Non solo partiture: fonti musicali di età moderna all'Ambrosiana

The musical holdings of the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan offer a privileged vantage point from which to reconsider the very notion of what constitutes a “musical source” in the early modern period. Far from being confined to scores and musical manuscripts, the Ambrosiana preserves a remarkably diverse range of materials — theoretical treatises, correspondence, pedagogical manuals, liturgical texts, and documents of a non-musical nature — which, when examined together, reveal the cultural and institutional density of Milan’s musical life over the past four centuries. Alongside medieval codices and printed collections of sacred and secular music, the library houses important works of music theory by Angelo da Pizzighettone, Nicola Vicentino, and Vincenzo Galilei, as well as normative writings on canto fermo by Camillo Perego and other early modern treatises. Equally significant for the city’s cultural and musical history are diaries, gazettes, periodicals, and encomiastic publications that record the reception, circulation, and daily practice of music within the more than three hundred churches of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Milan. Sources such as the Diario milanese of Don Giovanni Battista Borrani or the Ragguaglj di Varj Paesi, when read alongside the musical manuscripts of Gianandrea Fioroni, Carlo Monza, and Agostino Quaglia, demonstrate how musical activity was embedded within broader cultural frameworks that extended far beyond the purely musical domain. This plurality of perspectives encourages us to move beyond the traditional hierarchy of sources and to regard every document — whether a score, a theoretical treatise, an archival record, or a narrative chronicle — as part of a shared evidentiary corpus. Taken together, these materials enable a more coherent reconstruction of early modern Milanese musical practice and reaffirm the Ambrosiana’s role as a vital repository for understanding the intersections between music, written culture, and institutional history.