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'Colonna's Cantatas for Florence and Modena: Art and Music Combined'

The Italian baroque cantata has historically received relatively little attention from musicologists. This chapter is published in the volume resulting from a conference that aimed to redress this by examining the genre at the turn of the eighteenth century from a variety of different approaches. The author has spent several years studying the cantata in Bologna; it was the subject of her doctoral dissertation (2008), whilst a more recent article (forthcoming) considers examples of the genre that discuss the ongoing Ottoman wars. The present chapter examines two very unusual late seventeenth-century Bolognese cantata volumes created as decorative items to be presented to two of the most important families in northern Italy: the Medici in Florence (in the case of GB-Lbm Add. MS 27931) and the Este in Modena (I-MOe MUS C312). The former exclusively contains cantatas by the prominent Bolognese composer Giovanni Paolo Colonna, whilst the latter also includes works by younger composers who either studied with or worked under him in Bologna. The most striking aspect of these volumes is the presence of elaborate pen-and-ink designs, created by Carlo Buffagnotti, into which the music is written. Drawing both on internal evidence from the manuscripts themselves and a letter written by Colonna in 1689, Churnside proposes a date for their creation and explores the manner in which the composer appears to have helped his younger compatriots to gain recognition from an important patron through his own established connections.

Churnside’s work (01–03) forms part of the informal research grouping in seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century musicology at Birmingham Conservatoire, also involving Thompson, Sadler (qqv.), and three current research students.