Academic Major: Performance Music
Advisor: Erica Levenson
Title: Celebration and Carnival: Western Influences in the Secular Music of Venetocratic Candia
Written in late sixteenth-century Venetian Crete, a document residing in the Correr Library in Venice and belonging to a larger government collection of ordinances, outlines public procedures for holidays and provides valuable insight into music and procession’s role in administering and maintaining control of the native Greek Orthodox population. Although the two populations have been studied in detail, little work has been produced examining the exact colonial relationship taking place in Crete during the turn of the seventeenth century. My paper examines the presence of Orthodox Greek elements in Latin ceremonies and processions and whether, along with other non-musical efforts, these were genuine attempts at representing the majority Greek? population in public display or superficial inclusions meant to placate and solidify control of a crucial trading outpost otherwise known for rebellion and facing outside pressure from constant Ottoman advances.
I argue that the involvement of Greek clergy and the inclusion of Greek Orthodox elements in Latin rite attempted to assimilate the native population of Crete into Venetian culture. The detailed accounts written in the document titled “Solenità et Ceremonie che si costumano nella Città di Candia” illustrate processions and other festivities on major feast days, down to the exact order of processions of the nobility and clergy, departure and arrival points, instruments used, churches visited, and which languages praises (“laude”) were performed in and in which churches. Through this intense planning by the Venetian government to stage every public event in a positive light, we can notice striking moments of cultural contact, like laude being sung in Greek inside of a Latin church. Through a close reading of this document, my paper illuminates musical processions’ role in Venetian colonial governance of Crete, thus highlighting the global nature of the Venetian Republic and the Mediterranean during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.