The cultural significance of the cittern in Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries

Mariño Garza, E. (2025) The cultural significance of the cittern in Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Doctoral thesis, Royal College of Music.

Abstract

The cultural history of the cittern is the story of the battle between tradition versus innovation in a cultural climate of major forces of change, notably the economic circumstances of the sixteenth century, the beginnings of the modern age and their effect on musical culture. The increase of wealth of not only nobles but merchants, bankers, government officials and other lesser or non-aristocrats, as well as the demand for music, instruments, and art in general as means of acquiring and displaying social status and consolidating power, represented groundbreaking shifts. Music was affected by the larger investment in and consumption of art, which brought transformations in business organisations and international commerce. Such changes established a market for new varieties of musical practices and instruments, which reflected a novel amalgam of ideologies, traditions, and innovations. The cittern originated in an autochthonous instrument known in the Italian Peninsula as the cetra, which since the thirteenth century had been an iconological, Christianised version of the quintessential, mythological lyre of Classic antiquity. The cultural identity of the cetra, encompassing its humanist heritage and traditional manufacture, were dramatically transformed in response to the growing practice of polyphonic instrumental music and basso continuo. While in the Italian Peninsula, the instrument remained strongly bound to humanism, its transalpine counterpart underwent a greater commodification process. Within these transformations, the cittern acquired a range of contrasting social values and categorisations, helping shape social identities. This metamorphosis can be considered both as progress but also as a regression because in each important stage, the instrument lost as well as gained values. On the one hand, the cittern was stripped of its most important artistic value and cultural identity, its humanist heritage. On the other, through a mass globalisation this wire plucked stringed instrument became an intrinsic part of the social fabric and everyday music of early modern Europe and set the foundations for the majority of wire strung plucked instruments of the Western continent.

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