Renaissance Music in Croatia

Renaissance Music in Croatia is a website dedicated to the critical edition of music by composers and sources from the Croatian area, and also by Italian musicians who worked in Croatia during the Renaissance. This site collects the critical editions of pieces of music, references to musical and literary manuscripts and printed sources produced from the fifteenth to the end of the sixteenth century, and biographies. The critical editions can be downloaded in three formats: PDF, Sibelius and MEI files. This is a project in progress, periodically enriched with new editions of music.

During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Croatia was a crossroads of cultures, politically controlled by the Hapsburgs, the Hungarian kingdom, the Republic of Venice and the Ottoman Empire, while the Republic of Dubrovnik remained autonomous. Croatian Renaissance culture, especially in the region from Istria to Dubrovnik, contributed to the development of European musical production in different forms, such as:

humanism and musical theory, as is attested by the Speculum astronomicum by Federik Grisogono (Venice, 1507), the Enciclopediae, seu Orbis disciplinarum by Pavao Skalić (Basle, 1559) and the Della poetica by Francesco Patrizi (Ferrara, 1586)
the printing of musical texts, as in Italy by Andrea Antico "da Montona" (from Motovun)
the composition of polyphonic masses, motets, madrigals and other secular songs, thanks to composers such as Andrija Patricij, Giulio Schiavetti, and many others
the reception of Croatian Renaissance poets whose poems in Italian were set to music by contemporary composers
the preservation of sixteenth-century traditional music, published in anthologies by Giulio Cesare Barbetta (1569), Marco Facoli (1588) and Grgur Mekinić (1609 and 1611)

The results of the researches on music in Renaissance Croatia are published in the following volumes:

Ennio Stipčević, Renaissance Music and Culture in Croatia (Turnhout: Brepols, 2016)
Ennio Stipčević, Renesansna glazba i kultura u Hrvatskoj (Zagreb: Koncertna dvorana Vatroslava Lisinskog, Muzički informativni centar, 2017)
Marco Gurrieri and Vasco Zara (eds.), Renaissance Music in the Slavic World (Turnhout: Brepols, 2019)
Francesco Sponga Usper, Salmi vespertini (1627), ed. Dario Poljak and Ennio Stipčević (Zagreb: Koncertna dvorana Vatroslava Lisinskog, Muzički informativni centar, 2017)
Francesco Sponga Usper, Compositioni armoniche (1619), ed. Ennio Stipčević (Zagreb: Koncertna dvorana Vatroslava Lisinskog, Muzički informativni centar, 2019)

Musicologists interested in contributing are invited to contact the responsible of the project, Vincent Besson.

External links

Renaissance Music and Culture in Croatia (Turnhout: Brepols, 2016)
Renaissance Music in the Slavic World (Turnhout: Brepols, 2019)

Contributors