L’affermazione degli archi nel contesto liturgico fiorentino: pratiche e consuetudini tra Sei e Settecento

The emergence of the strings within the Florentine liturgical context: Practices and customs between the seventeenth and eighteenth century.
Strings started being used in the main Florentine churches for major celebrations in the last years of the seventeenth century and spread at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Initially confined to separate instrumental sections performed alongside the sacred song, they gradually replaced trombones and cornetts in the accompaniment of voices. The new configuration of instrumental groups called for new and wider spaces to place the musicians: cantorie were then equipped with rincrescimenti and new platforms were built, creating a favorable context for the production of music for multiple choirs. Despite the increasing presence of instruments in liturgical music, instrumentalists are absent from the lists of salaried musicians of Florentine churches: as mentioned in the chronicles, “musici stranieri” (foreign musicians), or, in some cases, “musici di palazzo” (court musicians) were employed. In the same chronicles, we find a term which probably identified the string orchestra: “Concerto degli Stromenti”.