Academy

Academy
Howard Mayer Brown, revised by Iain Fenlon

https://doi.org/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.article.00084
Published in print: 20 January 2001
Published online: 2001

1. Terminology.

At various times in musical history, the word ‘academy’ has meant diverse things, including (i) a formal
association of people interested in mutually communicating their opinions on various philosophical,
intellectual or cultural issues (most such academies sponsored theatrical events with music and some
included discussions of musical questions on their regular agenda), or even, in some few cases, a
formal association devoting itself primarily to the study of music; (ii) a more loosely formed circle of
intellectuals interested in holding lively discussions on various topics; (iii) an official national society
that serves as an arbiter of tastes and standards; (iv) a society formed specifically to sponsor musical
performances (including opera); (v) a single concert, either public or private; or (vi) an institution for
the training of musicians.

2. The Platonic academy.

The first of these definitions must be considered the original and therefore the primary meaning. The
word itself derives from the mythological character Akademos, after whom a garden or grove in Athens
was named, where it is said that the Greek philosopher Plato met his students to discuss philosophy,
although recent scholarship has shown that exclusive reference to Plato was never intended by users
of the word (Chambers, 1995). In spite of the existence of various medieval institutions formed to
debate intellectual or philosophical questions, and which therefore might be called ‘academies’, the
tradition of the academy in the West is often associated with the alleged resuscitation of the idea of the
Platonic academy in late 15th-century Florence. This ‘Platonic Academy’, founded in 1470, centred on
the figure of Marsilio Ficino, a philosopher supported by members of the Medici family and
commissioned by them to translate the works of Plato into Latin. It has been claimed that Ficino
conceived the idea of bringing together occasionally, on an informal basis, in emulation of Plato's
original academy, those Florentine nobles and intellectuals who had intellectual interests in common,
especially a desire to hear him expound his ideas about Plato (see della Torre, 1902); revisionist writing
has, however, dismissed the Accademia Platonica as fictitious (Hankins, 1990).

The 16th century saw the rise of numerous academies in Italy, if not in direct response to the Platonic
Academy in Florence – their character also owes much, for example, to the religious and secular
confraternities of the late Middle Ages – then at least echoing the general idea of a meeting place for
intellectual discussion. Several thousand such societies in Italy from the 16th century to the 19th have
been listed (see Maylender, 1926–30). Some of those established in the 16th and 17th centuries, such
as the Accademia della Crusca in Florence (founded in 1582), the Accademia dei Lincei in Rome

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(1603), and the Accademia Filarmonica in Bologna (1666), are still in existence today. Others
flourished for only a few years, for example the Accademia degli Elevati of Florence, devoted
exclusively to the cultivation of music; founded by Marco da Gagliano in 1607, it enjoyed an active life
up to 1609, but seems thereafter to have languished, disappearing from view altogether by 1626 (see
Strainchamps, 1976).

Most of these associations brought together members of the upper classes of society, scholars and
intellectuals, literati, artists and musicians. The typical Italian academy of the 16th century had its own
constitution and held regularly scheduled meetings where papers on literary, artistic, philosophical and
even sometimes musical questions were read and discussed. In many academies the members took
academic pseudonyms (for example, Count Giovanni Maria de' Bardi of Florence was known as ‘il Puro’
in the Accademia degli Alterati, his son Pietro as ‘l'Avvinato’ and the poet Ottavio Rinuccini as ‘il
Sonnacchioso’. Academies became important forums for the dissemination of ideas in 16th-century
Italy and also served as models for associations of various kinds in later times and different places.
Among their more important functions – which have little or nothing to do with the history of music –
many academies had as their mission the obligation to establish and preserve the vernacular language
and to identify the principal intellectuals of their countries. Thus the Accademia della Crusca in Italy
took on the responsibility of compiling a definitive dictionary of the Italian language, while the various
national academies of eastern Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries constitute associations of the
leading official intellectuals in each country (they also serve to sponsor various research projects); and
the Académie Française fulfils both functions, defending the purity of the French language and by
electing from time to time new members to join the ranks of the ‘immortel(le)s’.

3. Italian academies.

During the 16th century, Italian academies became important venues for the airing of musical
questions. The discussions in various Florentine academies about the nature of ancient music are
probably the best-known examples of the way topics of current intellectual interest were handled by
academicians. Members of the Accademia degli Alterati of Florence, for example, contributed to the
lively debate in the late 16th century about the implications for modern music of speculations about
the organization of ancient music and its powers to communicate with its audience (Palisca, 1968).
Even more theoretical in its approach to music was the Venetian Accademia della Fama (also known as
the Accademia Venetiana). Under the guidance of Zarlino, who was a member, the academy proposed
to publish a number of treatises by both ancient and modern writers as part of an ambitious publishing
programme covering all the main areas of knowledge. This scheme, which owed much to Aldo
Manuzio's conception of the intimate relationship between scholarship and the press in the pursuit of
accurate and authoritative texts, never came to fruition (see Fenlon, 1995).

Besides the importance of Italian academies in discussing musical questions, they played a significant
role in musical history simply because those connected with princely courts were among the most
important sponsors of the theatrical entertainments. Many academies organized performances of
comedies and other plays, in which their members acted, and sometimes academies (or individual
academicians) were charged with arranging the entertainment for princely weddings, state visits by

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Academy

visiting dignitaries or other important occasional or regular events. Through these activities, music
became an important element of the academic enterprise, for theatrical entertainments almost always
included some musical component. The plays most closely associated with the Accademia
degl'Intronati in Siena, for example, Il sacrificio and Gl'ingannati, apparently written by various
members of the academy and first performed by them in 1531, are filled with music. Francesco
Corteccia composed five madrigals to words by the poet Ugolino Martelli that were sung as intermedi
at the first performance of Francesco d'Ambra's comedy Il furto, sponsored by the Accademia
Fiorentina in 1544; Corteccia's cycle is one of the very few complete sets of non-courtly intermedi to
have survived from the 16th century. And the most famous intermedi of the entire century, those
organized by the Medici court in Florence in 1589, to celebrate the wedding of Ferdinando de' Medici
to Christine of Lorraine, were first performed between the acts of Girolamo Bargagli's La pellegrina,
which was acted by members of the Sienese Accademia degl'Intronati, of which Bargagli was himself a
member. One of the earliest court operas, Monteverdi's Orfeo (1607), was commissioned by Prince
Francesco Gonzaga of Mantua to entertain members of the Accademia degli Invaghiti.

By the 18th century the Accademia degl'Intronati had its own theatre, described on the title-page of
various opera librettos as the ‘Teatro Grande della nobilissima Accademia degl'Intronati’, where opera
was performed during Carnival season. Various other academies even served as financial guarantors of
opera seasons. Thus the Accademia degli Immobili in Florence supported opera productions at the
Teatro della Pergola during the early 18th century.

A few academies in 16th-century Italy concentrated exclusively on the study of music; several more
made it a prominent aspect of their activities. The earliest to do so, the Accademia Filarmonica of
Verona, was founded in 1543 as a coalition of two previously existing organizations (Turrini, 1941).
They had a formal constitution, held regular meetings, and owned a meeting-room with an extensive
library (including a good deal of music) and a collection of instruments. In 1548 they hired as musical
director a full-time professional musician, Giovanni Nasco, who was required to be present every
afternoon, presumably to assist members by giving them instruction and performing with them. He
was also charged with setting to music whatever poetry members gave him. The settings remained the
property of the academy, and Nasco had to get permission to publish them.

Although the members of the Veronese Accademia Filarmonica appear to have made music mostly for
their own amusement – visitors were normally not allowed into their meetings – they also gave public
performances from time to time. They appear to have specialized in performing compositions (mostly
madrigals) in combinations of voices with instruments, although their library included a wide variety of
genres and kinds of compositions. They sponsored, for example, a new polyphonic Mass of the Holy
Spirit to be performed in a Veronese church annually on 1 May, the anniversary of their founding, and
organized more secular entertainments during Carnival. Perhaps it was for these outdoor Carnival
celebrations that they used the trumpets, drums and fifes that they owned, and which still survive.

Nasco left the academy in 1551; a succession of relatively well-known composers were subsequently
hired to take his place, including Vincenzo Ruffo, Alessandro Romano and Lambert Courtois. The
academicians achieved a certain fame throughout Italy during the 16th and early 17th centuries; more
than half of the madrigals published in the 16th century that were dedicated to academies were

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Academy

addressed to the Accademia Filarmonica, including volumes by Ruffo (1554), Wert (1571), Pallavicino
(1579), Marenzio (1582 and later) and Ingegneri (1587). Similar in orientation was the Accademia
degli Unisoni, founded in Perugia by Raffaele Sozi in 1561. In addition to its regular meetings to
perform vocal and instrumental music, the Unisoni promoted lectures and discussions of other
‘speculative sciences’, including mathematics, rhetoric, moral philosophy and poetry, as well as music.
Other Italian academies that had madrigal books dedicated to them – and thus were presumably
especially interested in music – include the Costanti of Vicenza (Nasco, 1557; Portinaro, 1557;
Bonardo, 1565); the Desiosi of Conegliano (Piccioni, 1577); the Elevati of Padua (Portinaro, 1560); the
Novelli of Verona (Cavatoni, 1572); and the Olimpici of Vicenza (Pordenon, 1580). In 1585 the Olimpici
inaugurated their new theatre, designed by Palladio on Vitruvian principles, with a performance of
Sophocles' Oedipus rex in the vernacular; for this occasion choruses in a suitably ‘antique’ style were
composed by Andrea Gabrieli.

The two Italian academies most famous in the history of music – the Accademia Filarmonica of Bologna
and the Accademia degli Arcadi of Rome – grew up in the 17th century. In his monastery of S Michele
in Bosco, near Bologna, Adriano Banchieri founded the Accademia dei Floridi in 1614 or 1615 (the date
is traditionally given as 1615, but Banchieri had published the academy's constitution in his l of 1614).
The academy was devoted to the study of music, concerts and the cultivation of belles lettres. The
Accademia dei Floridi underwent various transformations in the following several decades, changing
its name first to Accademia dei Filomusi and then to the Accademia dei Filaschisi. Eventually it served
as a model for the Accademia Filarmonica, founded in 1666 by Count Vincenzo Maria Carrati, an
academy that still survives. There were three classes of musicians elected to membership in the
Accademia Filarmonica: compositori, cantori and suonatori. Early in their existence the Filarmonici met
twice weekly in the Carrati palace, to hear music composed and performed by their members. They
soon gained a European-wide reputation as a distinguished musical academy. During its long life, it has
admitted to membership a large number of well-known composers, performers and scholars, including
G.B. Vitali, Tosi, Corelli, Torelli, Francesco Gasparini, Benedetto Marcello, Farinelli, Jommelli, G.B.
Martini (whose notes on the history of the academy have been published in modern edition: see
Martini, 1776 and 1973), Grétry, Mozart, Meyerbeer, Liszt, Rossini, Verdi, Wagner, Brahms, Saint-
Saëns, Puccini and Ravel.

The intellectual vacuum left in Rome after the death in 1689 of Queen Christina of Sweden led to the
establishment the next year of the Accademia degli Arcadi by members of her circle of literary figures
and musicians, notably G.M. Crescimbeni. The Arcadian academy soon became one of the most
important cultural institutions of its time, even establishing branches (or ‘colonies’) in various other
Italian cities, probably the only academy to consolidate its cultural power in this way. Pretending to
escape the complexities of modern life by reverting to the idyllic lives of shepherds, the Arcadians were
in the vanguard of the attempts to counteract what were seen as Baroque excesses by recourse to a
new simplicity and an aesthetic based on the rules of reason and moderation. Among the musicians
associated with the Arcadians were Corelli, Pasquini, Alessandro Scarlatti and Benedetto Marcello. The
Accademia degli Arcadi, is especially famous in the history of music, though, for its influence in the
establishment of a new kind of opera libretto in which, among other things, the characters make
decisions based on reason or on moral issues larger than their own amatory interests. The librettos of

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Apostolo Zeno (a member of the Venetian colony of Arcadians) exemplify these new principles. The new
ideals are best exemplified in the librettos of the Arcadian Pietro Metastasio, dating from the 1720s
onwards, with their strong political bias in extolling the nobility of good rulers. It is from debates
around the Arcadians, too, that the view began to be held that academies supported conformity and
encouraged conservative art.

Besides formal academies – with constitutions, regular scheduled meetings and fixed agendas – there
were also, as early as the 15th century, a number of more loosely organized circles of intellectuals in
Italy. These more informal groups have also been described as academies and need to be taken into
account in any fuller history of the institution. Beginning in the early 1440s, for example, King Alfonso
I of Aragon, ruler of Naples, met regularly with his more erudite courtiers to discuss cultural
questions, and this circle of intellectuals (which much later became the Accademia Pontaniana) has
been called the earliest academy in Italy. According to Antonfrancesco Doni, Verdelot was among the
‘people with intellectual interests, whether foreigners or Florentines’ (Nardi, Le storie della città di
Firenze) who met in the gardens known as the Orti Oricellari; members of these informal gatherings,
among them Machiavelli, included music among their activities. Similarly, the circle around the
Venetian patrician Domenico Venier in the mid-16th century – initially devoted to the cultivation of
Pietro Bembo's literary ideals – has been called an academy (among others, by Venier's Venetian
contemporaries), although it was never formally organized as such and had no constitution or regular
meetings; the fact that the poet and composer Girolamo Parabosco was a member suggests that music
may have been among its concerns. Such loose groupings of like-minded intellectuals, centred on one
dominant figure, might better be called ‘salons’ and should in any case be distinguished from regularly
constituted academies.

The most famous of these salons were, of course, those in Florence in the second half of the 16th
century: the Camerata of Count Giovanni de' Bardi and later the companions of Jacopo Corsi. In the
1560s and 70s Bardi and his companions discussed various literary and cultural questions, but they
seem to have been especially interested in music and in particular the nature of ancient Greek music
and how its alleged impact in the ancient world could be reproduced in modern times. Such groups
fulfilled the functions of regular academies in disseminating current ideas about culture fairly widely
throughout upper-class society. In the case of Bardi's and Corsi's salons, too, various members also
influenced the composition of Florentine court spectacles, such as the well-known intermedi for the
1589 Medici wedding (unified around the theme of the power of music), and the earliest operas.

The word ‘academy’ was also used as early as the 16th century in Italy and elsewhere to describe
single concerts, especially (at the beginning) private concerts. Such terms as ‘adunanza’, ‘ridotto’ and
‘cenacolo’ were used – as well as ‘accademia’ – to denote a meeting of intellectuals, meetings that
could include music, or consist mostly of music. The well-known ridotto that met in the palace of Mario
Bevilacqua in Verona was a group of this kind; it is described in Pietro Porito's Ragionamento (1588) as
a place where ‘almost daily, gentlemen gather and exercise themselves in virtuous matters such as
playing and singing and discussion of similar topics’. Performances of cantatas in Roman private
houses in the 17th century were often called academies, and the usage continued into the 18th century
and beyond. To take but one example, the cantata performed in honour of ‘Beato Agostino Novello’ at

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the Ospedale di S Maria della Scala in Siena in 1761 is described on its title-page as ‘in occasione della
pubblica Accademia fatta dagli Alunni e Convittori del Seminario Soleti in onore di detto Beato’: that
is, as a public concert (an ‘accademia’) given by the students and alumni of the school.

4. French academies.

The earliest academy in France, the Académie de Poésie et de Musique, was established by Jean-
Antoine de Baïf and Joachim Thibault de Courville in 1570, with the royal sponsorship of Charles IX.
The Académie, which met regularly in Baïf's house in Paris, had two classes of membership: musicians
(that is, singers, poets and instrumentalists) and auditors (that is, the subscribers, who were to support
the academy financially).

The aim of the academy was to revive the kind of poetry and music used by the ancient Greeks and
Romans. Baïf, however, did not wish to study the music of the distant past merely for antiquarian
reasons; instead, he attempted to transform the nature of French poetry by applying to it principles of
quantitative metre as in Latin (vers mesurés à l'antique) and by setting to it a simple music that would
closely follow the ancient metres (musique mesurée à l'antique). He wished to do this not so much for
purely aesthetic reasons but rather to bring a new order into music and hence into public order and
morality, following neo-Platonic ideals that connect music with morality. His ideas derive, at least
distantly, from his knowledge of Ficino's Accademia Platonica in Florence. He was also strongly
influenced by his association with the great teacher Jean Dorat of the Collège de Coqueret in Paris and
by his friendship with Pierre de Ronsard and the other poets of the Pléiade. There is reason to believe
that natural philosophy, mathematics and other subjects were discussed at meetings, not only poetry
and music. To further his aims, Baïf sought the help of a number of French musicians, of whom the
most distinguished was doubtless Claude Le Jeune, whose experiments with musique mesurée
influenced the setting of French poetry to music for several generations even though the Académie de
Poésie et de Musique soon disbanded and the examples of ‘pure’ musique mesurée are not entirely
convincing aesthetically.

With the death of Charles IX, the Académie languished, although it revived for a time during the reign
of Henri III, meeting in the Louvre as the Académie du Palais. With its disappearance, the academic
movement remained moribund in France until the second third of the 17th century, in spite of various
unsuccessful attempts to form new academies of one kind or another. In 1635, however, Cardinal
Richelieu founded the Académie Française as an institution to maintain and preserve the purity of the
French language and to serve as an arbiter of French literary taste. There followed in short order a
number of other publicly instituted academies: the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture
(1648), the Académie de Danse (1661), the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres (1663), the
Académie des Sciences (1666), the Académie Royale de Musique (1669) and the Académie
d'Architecture (1671). This series of official institutions survived the Revolution, was reorganized
under Napoleon in 1803, and exists today, differently organized, as the Institut de France.

The Académie Royale de Musique was founded in 1669 by the Abbé Pierre Perrin and Robert Cambert.
It was intended from the very beginning as a society to bring opera to France. Perrin and Cambert,
however, did not succeed, and by 1672 Jean-Baptiste Lully had become its master, enjoying a monopoly
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over opera productions in France until his death in 1687. The Académie continued its existence into
the 18th century and beyond and maintained its central position as national opera company and forum
for lively debate about new operatic trends, including intense arguments about the merits of Rameau,
the Querelle des Bouffons and indeed about the relative merits of French and Italian opera in general.
The connection of French opera with the academy continues to the present day: over the entrance of
the Palais Garnier in Paris, one can still read the inscription that names the Paris Opéra as the
‘Académie Nationale de Musique’.

5. Germany, England and elsewhere: 18th and 19th centuries.

In the 18th and 19th centuries academies continued to pursue their traditional goals. But the kinds of
organization to bear the name took new forms and their efforts were directed towards an ever broader
public. Moreover, the word ‘academy’ no longer exclusively denotes a particular kind of institution;
many of the academies of this period could as well have been called ‘society’, ‘institute’ or some other
more or less generic term.

Some national academies dedicated to preserving their national heritage had musical sections; others
were dedicated solely to the organizing and sponsoring of concerts and operatic performances
(presumably with the aim of disseminating music to a wider audience); some became more specialized
societies, to study and perform particular repertories (like the Academy of Ancient Music in London
and the German Singakademien); and yet more were institutions dedicated to the training of young
professionals, educating an ever broader segment of the public. In the 18th and 19th centuries, too,
the word ‘academic’ came to mean something related in a general way with an institution for higher
learning (thus J.N. Forkel was appointed the first Academic Music Director at the University of
Göttingen in 1779, a position that involved conducting ‘academic’ concerts).

In 17th-century Germany there were societies to cultivate literature, such as the Fruchtbringende
Gesellschaft of Weimar, founded in 1617. But academies as such scarcely predate the establishment of
the Akademie der Künste in Berlin in 1696 and the founding of the Akademie der Wissenschaften in
Berlin in 1700 to a plan by the philosopher Leibniz. To some extent these, like their French models, had
as their goals the establishment of national standards and the study, maintenance and preservation of
the vernacular language; but in the spirit of German idealism the academies also wished to cultivate
the free and reasoned investigation of cultural issues. In that sense, they are products of the Age of
Enlightenment and models for our own modern ideas about the freedom of academic inquiry.

The Berliner Singakademie, founded in 1791 by C.F. Fasch for the cultivation of choral music, and
especially older choral music, became a part of the Akademie der Künste in 1793. This was the
organization that did much to revive interest in the music of J.S. Bach, and it sponsored the early
revivals of the St Matthew Passion (conducted by Mendelssohn in 1829), the St John Passion and other
major Bach works. In 1804, a school for the training of singers, the Ordentliche Singschule, was
established as a part of the Akademie der Künste, the first such state-supported school in Prussia. C.F.
Zelter was appointed to its faculty in 1806 and in 1809 he became a professor of music when the
University of Berlin was established.

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Many of the various associations of amateurs and professionals devoted to the performance of music
formed in Germany from the 16th century onwards were called Collegium musicum, and these
societies constituted a kind of academy. Fasch's Singakademie, it could be argued, was a kind of
collegium musicum. Its formation spurred the foundation of other similar singing societies in many
German cities during the 19th century, and most of these were also called Singakademie. There were
as well other concert-giving societies called ‘academies’ in Germany, such as the Musikalische
Akademie of Munich, formed by the court musicians there in 1811. As in other countries, the word
‘academy’ was also often used in Germany and in Austria to mean a single concert (Mozart habitually
used the term), although ‘academic concerts’ were those held at universities, probably following
Forkel's model in Göttingen.

In England, too, the role of academies in disseminating culture throughout the upper classes was
fulfilled by schools, universities and court circles until the early 18th century. No institution called
academy seems to have existed before the formation of the Academy of Ancient Music (possibly dating
from as early as 1710) and the Royal Academy of Music in 1719. The latter was a consortium of rich
patrons formed to sponsor the introduction of Italian opera to England and especially to support the
performance of Handel's operas. Intended as a commercial venture, to make money, it was
unsuccessful and collapsed in 1728. An attempt to revive it in 1729 was equally unsuccessful.

The history of the Academy of Ancient Music and its relationship with the Academy of Vocal Music is
less clear. The Academy of Vocal Music was a group of aristocrats, amateur musicians and
professionals who formed a society in 1726 to revive ancient church music. Their original intention was
to follow earlier Renaissance ideals in studying music scientifically and educating each other, but in
fact they (or their successor society) eventually became a sponsoring organization for public concerts.
After a scandal in 1731 involving charges of plagiarism against G.B. Bononcini, the society broke apart,
and some of the members may have established the Academy of Ancient Music as a direct continuation
of the earlier society, even though Hawkins dates the Academy of Ancient Music back to 1710. The
Academy of Ancient Music, under the direction of Pepusch, Benjamin Cooke and others, gave regular
concerts until its dissolution in 1792.

At one time Pepusch intended to make the Academy of Vocal Music a school of music. In fact, no
institution for the education of musicians was called an academy in England until the Royal Academy of
Music was founded in 1823. Its establishment is an early manifestation of the rise of state-supported
music schools everywhere in the Western world in the 19th century. Many of these came to be called
academies, for example, those in Berlin (the Ordentliche Singschule of the Akademie der Künste,
established in 1804), Rome (the Accademia di S Cecilia, named Accademia in 1839, established as a
music school in 1876, based on the Congregazione dei Musici di Roma, established in 1566), Dublin
(the Royal Irish Academy of Music, founded in 1848), Philadelphia (the Philadelphia Musical Academy,
founded in 1870), Glasgow (the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, founded in 1890 as the
Athenaeum School of Music), Munich (Akademie der Tonkunst, founded in 1874) and Vienna (Akademie
für Musik und Darstellende Kunst, so named in 1909). In most Western countries during the 19th
century, the same general situation obtains as in Germany and England. Institutions called academies
were founded. Most of them consisted of official national institutions for the preservation of the
national heritage, or of concert- or opera-giving societies, or of music schools.

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T. Lockemann: ‘Die Anfänge des Jenaer Akademischen Konzerts’, Festschrift Armin Tille
(Weimar, 1930), 215–33

N. Morini: La reale Accademia Filarmonica di Bologna (Bologna, 1930)

G. Turrini: L'Accademia Filarmonica di Verona dalla Fondazione (Maggio 1543) al 1600 e il suo
patrimonio musicale (Verona, 1941)

D.P. Walker: ‘The Aims of Baïf's Academie de poésie et de musique’, JRBM, 1 (1946–7), 91–100

F. Yates: The French Academies in the Sixteenth Century (London, 1947)

D.P. Walker: ‘The Influence of musique mesurée à l'antique, particularly on the airs de cour of
the Early Seventeenth Century’, MD, 2 (1948), 141–63

H. Burton: ‘French Provincial Academies’, ML, 37 (1956), 260–74

C. Schröder, ed.: Carl Friedrich Zelter und die Akademie: Dokumente und Briefe zur Entstehung
der Musik-Sektion in der Preussischen Akademie der Künste (Berlin, 1959)

R. Freeman: Opera Without Drama: Currents of Change in Italian Opera, 1675 to 1725, and the
Roles Played Therein by Zeno, Caldara, and Others (diss., Princeton U., 1967)
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C.V. Palisca: ‘The Alterati of Florence, Pioneers in the Theory of Dramatic Music’, New Looks at
Italian Opera: Essays in Honor of Donald J. Grout, ed. W.W. Austin (Ithaca, NY, 1968), 9–38

G. Vecchi: Le accademie musicali del primo Seicento e Monteverdi a Bologna (Bologna, 1969)

R. Giazotto: Quattro secoli di storia dell'Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia (Rome, 1970)

R. Giazotto: ‘Storia dell'Accademia Nazionale di S. Cecilia’, Studi musicali, 1 (1972), 237–84

C.V. Palisca: ‘The “Camerata Fiorentina”: a Reappraisal’, Studi musicali, 1 (1972), 203–36

A. Gallo: La prima rappresentazione al Teatro Olimpico (Milan, 1973)

A. Schnoebelen, ed.: G.B. Martini: Catalogo degli aggregati della Accademia Filarmonica di
Bologna (Bologna, 1973)

E. Paganuzzi and others: La musica a Verona (Verona, 1976)

E. Strainchamps: ‘New Light on the Accademia degli Elevati of Florence’, MQ, 62 (1976), 507–
35

A.W. Atlas: ‘The Accademia degli Unisoni: a Music Academy in Renaissance Perugia’, A Musical
Offering: Essays in Honor of Martin Bernstein, ed. E.H. Clinkscale and C. Brook (New York,
1977), 5–23

A. Cohen and L.E. Miller: Music in the Paris Academy of Sciences, 1666–1793: a Source Archive
in Photocopy at Stanford University (Detroit, 1979)

A. Cohen: Music in the French Royal Academy of Sciences: a Study in the Evolution of Musical
Thought (Princeton, NJ, 1981)

L. Pinzauti: L'Accademia Musicale Chigiana da Boito a Boulez (Milan, 1982)

N. Pirrotta: Music and Culture in Italy from the Middle Ages to the Baroque: a Collection of
Essays (Cambridge, MA, 1984)

J. de La Gorce: ‘Une académie de musique en province au temps du Roi-Soleil: L'Opéra de

Rouen’, La musique et le rite sacre et profane, ed. M. Honegger and P. Prevost (Strasbourg,
1986), 2, 465–96

P. Cattelan: ‘La musica della “omnigena religio”: accademie musicali a Padova nel secondo
Settecento’, AcM, 59 (1987), 152–86

A. Field: The Origins of the Platonic Academy of Florence (Princeton, NJ, 1988)

J. Hankins: ‘Cosimo de' Medici and the “Platonic Academy”’, Journal of the Warburg and
Courtauld Institutes, 53 (1990), 144–62

M. Feldman: ‘The Academy of Domenico Venier, Music's Literary Muse in Mid-Cinquecento

Venice’, Renaissance Quarterly, 44 (1991), 476–512

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Akademie und Musik: Erscheinungsweisen und Wirkungen des Akademiegedankens in Kultur-

und Musikgeschichte, Festschrift Werner Braun, ed. W. Frobenius and others (Saarbrücken,
1993)

D. Chambers: ‘The Earlier “Academies” in Italy’, Italian Academies of the Sixteenth Century, ed.
D. Chambers and F. Quiviger (London, 1995), 1–14

See also

London (i)

France. Country in Europe, §I, 3(iv): Art music, The 17th and 18th centuries., v) Musical life in
the provinces.

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