22 - Les mondes de la musique
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Florence Alazard
Musical media and music as a media: the case of the Italian Renaissance
Le Temps des médias n°22, Printemps 2014, p. 12-23.
In Renaissance Italy, the links between media, such as avvisi and other pamphlets, and music were not that simple : music was rarely – and perhaps never – the subject matter, but was instead the principal vehicle of information, since daily news were read, or intoned, even sung, on the piazze, with a musical accompaniment. Music was the media. Avvisi did not deal with music, but princes, during the sixteenth-century, monopolized the mediatization of music : musical festivities were mediatized thanks to printed books that aimed to represent, for the absent, the musical performance. That was how was build a new literary genre that submitted the mediatization of music to politics of grandeur but that also suggested a way to compensate the ephemeral feature of music.