«Di gran fuoco ed armonia»: la mobilità territoriale dei musicisti francescani nel caso di Francesco Passarini

Abstract

Dedicated more than any other religious order to music, the Order of Friars Minor Conventual abounded in remarkable friar-musicians: especially during the half of the early modern period, various convents often competed to engage them. On the one hand, moving from one city to another forced these friar-musicians to adapt to the specific performance and liturgical practices of the place while, on the other hand, it made them disseminators of new musical resources in their new working environments. The case of Francesco Passarini, a friar who was born in Bologna in 1636 and died there in 1694, is exemplary: chapel master at the basilica of San Francesco in Bologna, he was nevertheless also active in Ferrara, San Giovanni in Persiceto, Venice, Florence and Pistoia as well. His life story conveys a portrait of the ordinary career course of a skilled friar-musician before epigones such as Giambattista Martini and Stanislao Mattei gave rise to an almost totally sedentary model designed to serve different purposes from the second half of the eighteenth century to the dawn of the late modern period.