Heteroclito Giancarli and his Compositioni musicali of 1602

Abstract

1602 is a landmark year in the history of music in Italy, the year in which Giulio Caccini (1551‒1618) published Le nuove musiche in Florence. It is an emblematic work that marks the dawn of a new century and that heralds the new monodic song style, earning itself the status of an ‘epoch-making volume’ and the symbol par excellence of the new Baroque music. The same year, and only two hundred and fifty kilometres away, two similar books were printed in Venice, works that shared many features with Caccini’s. Both were issued by Giacomo Vincenti, the same printer who issued a reprint of Le nuove musiche in 1615. One was a volume of monodies by Domenico Maria Melli, and the other was the Compositioni musicali of Heteroclito Giancarli, a book of solo songs with lute accompaniment. Ignored and forgotten by contemporary scholarship, this present study is an initial exploration of the last of these books, a work that is one of the earliest sources of Italian lute songs composed with independent accompaniments, and therefore the first Italian book of this kind ever to appear in print. A completely unknown figure, Heteroclito Giancarli published his songs later in life, possibly as a retrospective collection. Some of the pieces, in the same way as Caccini’s, may have been composed twenty or thirty years earlier and also represent an older practice. Giancarli may thus be considered a contemporary of both Caccini and the Florentine cantore al liuto Cosimo Bottegari (1557‒1620). He was also a student of Ippolito Tromboncino, the renowned mid-century Venetian singer lutenist some of whose songs were preserved by Bottegari, and thus could have been born in the 1540s or 1550s.