The Music of Siena: Jasper Snow, Vielle; Georgia Burashko, Alto; Joshua Cheatham, Viol; Richard Pittsinger, Tenor
Musical selections responding to the special exhibition Siena: The Art of Bronze, 1450–1500. Fifteenth-century Siena was no silent city—its churches and streets carried chant, bells, processions, and devotional song—yet little of its notated polyphony survives, and almost none can be tied to a local composer. Led from
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the vielle by Jasper Snow, this program gathers pieces preserved in or near Sienese sources, several recovered from reused parchment. Works by Antonio da Cividale, Johannes Ciconia, and Zacara da Teramo set these surviving fragments within the international sound-world of the early fifteenth century, where Italian and French styles met in music of restless rhythmic and contrapuntal invention; alongside them are anonymous love songs and devotional works for local saints. Like the bronzes on view in the exhibition, this music poses a question of survival: sculpture endures as matter; music endures only through copying, loss, and dispersal—traced here from manuscript back to living sound. Image Credit: Vecchietta (Lorenzo di Pietro) (Italian, 1410–1480), The Resurrection, 1472. Bronze. The Frick Collection.