engleski

On Music Culture of Dalmatia between the Sixteenth and the Eighteenth Centuries

The very fact that Dalmatia belonged religiously to Western Christianity, or later Catholicism, i.e. to a universal Christian and not a national church, kept it permanently open to one of the greatest European multifold sacred music experiences, via its obligatory international music repertoire. Broader political circumstances established general social and cultural frames within which Dalmatian musical culture developed in this period in its forms and organizational aspects ; in this, art music naturally shared the destiny of literature, fine arts, architecture, urbanism, and the general style and feeling of life in Dalmatia and Dubrovnik: Renaissance and Baroque music, both imported and locally produced, was intended, played and sung in Renaissance and Baroque churches, town palaces and country castles as the only logical acoustic spaces for it. However, music in Dalmatia did not always blindly follow the dictates of external circumstances, i.e. it was not just the mere fact that Venice governed administratively and ruled politically (with military force in the background) most of the Province from 1420 till 1797, which brought the strongest influence of Venetian music ; the intrinsic qualities and appeal of any music in itself played an independent role, too. For example, Dubrovnik chose by free will the Italian lands as its source of influence throughout the period, following the mainstream that Italian musical influence exercised all around Europe ; and, when the interest in and quality of music shifted elsewhere, e.g. in Classicism towards Germanic countries and Vienna, Venetian Dalmatia and especially Dubrovnik turned their heads to hear musics other than the Italian. It is undeniable that during the 16th to18th-century period Dalmatia and Dubrovnik were more receptive than emanative musico-cultural entities, with traces of certain limited evolution concerning the span of the local compositional output towards the end of the period ; this means that influences coming from Europe, strong as they were, gradually but consistently found their echos and counterparts in domestic production (both Croatian and Italian, whether imported or local), and that the &laquo ; in-flux&raquo ; or &laquo ; in-fluentia&raquo ; of musical artefacts and ideas was transformed from mere import into a specific local Dalmatian music amalgam with corresponding domestic components. Thus, in the field of art music as a totality, a form appeared of that &laquo ; cultural synthesis&raquo ; as aforementioned, in its character both West-European (i.e. Mediterranean and Central-European) and specifically Dalmatian/Croatian/Slavic, but always different from the cultural patterns of both East Europe and, especially, the Islamic-Ottoman Empire, the latter being throughout the period a permanent reminder at the very threshold of Dalmatia and Europe – literally and symbolically – of the looming need to melt bells into cannons.

Dalmatia, Dubrovnik, Croatia, music culture, 16-18th century, cultural synthesis

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