The Politicized Muse

A reconstruction of the public festivals sponsored by the Medici family in Florence, which utilizes histories, diaries and family memoirs to record the musical lives of the festivals and to explain how the festivals combined art and literature in order to convey political meaning.

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During the years between the restoration of the Medici to Florence and the election of Cosimo I, the Medici family sponsored a series of splendid public festivals, which this text attempts to reconstuct. The author utilizes sources of information about the musical life of the times in contemporary narrative accounts of these occasions - histories, diaries and family memoirs. He explains how the festivals combined music with art and literature to convey political meanings to Florentine observers. As analyzed by Cummings, the festivals document the political transformation of the city in the crucial era that witnessed the end of the Florentine republic and the beginnings of the Medici principate. The author furnishes new evidence about the contexts for musical performances in early modern Europe. By describing such contexts, he ascertains much about how music was performed and shows that the modes of musical expression were more varied than is suggested by the relatively few surviving examples of actual pieces of music.