Overview

Two systems of timekeeping were in concurrent use in Venice between 1582 and 1797. Government documents conformed to the Venetian year (beginning 1 March), church documents to the papal year (from 1 January). Song and Season defines the many ways in which time was discussed, resolving a long-standing fuzziness imposed on studies of personnel, institutions, and cultural dynamics by dating conflicts. It is in this context that the standardization of timekeeping coincided with the collapse of the dramma per musica and the rise of scripted comedy and the opera buffa. Selfridge-Field discloses fascinating relationships between the musical stage and the cultures it served, such as the residues of medieval liturgical feasts embedded in the theatrical year. Such associations were transmuted into lingering seasonal associations with specific dramatic genres. Interactions between culture and chronology thus operated on both general and specific levels. Both are fundamental to understanding theatrical dynamics of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries.

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Reviews

Many readers will find their needs met by the New Chronology , with its concise introduction to Venice's theatrical seasons and repertory; those wanting full or detailed information on time and its measurement, the definition of the theatrical seasons or the relation between these and Venetian society and customs in general will have to consult Song and Season . -- Early Music

Song and Season is a work of history, in that it reconstructs on a documentary basis the calendrical system that underlies the theatrical life of Venice, the city which played a central role in the development of opera. Song and Season is also an essay in historical anthropology, discussed with perspicacity and expertise. It demonstrates the ways in which the theater, as an institution, benefited from both social habit and civic custom. It could not illustrate better the intertwining of civil, political, economic, and intellectual motives that underlay the role of operatic performance in the life of the Serenissima, --Lorenzo Bianconi, University of Bologna

I admire the equal provisions for a grand synthesis and for minutely detailed explications, and, above all, the originality of this work. To illustrate this point, I refer the reader to the temporal-cum-functional subdivision of the Venetian autumn and w

Author Information

Eleanor Selfridge-Field is Consulting Professor of Music and Co-Director of the Center for Computer-Assisted Research in the Humanities at Stanford University. She is the author of many books and articles in various fields, including Beyond MIDI (1997); The Music of Benedetto and Alessandro Marcello (1990); and Venetian Instrumental Music from Gabrieli to Vivaldi (1975).

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