How to lose your music teaching job in one year: the trial of Pietro Pontio 1566

MAIN SOURCES:


  • Murray, Russell E. “The Voice of the Composer: Theory and Practice in the Works of Pietro Pontio.” Ph.D. diss., University of North Texas, 1989. Vol. I [link]; Vol. II [link], full transcript of the processo against Pontio in "Document 10": pp. 23-51.


  • Murray, Russell E. "On the Teaching Duties of the Maestro di Cappella in Sixteenth-Century Italy: The Processo against Pietro Pontio." Explorations in Renaissance Culture 14 (1988): 115-128. [link]


Much of the artworks used in this video were photoshopped from an illuminated manuscript from 1414 of Boccaccio’s “Decameron” translated into French: Ms-5070. Boccaccio. Decameron, translated by Laurent de Premierfait [link]

FOOTNOTES

  1. [01:05] Pietro Pontio’s two treatises: 1. Ragionamento di musica (Parma, 1588) [link], 2. Dialogo […] ove si tratta della theorica e prattica di musica (Parma, 1595) [link].

  2. [01:18] Murray, The voice of the composer, Vol. I, p. 49.

  3. [02:18] Murray, The voice of the composer, Vol. II, p. 26.

  4. [02:50] Murray, The voice of the composer, Vol. II, p. 43.

  5. [03:03] Murray, The voice of the composer, Vol. II, p. 36.

  6. [03:44] Murray, The voice of the composer, Vol. II, p. 42.

  7. [04:30] Another example of a composer checking his composition by having singers sing it: It is said of Josquin des Prez that “Whenever he had written a new composition, he gave it to the choir to sing while he was wandering about listening intently whether everything sounded right. When something displeased him, he would step towards the choir and say: ‘Enough—I shall change it.’” Quoted in Anne Smith, The Performance of 16th-Century Music (2011), p. 7.

  8. [04:51] Murray, The voice of the composer, Vol. II, p. 46.

  9. [05:23] Murray, The voice of the composer, Vol. II, p. 47.

  10. [06:09] Murray, The voice of the composer, Vol. II, p. 47.

  11. [07:11] See Jessie Ann Owens, Composers at Work: The Craft of Musical Composition 1450-1600 (Oxford University Press, 1997), chapter five: “Erasable Tablets”. The engravings of tablets shown in the video are all taken from this chapter.

  12. [08:00] Murray, The voice of the composer, Vol. II, p. 26.

  13. [08:16] Murray, The voice of the composer, Vol. I, p.61-62.

  14. [08:45] Murray, The voice of the composer, Vol. II, p. 38.

  15. [09:35] Murray, The voice of the composer, Vol. I, p. 63-34, and Vol II, pp. 32-3.

Credits:

Created by Elam Rotem, April 2022.

Special thanks to Giovanna Baviera and Anne Smith.