Michael Anthony Carlson, Ph.D. 2023

Advisor: Annegret Fauser

Dissertation Title: “Musica Fatta Spirituale”: Aquilino Coppini, Claudio Monteverdi, and Madrigal Contrafacts in Early Seventeenth-Century Milan

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Dissertation Abstract:

Between 1607 and 1609, the Milanese professor of rhetoric, Aquilino Coppini (d. 1629), published three volumes of spiritual contrafacts, mostly of madrigals by Claudio Monteverdi (1567–1643). Musicologists have already noted some of the ingenuities of Coppini’s close readings of Monteverdi’s music, but have treated them as an interesting yet inconsequential footnote. My dissertation offers a necessary reappraisal of Coppini’s approach to contrafacts both by contextualizing his project within post-Tridentine spiritualities in Milan under its new archbishop, Cardinal Federico Borromeo, and by reading his texts and their musical consequences far more carefully than has hitherto been the case.

Informed by archival research and interdisciplinary approaches to music, literature, art, and religious studies, my close reading of these works demonstrates new intertextualities that connect a network of Humanists linked by a highly elaborate form of Milanese syncretism joining the sacred and the secular. Coppini’s contrafacts place Monteverdi’s music within a Milanese constellation of texts (musical, artistic, and literary) that sought to confront the rapidly changing world of the early seventeenth century. I argue that they provide a first-hand account of how Monteverdi’s madrigals were heard by reading them through the lens of Coppini’s rhetorical and poetic practices based on his own syncretic sense of religious affectivity. He catered both to secular audiences and to those in religious institutions, not least convents. It also becomes clear that Coppini must reconstruct texts that Monteverdi first deconstructed, which requires attention to musical rhetoric and not just oratory, prompting new analytical readings of the original madrigals themselves. My approach challenges the typical narratives of “Counter Reformation” contrafacts as didactic instruments of power to create a more nuanced view of works that served not just Coppini’s personal and professional needs, but also broader communities seeking new ways to perform their spiritual lives.

Dr. Carlson is currently Lecturer of Musicology at Texas A&M University-Kingsville. He is a Renaissance and Baroque Italian specialist and teaches courses in ethnomusicology, musicology, music theory, and popular music.