Restorations

Project in collaboration with Save Venice Foundation (New York) and Venice in Peril Fund (UK)

The choir book is a large, handwritten book of music, used by choirs in churches during the Middle Ages and especially in the Renaissance. It was placed on a high, wide lectern, so that it could be read by all the singers in the choir: in the first row were the boy sopranos, while the men were arranged in the following rows to allow everyone a good view of the text. The choir book therefore had to be large, in some cases reaching 51 x 68 cm when open. Likewise, every line and note were drawn in large, bold characters; the pages were often richly decorated and illuminated.

In Venice, the Historical Archive of the Patriarchate houses the choir books with the polyphonic music of the Ducal Chapel of San Marco, which date from the second half of the seventeenth century to the first decades of the eighteenth century and were declared World Heritage by UNESCO in 2014. This highly important documentation represents the most substantial core of the surviving ancient musical heritage of the San Marco chapel. It contains an a cappella polyphonic repertoire that the singers sang on the pulpitum magnum, that is, the hexagonal choir gallery located in the nave of the basilica, portrayed by Canaletto in "Musici che canta nella Chiesa Ducal di San Marco in Venezia".

In 2015, 18 handwritten choir books were restored thanks to funding from the Swiss Pro Venezia Foundation, the Save Venice Foundation and the Venice in Peril Fund. The conservation work involved unstitching and restitching the bindings and reinforcing weakened and torn pages and covers, using fabric fibre and Japanese cardboard.

These choir books were then the subject of an international research project entitled "The sound of St. Mark's", which resulted in the publication of a digital catalogue, created by the multimedia platform "Venetian Music Online" of Ca’ Foscari University, dedicated to the musical history of Venice and its territories. The multimedia portal was developed to be open-access and includes the critical transcription of all compositions and some fragments. The transcription and scoring of the music of the San Marco codices was carried out by Prof. Luigi Collarile, also a professor at the Universities of Fribourg and Basel. The initiative was carried out in collaboration with the Cathedral Basilica of Saint Mark, the Historical Archive of the Patriarchate of Venice, and the Swiss National Fund for Scientific Research, which funded the archival research and the creation of digital reproductions of the manuscripts.