Music, magic and witchcraft were inextricably linked in early modern Europe, and a thorough study of the unity of the three in dramatic works remains to be written. Jacobean England, in particular, saw an outpouring of dramatic works dedicated to the subject of the dark, destructive powers of the witch and her ability to conquer kings, destroy families and separate lovers. Surprisingly, none of the recent scholarly investigations into these works have paid attention to the vital use of music in the plays, which often represents the actual working of spells and rituals of magic. Ficino proclaimed that music was "still breathing and somehow living; like an animal … composed of certain parts and limbs of its own and not only possesses motion and displays passion but even carries meaning like a mind." Jacobean playwrights, actors and musicians also recognized that music had these powers and could seduce both characters in the plays and the audience who heard it.
     This paper focuses on two plays and their contrasting uses of music by witches for love and seduction: John Marston’s Sophonisba (1606) and Thomas Middleton’s The Witch (1609). Music played a central role in delimiting the sexual power of witches in these contrasting works, a portrayal made more intriguing by the presence of male actors in female roles according to standard English renaissance theater practice.
      In the absence of documentation regarding the specific sound of witchcraft music, the diverse evidence from stage directions included in both plays, plus surviving music that may be linked to at least one production, becomes crucial to our understanding of how sound was believed to function in dark, demonic magic. Through the examination of such witchcraft drama, we, as modern scholars, can garner some insight into the mindset of early modern England regarding the power of dramatic music and sexually predatory women, as well as the misogynistic attitudes toward the destructive, emasculating side of witchcraft.

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One lasting legacy of both Reformation and Counter-Reformation was a highly complicated reconsideration of physical stimuli which moved the bodily passions, but which were likewise associated with spiritual transport. As the sixteenth century gave rise to the seventeenth, and codifiers of perceptual theories proclaimed the supremacy of sight above hearing and the three lower senses, no art was more hotly contested than music. According to philosophers, physicians, and divines on all sides of the religious and cultural divide, music was of the same physical substance as the human soul and the multitude of spiritual entities that animated the visible and invisible universe. As such, it served as a useful aid to healing, meditation, and communion with the sacred. Yet the Church Fathers from St. Augustine onward, in words newly reclaimed by both Catholic and Protestant thinkers, had expressed grave suspicion of music’s power to lead not toward ecstatic union with the Divine, but toward the slow corruption and spiritual emptiness of physical pleasure. Furthermore, since the performance of instrumental music required the use of all five senses, it especially came to stand for the dangers of sensual excess in the symbolic language of the era.
      Art historians are most familiar with this topos in the still-life "vanitas" images of the era from Italy to the Netherlands, in which silenced musical instruments blend enticingly with other emblems of mortality. And musicologists have long examined controversies over church-music, and have had access to the settings of early cantatas and oratorios that warn the ear and the imagination of the difference between the sounds of the sacred and the profane. Yet these widely ranging items, which hardly present a unified picture, still need to be given their complete visual and cultural context. This paper proposes to examine "vanitas" images in form of paintings, sculpture, emblems, and the frontispieces of published books from England, France, Italy and the Netherlands in relation to words which express the same ideas in music theory treatises, theological writings, poetry, and medical manuals. It will relate this silent material to musical settings of texts on the dangers of surrender to auditory pleasure in contrast to spiritual revitalization.

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The interrelationship between medicine and music has long engaged thinkers and the case of seventeenth-century physician and musician Thomas Campion is no exception. For Campion and his contemporaries, the primary focus was placed on the influence of music on the four physiological humors, a topic of interest inherited from Antiquity and examined in earlier times by such diverse individuals as Galen, Aristotle, and Zarlino. Seventeenth-century musical commentators like Roger North, Christopher Simpson, and John Playford re-codified this tradition in music, making connections between the balance of the four voices in harmony and the bodily balance of the four humors, as well as highlighting the similarities between the affective characteristics of the modes and the personality traits of the humors. These associations are particularly striking when comparing the blood-driven sanguine humor and music. The circulation of the blood carried spirits throughout the body just as the airy spirit of musical song flowed in through the ear, oftentimes physically arousing the heart and soul. These airy spirits of song were the proper domain of the sanguine humor, linked to the element of air.
      Perhaps the most convincing connection between sanguinity and music was the usage of the term "ayre" to establish an entire genre of secular song at the turn of the seventeenth century. Many of these ayres discussed the affective traits of sanguinity, illustrating music’s use as a curative within actual ayre texts. The ayres of Campion are particularly fascinating, frequently describing music as converting a less healthy individual to the vital moist and hot sanguine temperament, creating health and harmony of body, mind, and soul. These texts therefore suggest that the aural experience of an ayre could enable a seventeenth century individual to tune his or her heart strings to the surrounding world, allowing the soul to harmonize with music and the universe by creating a humoral balance of health. Because both the sanguine humor and music were airy, soul-like, heart-arousing, and potentially merry, it is no surprise that this airy sanguine humor helped contribute to an ayre genre that celebrated the mirth-provoking airiness of secular song.

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John Brown’s Sermon on Female Character (1655) claimed that where "Women assume masculine Boldness and pretend to guide the Reins of Empire … it is inevitably the consequence that National Virtue vanisheth." Such a notion resonates with many late seventeenth-century English music dramas that are rife with images of women who transgress social and sexual boundaries and who are punished due to misplaced aspirations of power over men. These images are typically the products of male authors and belie a general level of masculine anxiety and the desire to maintain patriarchal order in the face of the perceived threat of feminine power during this period. One of the most severe manifestations of these fears occurs in John Blow’s Venus and Adonis (1682). In this work Venus is portrayed as a powerful older women who throughout the work manipulates and usurps Adonis’s freedom of choice, ultimately instigating his demise. Paradoxically, however, she is also sympathetically portrayed as a grieving lover and attentive mother of Cupid. In terms evocative of Venus’s pluralistic character, political historian Tom Nairn propounds nationalism’s chameleon-like ability to be "communal and authoritarian, friendly and bellicose" and "to rouse unlike peoples in unlike conditions." Indeed Venus’s multivalent characterization in this work reflects something of the factionalized nature of the state in the wake of the Catholic Exclusion crises.
      Venus’s representation of nationalism in this work is grounded in both her historical image as matron of the Trojan lineage of Britain but also in the literary analogy, derived from ancient Greek writers, of the socially harmonizing or disruptive goddess of love. In the project of unifying a diversity of individual experiences under an identifiable national image, Venus, in this latter guise, represents a readily identifiable feminine "other" against which notions of the masculine image of the nation might be focused. Indeed, to a large degree, conquest of the "other" is a matter that is common to the forging of both empire and nation. The portrayal of England as a strong, powerful, and masculine nation (in opposition to France and Italy, whose language and nature were commonly viewed as feminine) infused language, literature, and music throughout the late seventeenth century. Drawing upon the prevailing attitudes towards women in English society, I show Venus’s seemingly antithetical roles of dangerous women and national matriarch in this work to be inextricably linked. I also demonstrate Blow’s reinforcement of the dangers of female ambition and duplicity through various compositional procedures including modal juxtapositions, open and closed formal structures and contrasting melodic constructions. Finally, Blow’s Venus and Adonis will be placed in the context of numerous other contemporary works, including Dido and Aeneas , King Arthur, Albion and Albanius, and The Loves of Mars and Venus, from the same period and which manifest similar musical and textual representations of Venus.

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John Playford is most often regarded as the father of English music printing, a talented publisher with business acumen, and an eye for a burgeoning market. Moreover, his publications arguably shaped the musical aesthetic for both royalists and parliamentarians alike for the remainder of the Commonwealth and well into the Restoration. In addition to his music, Playford’s royalist political affiliations and loyalties during the social upheavals of the Civil Wars and ensuing Commonwealth are well known. Keith Whitelock has recently argued that Playford’s first publication, The English Dancing Master (1651) acted as royalist propaganda in its use of Stuart masque tunes disguised as traditional country entertainments. Ian Spink and Mary Chan have also observed political subtexts present in texted ayres published by Playford. The present paper takes the investigation of Playford’s political-musical affiliations a step further to assert that Playford had a deliberate plan to influence the views of his readership with ideas sympathetic to the royalist cause.
      The Introduction to the Skill of Music was the cornerstone for both the creation of a music market and for possible musical-political subversion: teaching all interested parties the respect for and understanding of music (beyond simple psalm tunes or broadside ballads), inculcating in a middle-class audience an affection for music formerly held only by the aristocracy, and directing them to royalist musicians for their continued musical training. From the Introduction (1654), Playford’s readers would then progress on to both vocal music (as in Catch that Catch can, 1652 and Select Ayres, 1652) and instrumental music (as in Musick’s Recreation: on the Lyra Viol, 1652), and finally to dance music (as in Court Ayres , 1655). As the title of the last work announces, its contents are unashamedly drawn from the Stuart Court, but what is less obvious is that the music in the other three publications is also royalist in its sympathies.
 
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William Lawes (1602–1645) is widely recognized as the most innovative English composer during the reign of Charles I. Focusing on a group of six autograph scores, held in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, the paper investigates several of the composer’s more abstract tendencies including the use of the augmented triad and its resulting diminished fourth, melodic inversion, thematic juxtaposition, and some of the earliest examples of motivic transformation. While the terms motivic or thematic transformation are most often applied to music of the nineteenth century, the idea developed in the sixteenth century via the variation principle. The technique can be found in early German dance pairs and later in seventeenth-century dance suites. Because William Lawes has been credited with presenting the earliest example of the English suite form (at least the Alman-Corant-Sarabande sequence), it is not surprising that we encounter some of the most progressive examples of motivic transformation in his works.
      Although a fair amount has been said concerning the specific autograph scores that contain the six works, the essential compositional element—a recurring four-note motive that exposes itself at various places within each movement and throughout the whole—has not been discussed. The paper isolates specific sections that clearly demonstrate the various ways Lawes has transformed the melodic line as well as used the motive to unify the six compositions. The study substantiates some of the most advanced techniques of motivic transformation in the entire seventeenth century and consequently suggests reinterpretation of certain performance, titling, and cataloging issues.
     See M. Davenport, "Between Fantazy and Aire: The 'Active Braine' of William Lawes" in Journal of the Viola Gamba Society of America 39 (2002): 49-75.

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The Sonata Violino Solo Representativa, which imitates various natural sounds, is among the earliest compositions traditionally ascribed to H.I.F. Biber. The attribution is primarily based on three direct pieces of evidence (a penciled note on the title-page and an inventory at Kromeríz, both from about 1695, and an inventory from the monastery at Osek dated 1720) and secondarily on the possibility that Biber may have copied the manuscript. Its traditional dating c.1669 is based on factors such as the Moravian watermarks and Prince-Bishop Liechtenstein-Castelcorn’s interest in similar works at this period.
     The attribution becomes suspect when the Sonata representativa is compared with Biber’s autograph Sonata Violino Solo from around 1670 since the stylistic features of these two works (such as imitative writing, harmonic language, continuo usage, etc.) are quite different. In addition, some characteristics of the manuscript for the Sonata representativa differ from Biber’s autographs of his own works (both in terms of calligraphy and format) but are remarkably similar to a manuscript copy of J.H. Schmelzer’s Cu Cu from this same time period.
     According to letters dated January 1669 from Wenzelburg, the Prince-Bishop’s Viennese agent, Schmelzer had started to compose a violin solo that incorporated the "voices of the birds and the cries of the other beasts" but was having difficulty with the animal sounds. Earlier scholars suggested that Biber wrote the Sonata representativa as a consolation to the Prince-Bishop when Schmelzer did not finish his composition. Yet, in a letter dated 1676, Schmelzer presumes that the Prince-Bishop would recognize one of his own works, "Die Animalien," which he had performed for the Empress. In fact, when the Sonata representativa is compared to the violin works of Schmelzer from this period, the similarities of technique and style indicate that Schmelzer’s commission was actually completed. What remains in Kromeríz is most likely a copy made by Biber, which may account for the differences from his own autographs and the later misattributions. This new ascription of the Sonata representativa to Schmelzer enhances his significance as a direct influence on the young Biber, an influence still felt in Biber’s later Battalia.

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On May 2, 1687, Dieterich Buxtehude traveled from Lübeck to Hamburg to visit the organ builder Arp Schnitger and to try out his new four-manual organ at the St. Nicholas Church there. Buxtehude’s purpose was clear: he wanted Schnitger to perform major renovations on the two organs at St. Mary’s Church in Lübeck, a dream that would remain unfulfilled. Instead, the Lübeck Cathedral got a new Schnitger organ in 1699, whose façade became the model for the North German organ in Schnitger’s style recently built by the Göteborg Organ Art Center and inaugurated in August, 2000.
     This paper reviews Buxtehude’s various connections with Schnitger and then considers the suitability of the new instrument for the performance of Buxtehude’s music, both as a solo instrument and as a continuo instrument for vocal and instrumental ensemble music. Since the new organ is tuned in pure quarter-comma meantone, extended by subsemitones, it provides an excellent vehicle for a timely reexamination of the questions of ideal temperaments for the performance of Buxtehude’s music and of how the organs in St. Mary’s Church may have been tuned during his tenure as organist there. The paper is illustrated by recordings made at the inauguration of the new Göteborg organ.

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The violin music in Breslau ms. 114, possibly originating in Frankfurt am Main, hints at the existence of a rich solo violin tradition in early seventeenth-century Germany, and may represent the repertoire played by violinists "auf der Orgel." The volume contains a large number of fantasias closely related in style to diminished versions of sixteenth-century vocal polyphony for instrumental performance. This stylistic relationship suggests that the language of diminution practice, set out in Italian treatises of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, formed the basis for early independent solo violin performance, both improvised and notated. The presence of the fantasias in a German source probably dating from around 1630 demonstrates that Italian instrumental practice was highly influential in the development of violin playing north of the Alps.
 
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The physical Elevation of the Host in the Catholic Mass is a dramatic, performative gesture added to the ancient words of consecration only in the twelfth century. The same controversy over the nature of the Eucharist that spawned the Elevation also yielded the initial declaration of the doctrine of transubstantiation at the Lateran Council of 1215. The Council of Trent emphatically reaffirmed transubstantiation, and the musical genre of Elevation Toccata emerged with the subsequent reconsideration of liturgical music by the newly formed Congregation of Sacred Rites. The specific goal of this paper is to explicate the early seventeenth-century repertory of Elevation Toccatas, of which the five published works of Frescobaldi constitute the outstanding examples. Correlation of Frescobaldi’s career in Rome with the artistic decoration of New St. Peter’s suggests that the two large works included in Diseconomy libro di toccate may have been occasional pieces for altar dedications in 1626. The publication of Fiori musicali in 1635, which includes the three shorter Elevation Toccatas, had a more abstract origin, forming part of a series of published "how-to" manuals for the post-Tridentine liturgy.
      In Frescobaldi’s hands, the Elevation Toccata effected on an emotional level the transformation inherent in the sacrament of the Eucharist. The paper investigates the issues of the developing Eucharistic theology, as they pertain to music, in light of changing science and increasing emphasis on the veneration of the sacrament itself. Also, the role of other musical genres within the Canon of the Mass—motets, the choral Sanctus, and the Durezze e ligatore —are considered. Frescobaldi’s role as organist for the Cappella Giulia palces him at the scene of cutting-edge, contemporary controversies, not the least of which was the matter of Galileo, which (according to recent scholarship) resulted in trial because of the recognized threat Galileo’s work posed to Eucharistic theology. By contrast, Frescobaldi’s musical contribution to Eucharistic performance points to his role as a faithful servant of the theological hierarchy. Ironically, Frescobaldi’s musical vocabulary introduced the language of the new seconda practica into the conservative confines of the Catholic Church in a way that both coordinated with the mystical theology of the larger church and enhanced the artistic program of the specific building where he worked.

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On 23 June 1661, the contract of marriage between King Charles II and Catherine of Braganza was signed in Paris, opening a new chapter in the history of the Roman Catholic Church in England. Charles agreed to guarantee Catherine the free exercise of her religion, with provisions that followed very closely the pattern devised for his French Catholic mother Henrietta Maria. As Queen, Henrietta had worshipped in the Catholic chapel at St. James’s Palace, built originally in expectation of the marriage of Charles I to the Spanish Infanta. The interior had been badly damaged during the Interregnum and one of the first tasks undertaken by Charles II was to return it to its original splendor. St. James’s was Catherine of Braganza’s principal chapel in London until 1671 when her establishment finally moved to Somerset House, which had been the residence of Henrietta Maria as Queen Dowager from 1661 to 1669. Catherine also had a small private oratory at Whitehall and whenever her household accompanied her to Windsor, Hampton Court or the homes of the prominent nobility, arrangements would be made for the celebration of mass, vespers of principals feats in the manner to which she was accustomed. For thirty years musicians from widespread lands and cultures served the Queen’s chapel, which also became an important enclave of Catholic worship in the city of London at a time when the policy of religious toleration faced attack on all sides. As well as the two well-known musicians Matthew Locke and Giovanni Battista Draghi, the Queen’s chapel employed some of the finest virtuoso singers and organists from Northern Italy and a team of musicians and singing priests from Catherine’s native Portugal, including at least one Portuguese castrato! This paper reveals hitherto unknown information about these musical personnel, their repertory and performance practices, and will also shed light on the significance of their activity in Restoration London at a time when Italian music exerted considerable influence on native English composers. Music historians have largely ignored the Restoration Catholic chapels in England and this paper contributes greatly to placing them in their appropriate historical context.

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For English-speaking historians of compositional theory the early seventeenth century is a crucial period, as it was at this time that much of the essential vocabulary of their discipline originated. In particular, the emergence in England around 1600 of "keys" as musical concepts has focused attention on respects in which English music of the period presages the tonal language of more recent eras. It has even been asserted that this music cannot reasonably be described as "modal."
      Working outwards from the body of works included in John Barnard’s First Book of Selected Church Music (London, 1641), an examination of the Anglican repertory according to classical modal criteria reveals that the English church composers adhered to an insular system which, while never strictly described as "modal" at the time of its use, can very properly so designated in the context of present-day musicology.
      This system has similarities with that of the contemporaneous Italian "tuoni ecclesiastici." It functions in terms of the vocal ensemble which had quickly become standard for Anglican choirs, and has its own conventions of notation and nomenclature—both of which have tended to be obscured by twentieth-century editorial procedures. Being based on some of the essential modal principles established in European polyphony by such figures as Willaert, Zarlino, Palestrina, and Lassus, it marks a significant departure from the older English style (aspects of which had continued to be employed in recusant Latin composition and by the English madrigalists, inflagrant non-compliance with continental practice).
      In this paper it is shown that each of the Anglican modes has individual characteristics which are aurally perceptible irrespectible of performance pitch; that anomalies in the system occur in those pieces which have proved most problematical for modern editors and performers; and that the system’s disintegration resulted partly from the stylistic influence of other musical genres.

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John Blow (1649–1708) composed an extensive repertory of verse anthems with organ accompaniment, but scholars have focused little attention upon these works, and most of them remain available only in manuscripts. Various dissertations and articles have explored Blow’s other major genres of sacred music. In addition, Musica Britannica has published three volumes of his coronation and symphony anthems, and Oxford University Press has published an anthology of full anthems. Blow’s organ verse anthems occupy a place of importance alongside these other forms of church music, and they merit a scholarly appraisal based upon their inherent musical qualities and upon Blow’s undeniable importance and stature as an English Baroque composer. The study of these anthems significantly increases our knowledge of his music and career. Furthermore, it continues to erode the misconception, perpetuated by Charles Burney, that Blow was a careless composer who "threw notes about at random."
      This paper serves as an explication of Blow’s craft of formal variation within the context of a relatively small-scale genre, looking at representative examples from his thirty-six extant organ verse anthems. Although not every anthem displays the same degree of musical sophistication, the majority exhibit inventive approaches to form, texture, and melody that result in a variety of interesting structures. Blow rarely repeats the same model, and his intuitive instincts for formal diversity at the structural level and on the musical surface impart a considerable degree of non-predictability to these anthems.
 
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Beyond its fame as a powerful governing body, the Nuremberg City Council was internationally renowned for its patronage of the arts, particularly its promotion of a flourishing music scene. In this paper, I examine the Council’s role as a sponsor of music and musical events in seventeenth-century Nuremberg, arguing that the Council promoted the formation of a highly organized and developed cultural infrastructure within the city. To begin, the Council encouraged the creation of a network of professional musicians active in Nuremberg through its support of both individual performers and composers from southern Germany. The Council was also an avid purchaser of music prints; the library started by the Council included an enviable collection of music books that forms the basis of the present Stadtbibliothek. The Council’s benevolence was also recognized beyond the city limits; it was the recipient of numerous manuscript and printed book dedications from local and regional composers who sought both favor and fortune in the form of a lucrative dedicatory stipend. More important still are the long-term effects of the Council’s artistic policies and tastes on the music industry, both in print and performance. The musical preferences of the Council—formed by its members’ extensive interest in and travel to Italy—may even be connected to the gradual Italianization of the music presses in Nuremberg at the turn of the seventeenth century.

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A vital, though overlooked, phase in the Italianization of early Baroque music in Germany was the cultivation of the Latin vocal concerto in Munich. From the time of Orlando di Lasso, the famous sixteenth-century ducal Kapellmeister, the capital of Bavaria was a bastion of the Catholic Counter-Reformation, enjoying close spiritual and cultural ties to Italy and to Rome in particular. These ties, along with the city’s position near transalpine trade routes, guaranteed a lively engagement with spiritual and musical currents from the south. Orlando’s litanies and Magnificats had reflected the court’s rising preoccupation with the Virgin Mary as the Patrona Boioriae, or Protectress of Bavaria, but the mingling of Counter-Reformation imagery and sacred music reached its height shortly after the turn of the seventeenth century, when composers connected to the court of Duke Maximilian I and the Jesuit college of St. Michael produced a large repertory of Italianate vocal concertos with Marian and Eucharistic texts. These pieces, still little known by scholars, were among the earliest experiments with the vocal concerto north of the Alps.
      Rudolph di Lasso’s Virginalia eucharistica (1615), a large collection of Latin vocal concertos for one to eight voices, instruments, and basso continuo, is an inventive example of this genre. Rudolph (c.1563–c.1626), the youngest son of Orlando di Lasso, served at the Munich ducal court his entire career as an organist and court composer, editing several collections of his father’s music while bringing out at least seven prints of his own motets and vocal concertos. Consisting of settings of liturgical and non-liturgical texts in honor of the Virgin Mary and the Eucharist, the Virginalia Eucharistica reflects an early phase in the development of the vocal concerto, mingling virtuosic monody with polychoral and imitative compositional idioms. A wide variety of timbral effects accompanies this mixture of styles, achieved through unusual combinations of voice types over the continuo line, and, in one case, the addition of independent wind parts. In this paper the Virginalia Eucharistica serves as a starting point for a broader discussion of how experimentation with Italian forms was melded with the Marian and Eucharistic imagery characteristic of Counter-Reformation Bavaria.
 

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Charles Sorel’s celebrated picaresque novel, L’Histoire Comique de Francion (1623–33), and his parody of Honoré d’Urfé’s Astrée , Le Berger Extravagant (1627), both feature musically adept protagonists. Characters in these two novels play the lute and the violin, and sing, sometimes offering music drawn from their fantasie rather than the printed page. The noble characters also sharply and literately criticize other characters’ performances, revealing aspects of contemporary performance practice in the process. Nobility and the ability to judge a musical performance go hand in hand for Sorel’s characters.
      Recent scholarship, particularly that of Catherine Massip, has shown the value of reading literary sources such as Tallement des Réaux’s Historiettes, gossipy anecdotes concerning courtiers and their habits, and the letters and diaries of noblemen and women. Such sources show the place of music in court society, attitudes towards performance, and sometimes even small details of performance practice. Seventeenth-century fiction also reveals aspects of musical practice that are often unaccounted for in other sources, particularly in the case of Francion, where Sorel presents in vivid detail such events as a village wedding, the dancing of a ballet de cour at a provincial noble’s estate, and the musical stimulation leading up to a grand orgy. In Le Berger Extravagant, the musical behavior of the protagonist, Lysis, becomes a source of satire—his emotional excesses are mirrored in the extravagance of his musical eloquence. Sorel integrates music into the fabric of his works as a commonplace element in his character’s lives: for instance, the aristocratic outcast Francion readily reveals aspects of his nobility in his consummate performances as a musician, dancer, and lover.
      This paper argues that the musical scenes in these two novels are a viable source for information concerning musical life in the seventeenth century. These comic novels present a relatively untapped, but rich, resource for musicologists investigating the function of music in society. When Sorel’s fictional accounts of musical performance are read within the context of archival evidence (payment records, employment records), reports from the Gazette de France, and mention of music-making from memoirs, they confirm Sorel’s familiarity with music and its functions in his world.

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My discussion focuses on Alessandro Stradella’s musical approach to comedy and his influence on comic opera. Robert Lamar Weaver’s 1959 study of seventeenth-century Florentine comic opera helped to spur interest in secant comic opera, which had been falsely considered an eighteenth-century invention. Since then, however, there has been little in-depth research on the early development of seventeenth-century comic opera. The small number of extant scores accounts for the dearth of critical literature. Fortunately, among the few that have survived is Alessandro Stradella’s only comic opera, Il tremolo tutore , one of the best examples of the genre. Although Il tremolo is his only full length comic opera, Stradella also composed seven comic prologues, which Carolyn Gianturco briefly mentions in her recent biography of Stradella. Given the small number of extant comic-opera scores from the period, these prologues offer a crucial opportunity to learn more about seventeenth-century comic composition.
   Whether featuring allegorical figures, such as Modestia (Soccorso, aita, ohimè), or everyday contemporary characters, such as patrons of a public bath in Rome (Che nuove? Oh, ragionevoli), Stradella’s comic prologues contain many of the same elements frequently found in early comic operas. They include social satire, the use of aria as aria, and the exploitation of serious aria style for humorous purposes. They also incorporate local dialect, a feature common in Jacopo Melani and Giovanni Andrea Moniglia’s comic operas for Florence. Like Il tremolo tutore, these comic prologues reveal Stradella’s innate ability to musicalize humorous situations and to portray the type of characters inhabiting comic operas.
 

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The Oaxaca Codex, a composition notebook kept by the Portuguese composer Gaspar Fernandes (c.1565–1629) during his tenure as maestro de capilla at the Puebla cathedral in Mexico (1606–1629), contains four compositions with texts in Nahuatl, the language of the Nahua culture (commonly known as Aztec). These compositions feature non-European stylistic elements that can be explained with reference to Nahua culture.
      The identification of Nahua musical characteristics is difficult since there is little direct information regarding Nahua music of the immediate pre-conquest and early colonial periods. Descriptions of Nahua music by European chroniclers are often either superficial or so broadly cultural in focus that they exclude any discussion of actual stylistic features. Some missionaries did write hymns in Nahuatl that were intended to be sung to indigenous tunes. Unfortunately, while the texts of some of these hymns has been preserved (e.g., Bernardino Sahagún’s collection, Psalmodía Christiana , dated 1593), the tunes have been lost.
      In spite of a lack of direct information about the specifics of Nahua musical style, we do know much about other aspects of the culture. Nahua culture was characterized by a way of understanding and of organizing a variety of modes of cultural discourse. This epistemological system can be detected in what James Lockhart has called cellular or modular organization, characterized by "the aggregation of parts that remain relatively separate and self-contained, brought together by their common function and similarity, their place in some numerical or symmetrical arrangement, their rotational order, or all three."

An analysis of some of the Fernandes compositions with Nahuatl texts shows that cellular-modular organization is an important feature of the music not only with regard to formal design, but also to melody, harmony, and rhythm. The presence of such cellular-modular organization in these pieces constitutes evidence of Nahua influence on early Mexican polyphonic music in the European tradition.

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Emigrating from Holland and Germany in search of religious freedom, the first Anabaptist Mennonites in America traveled in the late seventeenth century and settled in areas around Manhattan and, particularly, Pennsylvania. Though many became Quakers by affiliation, early American Mennonites continued their sacred musical traditions while participating in the rituals of other religions and cultures. The result was a dynamic interplay in which music became critical towards establishing new identities brought about through religious, economic, demographic, and social forces evolving in colonial settlements.
      This paper reviews the chronicles of Jesuit missionaries and historical documents contained in Mennonite libraries to examine the musical heritage of the first Mennonite settlers and how their experiences in the New World shaped their musical and social identities. Far from simply transplanting musical ideals, American Mennonites constructed their values based on interactions with other cultures. Music was fundamental in defining the ideological basis for worship and the structure of daily life. The hymns, liturgical music, sacred music at home, and subsequent pedagogy created a rich forum for music that, through time, has resulted in the present practice of unequaled four-part a cappella harmonies during Mennonite worship services.
      By examining historical records as well as the devotional books used by the Mennonites in their early years of colonization in America, this paper expands the repertory of colonial American music by recognizing how a diversity of religious roots influenced the creation of written and oral repertories. A comparison of devotional music with other religions in the same historical and geographical area illumines the various contexts for music-making in colonial America.