Music for Medici Festivals

Festivals sponsored by the Medici of Florence were among the most renowned of the time. The Medici were a mercantile family ennobled in the 1530s, when the senior male family member was first declared duke of Florence and granted the right of hereditary succession to the throne.

The family's anxiety about its origins inspired it to stage extravagant festivals that outdid those of the historic European nobility. Medici festivals are documented by remarkably full evidence: prose accounts, sketches of the triumphal arches of wood and floats that carried allegorical and mythological figures, and music. But of these elements, the music has been the least effectively presented to present-day devotees of Renaissance culture.

This album completes the reclamation of elements of High-Renaissance Florentine festivals. It contains surviving music for Medici festivals, most of it not yet recorded and the vast majority of it written by the principal composers in Medici service: Philippe Verdelot, Jacques Arcadelt, Francesco Corteccia, and Alessandro Striggio.

All were preëminent figures in European music history more generally, and their festival music is of the highest artistic quality. Aficionadoes of these mythic events will now be able to hear the music that contributed to the powerful impression these pageants left on contemporaries.