Correspondence

Abstract

In her review of Giovanni Gabrieli: transmission and reception of a Venetian musical tradition (of which we are editors and, inter alia, authors), Eleanor Selfridge-Field describes the volume as ‘a valuable and eminently useful resource’ (Early Music, xlvi/1 (2018), pp.167–9). Yet some of her observations do not corroborate this judgement. We here comment on salient passages in her review. Selfridge-Field writes: ‘This collection of essays ... is intended to celebrate, I believe, the strong stimulus to Gabrieli studies of Baroncini’s too narrowly distributed Giovanni Gabrieli (Palermo, 2012) ... Selected quotations from Baroncini’s book appear before each chapter’. The ‘selected quotations from Baroncini’s book’ are, in reality, the abstracts of the individual chapters, placed in the volume before the main body of text. Furthermore, as here certified by the editors (one of whom authored the 2012 monograph), this new collection of essays has no celebratory contents or intentions. Selfridge-Field also comments: ‘Although bibliographies are generously provided and citations are clear, they occasionally serve to illustrate how little use has been made of previous studies on the same or closely related subjects’. Recommending the use of RILM, she adds: ‘Since all the contributors are recognized scholars, it is difficult to imagine how it is possible to ignore this behemoth of music bibliography’. After this statement, she cites only three examples: essays by Stefano Lorenzetti, Massimo Bisson and Rodolfo Baroncini. In the first case, a cursory examination of the omitted bibliography justifies the author’s (and editors’) decision. Volume xxxi (2007) of the Basler Jahrbuch für historische Musikpraxis contains 13 essays collected under the title of ‘Improvisatorische Praxis vom Mittelalter bis zum 18. Jahrhundert’, none of them akin to the theme of Lorenzetti’s contribution (‘Giovanni Gabrieli’s keyboard music and the art of improvised composition’). To be sure, Morelli’s 1996 study (‘The role of the organ in the performance practices of Italian sacred polyphony during the Cinquecento’) is not cited, but the same author’s specific investigation of ‘Concorsi organistici a San Marco’ (1998) rightfully finds its place in Lorenzetti’s bibliography. Selfridge-Field’s 1978 essay (‘Canzona and sonata: some differences in social identity’) is no more relevant to Lorenzetti’s study than dozens of other contributions variously focusing on Venetian keyboard music of the 16th and 17th centuries.