Robert L. Kendrick – författare

In this book, a follow-up to his 1996 monograph Celestial Sirens, Robert Kendrick examines the cultural contexts of music in early-modern Milan. This book describes the churches and palaces that served as performance spaces in Milan, analyses the power structures in the city, discusses the devotional rites of the Milanese, and explores the connections among city-politics, city-scape and music. Milan's music, Kendrick argues, was the best representation of that city's symbolic system.More than a typical "patrons and institutions" analysis of music's influences, The Sounds of Milan makes use of social anthropological methods to illuminate the roles of composers, performers and audiences. Kendrick traces the rise of polyphony from early appearances in secular music to an important feature of devotional music, all occurring under the careful regulation of the church hierarchy. He illuminates how lay musicians, organised into professional guilds, collaborated on civic festivals and even borrowed from one another's work.Reflecting extensive research into architecture, art, politics, religion, this book offers a complete and interdisciplinary portrait of Milan, one of the most vibrant -- and most musical -- cities in early-modern Italy.

This study investigates an almost unknown musical culture: that of cloistered nuns in one of the major cities of early modern Europe. These women were the most famous musicians of Milan, and the music composed for them opens up a hitherto unstudied musical repertory, which allows insight into the symbolic world of the city. Even more importantly, the music actually composed by four such nuns, Claudia Scossa, Claudia Rusca, Chiara Margarita Cozzollani, and Rosa Giacinta Badalla - reveals the musical expression of women's devotional life.The two centuries' worth of battles over nuns' singing of polyphony, studies here for the first time on the basis of massive archival documentation, also suggest that the implementation of reform in the major centre of post-Tridentine Catholic renewal was far more varied; incomplete, subject to local political pressure and individual interpretation, and short-lived than any religious historian has ever suggested. Other factors that marked nuns' musical lives and creative output - liturgical traditions of the religious orders, the problems of performance practice attendant upon all-female singing ensembles - are here addressed for the first time in the musicological literature.

Examines how stories of biblical families were reconfigured and projected in the genre of the oratorio, a form of sacred opera, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.Based to a great extent on the Old Testament, the largely Catholic musical-dramatic genre was popular in Italy, Austria, and southern Germany in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Biblical Families in Music reveals how difficult stories of fratricide, child sacrifice, death, and forbidden love performed a didactic function in oratorios, teaching early modern audiences about piety and the rules of proper family life.In the century after 1670, the heavily adapted tales of Abraham and Isaac, Cain and Abel, and the Egyptian slave Hagar and her son Ishmael were set to music by figures such as Alessandro Scarlatti and Antonio Sacchini and performed during Lent in churches and other sacred spaces for an audience of court nobility, clergy, and the urban patriciate. By examining the resonance of Catholic oratorios within predominantly upper-class social realities, the book broadens our cultural understanding of the early modern European family and underscores the centrality of family and familial relation to social position, devotional taste, and identity.

A defining moment in Catholic life in early modern Europe, Holy Week brought together the faithful to commemorate the passion, crucifixion, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. In this study of ritual and music, Robert L. Kendrick investigates the impact of the music used during the Paschal Triduum on European cultures during the mid-16th century, when devotional trends surrounding liturgical music were established; through the 17th century, which saw the diffusion of the repertory at the height of the Catholic Reformation; and finally into the early 18th century, when a change in aesthetics led to an eventual decline of its importance. By considering such issues as stylistic traditions, trends in scriptural exegesis, performance space, and customs of meditation and expression, Kendrick enables us to imagine the music in the places where it was performed.