THURSDAY 19 August 2021

13.30-14.00 Registration
14.00          Opening of the conference

Session I. – Composer and his works (I)
Chairman:  Jan BAŤA

14.10-14.50  Robert LINDELL (Vienna): How the Fleming Filip van de Berghe became Filippo di Monte, the most prolific composer of Italian madrigals
14.50-15.30  Ferran ESCRIVÀ-LLORCA (Universidad Internacional de Valencia): Philippe de Monte as understood by Pietro Cerone
15.30-16.10  Marc DESMET (Université de Lyon-Université de Saint-Etienne): Belga apud Gallos. Philippe de Monte and the treatment of sonnet form in                       the Sonetz de P. de Ronsard (1575): madrigal or chanson?

16.10-16.30  Coffee break

Session II. – Itinerary of sources
Chairman: Jan BILWACHS

16.30-17.10  Petr DANĚK (Academy of Performing Arts, Bratislava): Thou shalt not steal. (Exodus 20:15). On the fate of the so-called Sabbateni                                   Collection in New York
17.10-17.50  Erika Supria HONISCH (Stony Brook University, New York): Philippe de Monte in Chicago

18.00            Social event


FRIDAY 20 August 2021

Session III. – Transmission of italianità
Chairman: Jan BAŤA 

10.00-10.40  Stanislav TUKSAR (Zagreb): Musical conditions in Split at the time of Philippe de Monte in Prague and the reign of Rudolph II (1576-1612)
10.40-11.20  Daniele V. FILIPPI (Milano): Philippe de Monte and the culture of the spiritual madrigal north of the Alps
11.20-12.00  Gilberto SCORDARI (Bari): Two madrigals of Philippe de Monte in Francesco Baseo’s Primo Libro di Madrigali a cinque voci (Venice, 1573)

12.00-14.00  Lunch break

Session IV. – Composer and his works (II)
Chairman: Petr DANĚK  

14.00-14.40  Kateřina MAÝROVÁ (Prague): Sacred works of Philippe de Monte in the Rokycany music collection
14.40-15.20  Jan BAŤA – Jan BILWACHS (Charles University, Prague): Towards the online critical edition of Monteʼs work

15.30  End of the conference

19.30  Concert of the Gontrassek ensemble (offline)


Jan BAŤA – Jan BILWACHS (Charles University, Prague): Towards the online critical edition of Monteʼs work
During the 20th century, there have been two serious attempts to publish Monte´s opera omnia. The first one was disrupted by the Second World War, the second one simply dissapeared in 1980´s after several volumes. The aim of the paper is to open the discussion on the (really) complete critical edition of the extant works of Philippe de Monte that should be made online. 

Petr DANĚK (Academy of Performing Arts, Bratislava): Thou shalt not steal. (Exodus 20:15). On the fate of the so-called Sabbateni Collection in New York
In 2001, Professor Stanley Boorman drew my attention to the existence of a privately owned collection of musical prints and manuscripts of Bohemian origin in New York. Since then, it has become part of the New York University Library, where it was placed in the Fales Library and Special Collections under the name of The Sabbateni Collection of Renaissance Music Manuscripts. It is an important collection in 13 parts bound into 31 volumes, which were originally part of the library of a Czech lawyer from around 1600, Václav Kristián of Greifenfels, also known as Sabbatena. At the time when Professor Boorman informed us about the existence of this collection, it was a set of sources completely unknown to Czech musicologists and cultural historiographers – quite understandably, considering the disorderly state of many historical libraries and their turbulent fate during World War II and the communist period. Today, however, it has become clear that the collection was stolen from the bishop’s library in Litoměřice and illegally taken to Switzerland, to be sold to the USA at a later stage. This article deals with this sad history.

Marc DESMET (Université de Lyon-Université de Saint-Etienne): Belga apud Gallos. Philippe de Monte and the treatment of sonnet form in the Sonetz de P. de Ronsard (1575): madrigal or chanson?
The vast and outstanding production of more than one thousand Italian madrigals by Philippe de Monte may rightly lead to consider his less than fifty French chansons as marginal, even more so when considering that these appear disseminated in anthologies, and that the only print devoted to this genre is a modest volume entitled Sonetz de P. de Ronsard bearing the date 1575. Scholars have yet regularly alerted the musicological community on the originality of this publication, and it is a matter of curiosity that this volume should also represent one of the rare asserted links, although not unique, of a Monte’s publication with the French court. Far from being a rapid compositional attempt on a market then in full development, this of the French sonnet, this publication reveals an unexpected awareness to what was to become a landmark of the chanson in the second half of the 16th century: its attention to prosody and metre. Meanwhile there is no doubt that Monte had an impressive command of many musical idioms of his long artistic life, the way he reacts to sonnet form deserves further investigation in spite of its being only a brief parenthesis inside a constant dedication to madrigal and motet compositions.

Ferran ESCRIVÀ-LLORCA (Valencia International University): Philippe de Monte as understood by Pietro Cerone
The importance of a composer can be determined by the inclusion of his work in the theory books of his time or later. The presence of his music provides us with insights into the circulation of music in different periods. In addition, the technical and aesthetic considerations of these works by theorists also offer an interesting perspective for studying this composer. Philippe de Monte is referred several times in Pietro Cerone's treatise El Melopeo y Maestro (Naples, 1613). The presence of his music and its place in specific groups of polyphonists allows us to better understand the valorization of the Imperial Chapel master in the Italian and Iberian area, in which Cerone moved during his lifetime. This paper also shows some of Monte's works that serve as examples of his technique and style, as well as the possible ways of Cerone's knowledge of his works.

Daniele V. FILIPPI (Milano): Philippe de Monte and the culture of the spiritual madrigal north of the Alps
Philippe de Monte, possibly the most prolific madrigalist in the entire sixteenth century, was one of the most productive in the special field of spiritual madrigals as well. The five books of such works he published between 1581 and 1593 constitute a unique corpus of Italian-texted moral/devotional polyphonic songs composed north of the Alps. The books belong to different typologies, with various concepts and a different degree of unification (from apparently ‘casual’ collections to the unitary cycle of the Eccellenze di Maria Vergine). Different too are the roles of the authors, or the providers, of the texts, whose agency and interaction with de Monte offer important clues as to the genesis and destination of his madrigali spirituali – the links with Jesuit environments emerge with special clarity. The available evidence concerning the actual performance of this music is, unsurprisingly, scant. By combining, however, the results of textual and musical analysis with contextual information, I will try to define de Monte’s own “idea of spiritual madrigal”, and uncover its connections with contemporary spirituality and with private and public practices of devotion.

Erika Supria HONISCH (Stony Brook University, New York): Philippe de Monte in Chicago
In 2015, the Newberry Library in Chicago purchased two manuscript fascicles evidently copied in Saxony around the turn of the seventeenth century. The pair transmit different repertories: the first fascicle—just the bassus of what originally was a set of six partbooks—was copied in 1599 by one Matthaeus Schenkenberg, who gave his little manuscript the title Fascicvlvs Hübscher Lustiger newer Deutscher und Lateinischer Stücklein...durch vornehme berühmte Deudscher und anderer nationen Musicos componiret, and took pains to identify the composers and number of voices wherever possible. The second fascicle, a cantus partbook, transmits an unrelated and slightly later repertory, mostly without attribution. Among the contents of the Bassus fascicle is a 5-voice Lied “Weiss ich ein Megdlin reine,” attributed by Schenkenberg to Philippe de Monte. This paper situates "Weiss ich..." in the context of Schenkberg’s collection, exploring what the fascicle’s contents as a whole can tell us about the musical world of a late sixteenth-century Central European enthusiast, and what de Monte's unassuming Stücklein—if indeed it is by him—might reveal about his engagement with light genres, and with melodies that were already in the ears of his German listeners.

Kateřina MAÝROVÁ (Prague): Sacred works of Philippe de Monte in the Rokycany music collection
This contribution provides a global survey of the sacred music of the Rudolfine composer Philippe de Monte contained in the music collection preserved at the Roman-Catholic parish church in the town of Rokycany, located in Western Bohemia near Pilsen. From a music-historical point of view, this collection of musical prints and manuscripts originating from the second half of the 16th to the first third of the 17th centuries represents a very interesting group of music sources. Originally they were the property of the Rokycany literati brotherhood. As the surviving manucript collections show, the Rokycany literati flourished from the second half of the 16th century to the 1630s (the last transcription is dated 1638). The Rokycany Music Collection consists of fifteen volumes, that contain part books and manuscripts, each volume marked with different shelf marks; ten of them handwritten (A V 19a-b, A V 20a–e, A V 21a–c, A V 23a–d, A V 37a-e, A V 38a-e, A V 41, A V 43, A V 44, A V 45a-b), two printed (A V 39 and A V 42a-b) and three consisting of manuscripts and additional printed material (A V 22a-b, A V 40 and A V 24a).

Gilberto SCORDARI (Bari): Two madrigals of Philippe de Monte in Francesco Baseo’s Primo Libro di Madrigali a cinque voci (Venice, 1573)
The nearly forgotten figure of Francesco Antonio Baseo, a musician working in Lecce (Puglia, the south-eastern region in Italy) between 1573 and 1582, stands out within a period characterized by an intense cultural fervour in this suburbs of the Kingdom of Naples. Three collections of printed music by Baseo survive, and one of them – Il Primo libro di madrigali a cinque voci (1573) – contains a taste of the most important composers who were active between Rome and Naples in those years (Baseo included). Particularly noteworthy, in this collection, is the presence of the only hitherto known madrigal in the Italian language by Diego Ortiz, together with the first edition of madrigals by Giannetto da Palestrina, Giovanni Domenico da Nola, Bartolomeo Roy, Stefano Felis and Philippe de Monte. The madrigals by de Monte are Se non fusse il pensier (prima parte) and Né men, dove ch’io vada (seconda parte) on text by Pietro Bembo (1470-1547): they will be published by de Monte a year later in his Quinto libro di madrigali (1574). The presence in this collection of such important premières gives the impression that Baseo was in touch with these composers, but also his compositional style is very close to de Monte’s style (as Baseo’s 1582 collection amply demonstrates). We also know that another apulian composer (very close to Baseo), Stefano Felis, had a musical contact with de Monte in Prague, as we can read in the preface of his Sesto libro di madrigali, published in 1591. For all these reasons I argue that the contribution of Philippe de Monte to the development of the Flemish madrigal tradition in the Kingdom of Naples could probably be more decisive than actually known.

Stanislav TUKSAR (Zagreb): Musical conditions in Split at the time of Philippe de Monte in Prague and the reign of Rudolph II (1576-1612)
The town of Split in central Dalmatia made at the turn of the 16th and 17th centuries part of the Venetian dominion comprising the main part of the eastern Adriatic shores. Its population was mixed, consisting of prevalently Slavs (Croatians) and Italians, both of exclusively Catholic religious denomination. Split was the Metropolitan seat of the Archbishopric since the 7th century and liturgical music making in its Cathedral was until early 19th century the focal point of the town music culture at large. Documents testify of the existence of music practice there since the end of the 11th century, the first cantor (Petrus de Avignone) was registered in the mid-14th century and the first organ was installed in 1412. Other music making institutions included some monasteries and private patrician and civil locations. Musical conditions in the town during the period under consideration seemed to be vivid and complex. The Franciscan monastery keeps an important collection of late-Renaissance music prints, including de Monte’s collection of motets from 1593. Following the Tridentine Council instructions, in 1581 the Archbishop Foconio opened a Seminary with singing courses. The first Cathedral chapel was active between 1603 and 1609. By bringing the north-Italian composer Tommaso Cecchini in Split in 1604 Archbishop de Dominis indirectly supported the penetration of early Baroque music style. The stylistic interchange of Renaissance and Baroque existed at least until 1620, involving the activities of local personalities such as the composer Ivan Lukačić and the theoretician Giorgio Alberti.