Corporate Patronage Research Articles

MUSICAL PATRONAGE: SIENA

The principal system of musical patronage in Siena from the mid-15th through the mid-17th centuries was one that had its origins in policies devised by the Commune's rulers a few hundred years earlier1. It was a corporate one which placed development, direction and financing of the musical institutions associated with the two focal points of Siena's public life, its Cathedral and its Palazzo Pubblico, in the hands of pub licly elected officials or their appointees. Other levels of musical patro nage ?individual, family, guild, academic? existed, although these ne ver assumed the importance in Siena that they had in other cities, such as Florence, and only became more prominent in the later 16th cen tury. Even the demise of Siena's ancient republic in 1555 and its subse quent absorption into the Medicean state a few years later had little or no effect upon the established system. Cosimo I and his successors, as I have noted on another occasion, were content to allow Sienese cultu ral institutions to continue to function as they had in the past so long as their policies posed no threat to Medici rule2. Thus Siena's corporate patronage system, subject, to be sure, to a rarely exercised ducal autho rity, was able to adjust the new realities posed by a changed political or der. The corporate system was an outgrowth for the most part of policies established under the government of the Nine, which from 1287 through 1355, brought an unprecedented period of stability to Sienese politics.

Honors and Prizes in the Mla Field

Two Centuries Ago another Dr. Johnson, commenting on the griefs and dangers that beset the scholar, advised him to pause a while from letters to be wise:Deign on the passing world to turn thine eyes …There mark what ills the scholar's life assail,Toil, envy, want, the garret, and the gaol.See nations slowly wise, and meanly just,To buried merit raise the tardy bust.A few years later he indicated that patrons are even greater ills than garrets in the life of the scholar. The corporate patronage of our time represents some advance over the system of individual patronage that was dying in the eighteenth century, and, in the field of modern scholarship, living merit is generally acknowledged–if not always in due proportion or in the crude but useful form of hire and salary. In two centuries there has been apparent progress, though it would be difficult to say how much. It is not the purpose of this essay to refute the universality of Dr. Johnson's sobering generalization but, for our own time and place, to qualify and perhaps to document it by surveying the honors reserved for living scholars, specifically those honors awarded by groups or institutions in the United States and Canada that have been or might conceivably be given to MLA members in recognition of unusual achievement.

Honors and Prizes in the MLA Field

A few years later he indicated that patrons are even greater ills than garrets in the life of the scholar. The corporate patronage of our time represents some advance over the system of individual patronage that was dying in the eighteenth century, and, in the field of modern scholarship, living merit is generally acknowledged-if not always in due proportion or in the crude but useful form of hire and salary. In two centuries there has been apparent progress, though it would be difficult to say how much. It is not the purpose of this essay to refute the universality of Dr. Johnson's sobering generalization but, for our own time and place, to qualify and perhaps to document it by surveying the honors reserved for living scholars, specifically those honors awarded by groups or institutions in the United States and Canada that have been or might conceivably be given to MLA members in recognition of unusual achievement.