edited by Galliano Ciliberti and Thomas Neal, Turnhout, Brepols, 2025 (Studies on Italian Music History, 21)
This volume offers a comprehensive examination of sacred music in Italy from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century, bringing together contributions from nineteen scholars at the forefront of current musicological research.
Through a diverse array of topics and methodologies, the collection sheds new light on the multifaceted roles that sacred music played within Italian religious, cultural, and institutional life over four centuries.
The chapters engage with the production, transmission, and performance of sacred music across a variety of regional and ecclesiastical contexts. Topics include manuscript production and the devotional practices of confraternities, as well as the commissioning and composition of sacred works tailored to local liturgical needs and patronage structures.
The volume also addresses broader issues such as the pedagogical uses of sacred music, the development of organology in ecclesiastical settings, evolving performance practices, and the aesthetic and theological discourses that informed the liturgical movement.
By foregrounding the interaction between sacred music and the wider cultural landscape of early modern and modern Italy, this collection not only deepens our understanding of specific repertoires and practices but also contributes to larger conversations about the place of music in religious experience and institutional, cultural, and religious identity.
Richly interdisciplinary in approach, the volume is essential reading for scholars of music history, religious studies, and early modern Italian culture.
Thomas Neal is a musicologist, teacher, and conductor. He graduated in musicology from Clare College, Cambridge, where he was the John Stewart of Rannoch Scholar in Sacred Music. Since 2018, he has served as Director of Music at New College School, Oxford. Thomas’s research centres on liturgical music and culture in sixteenth-century Rome, with a particular focus on Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina. Thomas is also active as a church musician for the traditional Latin liturgy.
Galliano Ciliberti is a professor of History of Music at the “Nino Rota” Conservatory in Monopoli. He has received several contracts as research director funded by the National Research Council, he was a research fellow at the Department of Musicological and Paleographic-Philological Sciences of the University of Pavia, Cremona branch and has obtained several teaching contracts at the University of Perugia, the Université Paris IV (Sorbonne) and the University of Bari.
