Abstract: Florentine musical traditions exemplify change throughout the centuries. Individual moments in their history acquire a logic when re-situated in the context of what came before and after. My paper reports on several findings that emerge from the larger narrative that illustrate determinative influences on Florentine musical culture writ large.
In music, Florentines seem to have expended their creative energies on the initial ideation. Thereafter, they cede primacy to other centers of musical activity, where the original development is perfected. Later innovations in the madrigal typically occurred elsewhere. And although the earliest operas were the creation of Florentines active around 1600, “the definitive eclipse of Florentine operatic supremacy” had occurred by 1637.
After those initial developments, Florentines often surrender to “Florentinism,” a “satisfied contemplation of their own past,” which is one of the explanations for the academic movement of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that generated the theorizing resulting in the birth of both the madrigal and opera.
Quintessentially Florentine genres are refashioned in response to changes in political tradition, such refashionings reflected in other expressions of Florentine experience: architecture; the constitution. Carnival song originally celebrated the trades, which suggests the importance of the mercantile guilds in medieval Florence. With the ennoblement of the Medici, songs became politicized, instruments for effecting the transition from republic to aristocratic state. And with the emergence of a courtly culture, the carnival song is again refashioned as a vehicle for the expression of courtly values.
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