Matching musicology to performance was one of the major goals of this international conference, and thus it is appropriate to begin this report with the conference's end. Each of the two days of study concluded with a concert conducted by Vanni Moretto. The first concert took place in the Cattedrale di San Pietro, with the orchestra Atalanta Fugiens performing a programme centred on three composers of the so-called ‘Milanese symphonic school’: Antonio Brioschi, Andrea Zani and Fortunato Chelleri. The other concert was given at the synagogue of Casale Monferrato and featured Brioschi's Symphony in G major and, in the first performance since 1733, the Jewish cantata Dio, clemenza e rigore, among other Italian works. This time the orchestra was composed of students who had taken part in a seminar on performance practice held during the week preceding the conference. Like the conference itself, the seminar was devoted to the new musical style of the eighteenth century in Lombardy and Piedmont.
As the object of our studies is a performing art, these two concerts represent one of the most precious results musicological research can achieve: the transformation of texts into performing events. Moreover, these concerts demonstrated that it is possible to talk about a ‘Milanese style’. As Raffaele Mellace wrote in his article ‘C'era una volta a Milano’ (Amadeus 9 (September 2008), 43–45), after the Alessandria conference the expression ‘it sounds Milanese’ could enter the common language about eighteenth-century music: in the Age of Enlightenment there was a regional style whose peculiar sonority was clearly recognized by musicians and maybe even by a select public. But what is this style and what was the conference about?
The conference was organized by the Atalanta Fugiens Association together with the Sezione Musica of the Dipartimento di Storia delle Arti, della Musica e dello Spettacolo of the Università degli Studi di Milano, and was also supported by the Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Alessandria. It provided the opportunity to rediscover a talented composer forgotten by musical history, to reconsider the wider instrumental production of the eighteenth century in Lombardy and, finally, to redefine the music-historical category of the Milanese style and even the classical symphony itself.
After the welcome by the local authorities, who placed one of the Palazzo Cuttica's most beautiful rooms at the conference's disposal, the first day of studies began with comments from Luciano Rebeggiani (Sony Music Entertainment). One of the objectives of his work is the creation of a large discography for Brioschi and other contemporary Milanese composers. The first recording came out two years ago and contained six of Brioschi's fifty symphonies. A broader-based project named ‘Archivio della Sinfonia Milanese’ aims to collect the Lombard symphonic repertoire of the period in its entirety, although it has so far made only the first steps towards this goal, and to coordinate historical-critical research with discographic production. The Atalanta Fugiens Orchestra is now recording other works, which Sony BMG intends to include in their catalogue.
Cristiano Ostinelli (Casa Ricordi) discussed the Archivio's edition projects. One of the most recent publications is Brioschi's Dodici Sinfonie (Milan: Ricordi, 2008), which involved a collaboration between the collection's editor, Sarah Mandel-Yehuda (Bar-Ilan University of Ramat Gan), the Università degli Studi di Milano and the publishing house of Ricordi itself. Forthcoming volumes will be dedicated to Fortunato Chelleri and Nicola Antonio Zingarelli, among others. The recordings and publications discussed by Rebeggiani and Ostinelli are supreme examples of work that both meets musicological criteria and complies with the requirements of performance practice.
In the musicological conference that followed these opening remarks, the first speaker was Cesare Fertonani (Università degli Studi di Milano), musicological director of the project, who discussed ‘La sinfonia “milanese” e il contributo allo sviluppo di un nuovo stile strumentale’. He explained the use of the term ‘Milanese’, an adjective that, on the one hand, can be used for those authors such as Giovanni Battista Sammartini, Ferdinando Galimberti and, of course, Antonio Brioschi, who lived in Milan and contributed to the development of the symphony between 1730 and 1750; on the other hand, the term can be understood as referring to Lombard or North Italian music, much as ‘Neapolitan’ has been accepted by historians as a broad category for South Italian music. Furthermore, Fertonani addressed some of the sociological and methodological issues that arise with the use of this term, as, for instance, with respect to the diffusion and impact of the Milanese symphony in Europe and its importance in the creation of a new Austro-Lombard musical identity.
Luca Aversano (Università degli Studi Roma Tre) followed with his paper on ‘Classicismo e musica strumentale nel Settecento italiano’, in which he analysed the question of classicism from lexical, stylistic and historiographical points of view. He aimed to define the contexts within which the new instrumental culture of Lombardy and Piedmont might be placed in the future. The next contribution moved towards a European perspective: Bertil Van Boer (Western Washington University) spoke about ‘A Radical Change: The Influence of Brioschi on the Development of the Swedish Symphonies of Johan Helmich Roman’. He compared Roman's and Brioschi's works of the period 1736–1742, when the two composers might have been in contact and influenced each other.
In ‘Strumenti e strumentisti intorno a Mozart a Milano’ Renato Meucci (Conservatorio Guido Cantelli, Novara) delved into organological issues in order to illuminate the musical fashions of Brioschi's city during the eighteenth century. He talked first about Antonio Scotti, a harpsichord maker who produced an instrument that was played by Mozart; then he identified the so-called ‘serpentino’ as a tenor bassoon, an instrument used by Mozart for his Ascanio in Alba, k111. Next, in ‘La sinfonia milanese del Settecento: aspetti e problemi di prassi esecutiva’ Vanni Moretto (Milan) drew on his experience as general editor of the Archivio project, as orchestral conductor and as instructor in the performance practice seminar. He concentrated on the main challenges to performance presented by Brioschi's music and on the possible defining formal features of a Milanese style.
In ‘Gli anni 1730 fra barocco e preclassicismo: la variazione formale nel repertorio sinfonico del centenario del Teatro di Amsterdam (1738)’ Rudolf Rasch (Universiteit Utrecht) analysed the compositional principles of refrain and sonata form in works by Vivaldi, De Fesch and Chinzer, among others. Francesco Spagnolo (Judah L. Magnes Museum, Berkeley) spoke on ‘Il mondo in Sinagoga: dialoghi musicali tra ebrei e cristiani a Casale Monferrato (XVIII–XIX sec.)’. Casale Monferrato (where the final concert was also performed) possesses many autograph scores and manuscript copies – wonderful documents of liturgical activities whose history remains to be written. Spagnolo examined Jewish music in the light of synagogue life and the relations between Jewish and Christian religious communities.
The first day of studies was closed by Matteo Giuggioli (Università degli Studi di Pavia), who discussed some examples of classical symphonic music and compared different rhetorical strategies (‘Intorno ad alcuni esempi di “sinfonismo” lombardo: strategie retoriche a confronto’). He introduced concepts from James Hepokoski and Warren Darcy's Elements of Sonata Theory (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006) in order to analyse some movements from symphonies by Brioschi and other Milanese composers. He argued that sonata rhetoric existed in pieces written before 1750.
To begin the second day of the conference, Sarah Mandel-Yehuda addressed ‘Issues of Authenticity in Eighteenth-Century Sources of Symphonies: The Case of Antonio Brioschi’. As she has edited a good number of Brioschi's symphonies, she was well placed to comment on issues of authorship, provenance and chronology that surround the manuscripts and prints of eighteenth-century symphonies preserved in European and North American libraries. Although scheduled to present, Bathia Churgin (Bar-Ilan University), one of the foremost experts on Brioschi, was unable to take part in the conference. Her contribution (‘A Brioschi Borrowing from Sammartini: The Andante from His Trio Symphony, Fonds Blancheton, Op. II, 61’) will be included in the conference proceedings, to be published in 2010.
The conference ended with papers by students in the Gruppo di Ricerca (Davide Daolmi, coordinator) of the Dipartimento di Storia delle Arti, della Musica e dello Spettacolo at the Università degli Studi di Milano. The topics ranged widely over issues relating to eighteenth-century Milanese music, from newly rediscovered composers such as Gaetano Piazza, Carlo Monza, Ferdinando Galimberti, Giuseppe Paladino, Andrea Zani, Ferdinando Brivio and Francesco Zappa, to identifying challenges and new ways of doing research, such as mining eighteenth-century almanacs or using Frank Zappa recordings as points of comparison.
These young researchers and musicians are a guarantee of strength to the Archivio della Sinfonia Milanese project, or, at least, they add their strength to that of many others. Coordinating such a broad project in which so many are involved – researchers, educators, students, professional musicians, publishers, recording companies – is no easy matter. Nonetheless, the conference demonstrated that collaboration can indeed point the way towards a new way of doing musicology.
