Talk:Giovanni Bassano

Sources

I wrote this article (late 2004) before we were routinely citing sources. I didn't make anything up. Here is one of the articles I probably used. Some of it is from the Selfridge-Field book as well. Antandrus (talk) 04:35, 28 January 2012 (UTC)

Don't go taking this all personally, Antandrus! When I placed those requests for sources, I didn't look at the edit history first to see if this article had been written by someone I wanted to take a poke at. Of course I trust you (and all other editors on Wikipedia) to have consulted reliable sources before writing anything. Still, it is a sad fact that we must tell Wikipedia readers where the information in these articles comes from. I don't need to tell this to you, of all people! I'm only sorry I didn't leap in with the preferable format for references, when I had the chance. Now this article will be stuck with footnotes forever, whereas parenthetical referencing is so much superior. What a shame!—Jerome Kohl (talk) 08:35, 28 January 2012 (UTC)

I would have thought this would be a particularly easy article to reference and indeed expand, partly because the history of this family is the subject of David Lasocki's The Bassanos: Venetian musicians and instrument makers in England, 1531-1665, which I note is not among the works currently referenced. Unfortunately I don't have the book; I do however have Selfridge-Field, if that is of any help. With a view to restoring some of the removed material, with appropriate references, to the article, I'm placing it here:

Bassano was the person most responsible for the performance of the music of the Gabrielis, both as a performer and a director. Most likely Giovanni Gabrieli had Bassano in mind for his elaborate cornett parts.
In addition to directing the music at St. Mark's, Bassano was busy elsewhere in Venice; he directed several groups of piffari, bands of wind players including bagpipes, recorders, shawms, flageolets, bassoons, and conceivably other instruments, which were used in other churches (such as San Rocco) or even street festivals.
Bassano was also a composer, though his accomplishment in this regard has been overshadowed by his renown as a performer and his associated performance treatise. He wrote motets and concerti ecclesiastici (sacred concertos) in the Venetian polychoral style; and he also wrote madrigals, canzonettas and some purely instrumental music. His canzonettas achieved some fame outside of Italy: Thomas Morley knew them, printing them in London in 1597 in English translation.
Some of Bassano's instrumental music is ingeniously contrapuntal, as though he were indulging a side of his personality he was unable to display in his more ceremonial, homophonic compositions. His fantasias and ricercars are densely imitative and contain retrograde and retrograde inversions of motivic ideas, a rarity in counterpoint before the 20th century.
The similarity of Bassano's motets to the early work of Heinrich Schütz, who studied in Venice with Gabrieli, suggests that the two may have known each other; certainly Schütz knew Bassano's music. At any rate Schütz carried the Venetian style back with him to Germany where it continued to develop into the Baroque era.

I'll try to take a look at Erig's introduction later today in case that is of use. Justlettersandnumbers (talk) 12:45, 28 January 2012 (UTC)

Sorry, I just can't find what I wrote this from. I don't have JSTOR from home, thanks to their idiotic policy of only servicing academics. Another possibility is I used the notes to a CD. I've already looked in the 1980 Grove. Usually I listed all my sources at the end (we didn't have a citation mechanism in 2004) but seem to have neglected one in this case. Antandrus (talk) 15:02, 28 January 2012 (UTC)

By the way, that book on the Bassanos, if I remember correctly, only covers those active in England; it omits Giovanni who remained in Venice. The 1976 article by Selfridge-Field is probably the most comprehensive source (weirdly, it does not look familiar to me, which is why I think I wrote from something secondary, i.e. written from it). Also, go ahead and switch to parenthetical referencing; I don't mind; I just threw in the footnote from habit. Antandrus (talk) 15:05, 28 January 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for this. I'll admit I've not read the Lasocki book; my suggestion that it might be relevant here is based on hearsay. It looks to me as if the printed Grove is a source for a good deal of the "disputed" material, but that you've sometimes gone some way gone beyond it (and by the way, I don't think anyone is actually disputing any of it except for maybe the retrograde composition technique). I'll possibly try to add those parts of the stuff back in. I no longer have JSTOR at all, so can't read the S-F article anyway. I'll see if I can find her book, I know I have it somewhere. Justlettersandnumbers (talk) 16:40, 28 January 2012 (UTC)

No problem ... actually it turns out it's almost all from the Selfridge-Field book. When I first looked in it last night I missed that there was more than one index (I hate it when authors do that). The retrograde-retrograde inversion example is in page 64-65, and Bassano is all through the book in bits. There are a couple of essays by Paul McCreesh included as liner notes in CDs I have that mention Bassano as well. Antandrus (talk) 16:57, 28 January 2012 (UTC)