Poesia, musica, censura : testi italiani del 16. e del 17. secolo

The huge transformation the Catholic Church had to face, between the sixteenth and the seventeenth century, had a big impact on the music scene of the Italian peninsula. Unavoidably, music was involved in the disputes between Catholics and Protestants as essential liturgical element. The musicologists have mainly studied the Council of Trent action, which seemed to be animated by the desire to remove the secular textual and melodic components from the church repertory. Therefore, Rome became the main center of production for sacred and spiritual music used in celebrations, devotional practices and also in teaching catechism. The case of the Society of Jesus is exemplar: music represent a powerful means of education in college programs, and a strategic tool in the catechesis work. To the enhancement of spiritual genres corresponds as well the will of 'suppress' the profane repertories. This is well documented during the age of Counter Reformation, by the variety of cases of "travestimento" which invest canzonette and madrigals. This attitude was also proved by some of the measures the ecclesiastical censure adopted against the vocal production since the seventies of the sixteenth century. However, the music has remained on the sidelines of studies about book censorship in the modern age and it still lacks a comprehensive reconstruction of the Roman policy in this area: which authors are condemned, to what extent and why? This essay tries to provide a first answer to these questions by studying the cases of Alessandro Striggio and Girolamo Parabosco, and the documents of the Index Congregation.