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Dante's Journey to Polyphony. Francesco Ciabattoni. University of Toronto Press, 2010. 240 pages. Reviewed by Aliyah M. Shanti.
Dante's Divine Comedy is a work of intricate internal structure and symbolism, full of references to the history, theology, and culture of his 14th-century Italian milieu. In Dante's Journey to Polyphony, Francesco Ciabattoni applies the latest research on Trecento Italian music and liturgy to Dante's numerous musical quotations and allusions, constructing out of them a coherent musical system that spans the entire Commedia. This system passes from the groans and wails of the Inferno, in which music is present only as obscure allusions to secular and instrumental songs, and as debased parodies of the liturgy, through the monophonic, penitential chanting of Psalms in the Purgatorio, to the Paradiso's, communal polyphony of praise.
Ciabattoni's work, which is organized into chapters detailing the musical references in each of the three cantiche of the Comedy, depends upon his assertion in the introductory and final chapters of the early diffusion of polyphony in Italy. His claim that organum, both written and improvised, was common in the Florentine liturgy of Dante's time is corroborated by studies of ordinal books from the...