Dare agli eventi una «istorica forma»: padre Martini e i primordi della storiografia musicale

Abstract

What would the Foundations of Music History look like had they been written by Modern-era authors? Taking Padre Giambattista Martini’s view of music history as a lynchpin of the discussion, the first part of the article argues that some elements Carl Dahlhaus identified as defining the essence of musical historiography are actually latecomers: not only did they not play any part in the writing of the first music-historical works, but also and above all their absence does not grant these earlier works any lesser degree of ‘historicity’. The second part of the article argues for the necessity of engaging more deeply with the multifarious ways authors such as Printz, Bontempi or the Bonnet-Bourdelots gave what they viewed as historical shape to the enormous amount of knowledge about the science of music extant at their time. The article takes seriously these works’ claim to historicity with the aim of explaining what it is about them that made their authors call them ‘histories’.