Arcangelo Corelli and friends: kinships and networks in the Papal State.

Neither scholarship nor popular interest has neglected Arcangelo Corelli. His music is a favourite of many performers; references to his sonatas and concertos are ubiquitous across a wide spectrum of musicological literature. The rise of serious Corellian research on an international scale since the 1970s has given new breadth to several areas of enquiry, including sources, archival documents, reception and performance studies. And yet, despite the advances of modern Corellian scholarship, a number of historical and critical issues are still to be investigated. Especially important for our understanding of the Corelli phenomenon is to determine the nature of the original social and cultural conditions that made it possible. Recent writings have shown that posthumous interpretations of Corelli depended mainly on processes peculiar to 18th- rather than 17th-century musical cultures. This article reconsiders the wealth of evidence unearthed by historical research to pinpoint the geographical, political and economic locus of Corelli’s work. It argues that, notwithstanding his international success as a published composer and his later reputation as a standard-bearer for Italian music outside Italy, Corelli was in fact the product of a rather restricted though distinctive milieu in the Rome of his time. By sketching the specific events that led to Corelli’s extraordinary career as a specialized instrumentalist, the article shifts attention away from the composer’s position within vast schemes of music history and restores it instead to the original environment in which his musical activities took place. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]