Music, Architecture and Acoustics in Renaissance Venice:
Recreating Lost Soundscapes
An illustrated lecture by Deborah Howard and Malcolm Longair. Renaissance Venice was the scene of a remarkable flowering of art, architecture and music. Painters such as the Bellini, Titian, Giorgione and Veronese decorated churches and palaces with glowing canvases while architects such as Sansovino and Palladio created classical buildings filled with space and light. Willaert introduced the cori spezzati (split choirs) for polyphonic choral music in St. Marks. The music for split choirs was to reach its pinnacle with Giovanni Gabrielli and Claudio Monteverdi. Venice had invested heavily in musical composition – how well could complex polyphonic music be heard in these great buildings?
The lecture describes projects aimed at addressing these issues through quantitative analysis of the acoustic properties of 11 churches, including the Basilica of San Marco, the Redentore, as well as monasteries, hospitals and parish churches. Live experiments were carried out with the St. John's Choir Cambridge for all 11 churches and audience responses were compared with acoustic properties. Finally, virtual acoustic models were created to reproduce the present acoustic properties of the churches. We were then able to reproduce what would have been heard in four of the churches, including the Basilica of San Marco and the Redentore, in the Renaissance on the great state occasions.
The lecture will be profusely illustrated with musical examples illustrating the results of the project.
Deborah Howard FBA is Professor Emerita of Architectural History in the Faculty of Architecture and History of Art, and a Fellow of St John's College, Cambridge. She was Head of Department of History of Art from 2002-9 . From 2005 until 2013 she led the Centre for Acoustic and Musical Experiments in Renaissance Architecture (CAMERA) in the Department of History of Art, University of Cambridge. Her principal research interests are the art and architecture of Venice and the Veneto; music and architecture in the Renaissance; and the relationship between Italy and the Eastern Mediterranean. Her recent books include Her latest books Sound and Space in Renaissance Venice: Architecture, Music, Acoustics (with Laura Moretti), Yale University Press 2009.
Malcolm Longair CBE, FRS is Jacksonian Professor Emeritus of Natural Philosophy and Director of Development, Cavendish Laboratory, University of Cambridge. Professor Longair was appointed the ninth Astronomer Royal of Scotland in 1980, as well as Regius Professor of Astronomy, University of Edinburgh, and the Director of the Royal Observatory, Edinburgh.
7pm Thursday March 12 - Book tickets via link https://www.tickettailor.com/events/folkestonenewmusic
The Grand, Folkestone