A flowering spring and a great absentee. Music in the Jesuit Library, Palermo 1682

Abstract

The Index alphabeticus scriptorum. Qui ad annum 1682. In Bibliotheca Collegii panormitani Soc. Iesu asservantur is the general catalog of the Palermo Jesuit library. This so far neglected source helps us understand what Sicilian polyphonic music composers knew about their contemporaries. It is a huge list and has texts on all topics. Author names and titles (indicated in short—no publisher, place, year, or size) are often Latinized, thus making identification hard. Musical items include seventeen treatises. Thirteen are now at the Sicily Region Central Library,  the modern heir of the ancient Jesuit Library. The oldest book is Franchino Gaffurio’s Practica musicæ (1502), the most recent one is Athanasius Kircher’s Musurgia nova (1673). As for printed music, about twenty are instrumental music compilations. There are also fifty sacred-music and eighty secular-music books, mostly consisting of madrigals, for a grand total of 149 works by 102 composers. These include Italian, Italianized, and foreign musicians, most of them active in Central-Northern Italy, some also in Central-Southern Italy. Major, well-known, lesser-known, and even totally obscure composers are represented, with a dozen unica. Most books date back to the 16^th and early 17^th century—an already outdated repertoire, associated to old-fashioned genres. Eighteen Sicilian composers are cited, all of them well known. We learn the title of a collection by Claudio Pari, perhaps significant for his personal history. Monteverdi’s complete absence is striking.

Two questions arise though. Where did these largely secular editions come from? Most likely from Don Vincenzo Branciforti’s library. And, as Ottavio Tiby put it, “Where did they end up?”