Lorenzo Tunesi: Listening to the Lost Sound of a Late-Medieval City
Lorenzo Tunesi: Listening to the Lost Sound of a Late-Medieval City
The project
In my dissertation, I pose the question: if we suddenly gained access to a time machine that allowed us to travel over 600 years into the past and walk through the streets of a European city, what might we hear? My dissertation addresses this question by exploring diverse sonic and musical phenomena in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Italian urban environments, with an emphasis on the interaction of music with the physical locations in which it was performed. The urban spaces of a late-medieval city were filled with heterogeneous types of sound: some of these were open to citizens of every social status, while others, such as the music performed at princely courts, in private chapels, and in monasteries, were accessible only to a tiny elite. Particularly tantalizing is the question of how physical space conditioned listening: more specifically, can studying the architectural spaces in which musical performances took place provide insights into how the interplay of sound and space affected and shaped the musical experience of fifteenth-century listeners? What, in turn, can these experiences tell us about the social and political dynamics of late-medieval society?
Late-medieval Milan, the main focus of my research, offers an intriguing case study (Figure 1). Apart from the ducal music chapel, musical life in pre-1500 Milan remains completely obscure, even though the city was a major European music center that attracted some of the most prominent composers of the time. My methodology, thus, draws on unfamiliar sources that can help us move beyond what well-known courtly documents tell us. I navigate a total absence of written descriptions of music-making by scrutinizing materials such as legal acts, court verdicts, and the legislations promulgated by the city council and the ducal chancellery. Unexpectedly, these documents often reveal how sonic phenomena ranging from urban noises to organized musical performances were judged and experienced by people of different social strata. Analyzing these sources can facilitate new insights into sound regulation and music-making that have been completely overlooked by music scholarship.
My work advocates a shift of emphasis from composers/performers, who have traditionally been the center of scholarly attention, to listeners. Drawing on primary sources from several Italian archives, my dissertation explores interactions between listeners, music, and space in public streets, markets, and squares as well as in domestic environments. In doing so, I aim to address how listeners from different social strata negotiated heterogeneous musical experiences.
My experience and findings
None of this would be possible without an extensive study of archival sources. For this reason, I am grateful to The Europe Center at Stanford for having given me the means to fly to Italy and conduct archival research in Milan’s Archivio di Stato, Archivio Storico Civico, and Archivio della Venranda Fabbrica del Duomo. During my Italian sojourn, I was also able to scrutinize rare books from Milan’s Biblioteca Sormani and Biblioteca di Scienze della storia e della Documentazione Storica (Milan State University).
In the archives, I examined the correspondence between the Mantuan ambassadors in Milan and the Mantuan marquises, registers of ducal decrees, administrative documents from the cathedral's archives, and fourteenth- and sixteenth-century chronicles. All these documents offer insights into sound-making. More specifically, the Mantuan ambassadors’ letters are particularly informative when it comes to describing celebrations featuring performances by the ducal choir. Similarly, the Milanese chronicles I read allow me to discuss events that took place indoors and outdoors, and describe how people behaved during the liturgical functions held in Milan’s cathedral. Particularly insightful is an edition of Galvano Fiamma’s fourteenth-century chronicle Opusculum de rebus gestis—kept in the Sormani Library—which allowed me to tentatively reconstruct the itinerary of the procession held on Palm Sunday in medieval Milan—which I integrated with the nes published by Boucheron in 1998 (Figure 2). Finally, the documents from the Duomo’s archives prove to be particularly useful in examining how the city administration tried to maintain public order by limiting specific commercial activities and noise-making in the area around the cathedral.
Next steps
As I keep scrutinizing archival material, I consider these findings of great value. They will be the bulk of the two central chapters of my dissertation, which explore how Milanese citizens accessed, experienced, and received sound in outdoor and indoor spaces. In these two chapters, I theorize public urban spaces and churches as sites of inter-repertorial encounter, with popular songs bumping up against refined musical forms from courtly environments, and occasionally performed in front of broader audiences to celebrate the most important civic and religious events.
I am also excited to share that some of these findings will be presented at international conferences in Valencia, in October 2023, and in Kalamazoo (MI), in May 2024.
I could not be more grateful to The Europe Center at Stanford for allowing me to make such incredible progress in my academic journey.