During the years between the restoration of the Medici to Florence and
the election of Cosimo I, the Medici family sponsored a series of
splendid public festivals, reconstructed here by Anthony M. Cummings.
Cummings has utilized unexpectedly rich sources of information about the
musical life of the time in contemporary narrative accounts of these
occasions--histories, diaries, and family memoirs. In this
interdisciplinary work, he explains how the festivals combined music
with art and literature to convey political meanings to Florentine
observers. As analyzed by Cummings, the festivals document the political
transformation of the city in the crucial era that witnessed the end of
the Florentine republic and the beginnings of the Medici principate.
This book will interest all students of the life and institutions of
sixteenth-century Florence and of the Medici family. In addition, the
author furnishes new evidence about the contexts for musical
performances in early modern Europe. By describing such contexts, he
ascertains much about how music was performed and how it sounded in this
period of music history and shows that the modes of musical expression
were more varied than is suggested by the relatively few surviving
examples of actual pieces of music.
Originally published in 1992.
The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand
technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from
the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions
preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting
them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the
Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich
scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by
Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
