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Dataset for "Florentine Trecento Musical Iconography and Contemporary Musical Performance" (PhD thesis)
John Stinson, OAM

In documenting the use of Trecento musical instruments, five categories of documents have been searched: payment records from surviving archives, contemporary chronicles, contemporary literature, medieval music theory treatises  and relevant modern accounts. Excluded from this catalogue are musical activities which do not necessarily involve instruments, such as singing and dancing: these will be displayed in a table in the Data Repository. Frequently encountered generic names for musicians such as suonatore and piffaro have not been included in the catalogue of instruments as the instruments actually played are not specified: the Suonatores della Signoria comprised trombadori (trombonists), trombetti (trumpet players) and pifferi, who played shawms and bombards. These generic musicians are briefly listed below and in detail in the Data Repository.

Documents with the document number beginning with [D] are usually payment records and therefore refer only to musicians who were paid for their work, irrespective of whether this was a full-time occupation of just an occasional engagement. Document numbers beginning with [L] are taken from contemporary literature, Dante, Boccaccio, Sacchetti, Jacopo da Voragine, Folgore da San Gimignano, Petrarch, Brunetto Latini and Prudenzani. While the works from which these documents have been extracted make no pretence at giving a factual account of Florentine musical practice, they are important for describing the musical activities of those not usually paid for their musical activity – the amateur players who were an important part of the Florentine soundscape. More descriptive of actual events are the documents whose document number begins with [C]: contemporary chronicles in which festive occasions are described, especially those by Goro Dati and Giovanni Sercambi, Giovanni and Filippo Villani. Medieval Latin theory texts, extensively gathered in the Thesaurus Musicarum Latinarum, sometimes discuss the use of musical instruments but do not necessarily reflect trecento musical practice: the systrum, for example, an instrument known from Egyptian times, and symphonia were nowhere found documented in other trecento documents. Two exceptions are the treatises by the Dominican Jerome of Moravia and the Franciscan Juan Gil da Zamora, which may have been used in the education of young friars  and Johannes de Grocheio’s De Musica, which describes of musical life in Paris, where many Florentine friars were educated.
The search was based on the linguistic root of the instrument name, e.g. viol or viuol for fiddle. This produced successful hits for viola and viuola but also irrelevant words like violenza (violence); the root 'organ' produced verbs like organizzare (to organize). The led to the establishment of a list of words to be excluded.

From the initial file of 48,985 documents, a file of 33,247 unique records was developed with one keyword for each line[1]. All documents with their line numbers are held in Appendix B of the full document in which the keyword is found. This file includes names of instruments, but generic terms for players of instruments such as suonatori and pifferi as well as more specific terms such as cennamellarius (shawm player) and trombadori (trombonists) are listed separately.

Non-instrumental musical activities such as singing (both monophonic - cantare and polyphonic - biscantare) and dancing - danzare and its cognate forms  are also listed.

To verify the extract of text labelled fulline in the table, please follow the following steps:
1. Capture the docnumber from the table
2. Make a note of the linenumber
3. Go to the folder Lines
4. Navigate to the text file labelled with the docnumber
5. Locate the linenumber

The text following the linenumber should give the same result as the fulline in the Table of Instruments.
Please note that the dates given in the Table are approximate only. When the keyword is related to a painter or painting, the date given is usually the earliest date for the active career of the painter. When the date refers to a literary work, it is the approximate date when the work was written. Payment documents are usually precise.


Note

[1] The line number refers to the number assigned by the database software FoxPro7. The length of the line can be set within the program: the standard used in this dissertation is 254 characters, i.e. the maxim number of characters in a fixed-length field. While this may seem arbitrary to those not using the same software, it securely identifies the segment of 254 characters within which the keyword is located in a digital file