ABSTRACT
In an article published in the Journal of the American Musicological Society in 1994,1 presented a controversial new hypothesis to explain the historical and expressive significance of Adrian Willaert’s Musica nova (1559).1 I proposed that this monumental collection, which most Renaissance scholars have associated with the politics and culture of mid-sixteenth-century Venice, may instead have been compiled to commemorate the republican political traditions of Willaert’s Florentine patrons, many of whom were living as expatriates in Venice at that time. This hypothesis drew on documentary, historical, literary, religious, and more broadly cultural evidence, most of which is well known. What was new about my argument, and what pointed to a Florentine context for Musica nova, was my claim that Willaert embedded short citations of liturgical chant in his dense polyphony.
