Byzantine Music and the Veneto Region

The focus of this book is Byzantine music, seen through its early written steps, then through its legacy, when the Eastern Roman Empire had already been politically defeated, but not its deepest soul. By the tools of Greek palaeography and musicological analysis, the volume describes some sources kept in the Veneto region, trying to understand how text and neumes cooperate to create the peculiar Byzantine hymnography. In the first two chapters, musical manuscripts from Bassano del Grappa (12th c.) and Padova (17th c.) are object of a detailed study aimed at uncovering their notational systems, from their adiastematic beginning to the highly developed, post-Byzantine stage. In the last chapter, the central point is the European Enlightenment of the 18th c., when Medieval Greek music – whose echo came mainly through Venice – began to be laically seductive to Western musicologists, anxious to decipher for the first time its neumes, maybe heirs and brothers of ancient Greek music, and of Latin Christian chant.