collection in the general context of Tartini’s trio sonatas, establishing in a plausible manner the characteristics of the repertoire and the distinctions of the various subgroups of the repertoire