I canoni di Giovanni Battista Martini, in "L'idillio di Amadeus", a cura di Piero Mioli, Conservatorio di Musica G.B. Martini di Bologna, Forni ed. pp.81-183.

Review of Tomasz Jeż, in Muzyka: Kwartalnik poswiecony historii i teorii muzyki 61/3:242 (Warszawa, Poland: 2016), p. 149.

This writing is an introductory essay on Martini’s Canons. The huge amount of Martini’s canons escapes a superficial analysis since their manifold levels and intertextual connections are too complex; some deeper analysis presupposes an exhaustive cataloguing of all canons based upon the original sources.
Martini’s Canons are very short compositions in Latin (high style), in Italian (middle style), in Bolognese dialect (low style); from the musical point of view, of course the Latin canons (which often deal with sacred topics) show a greater seriousness, even if they may share some elements with the low-style, profane canons. When approaching such works, it must be taken into account that the large amount and variety of solutions provided by Martini do not find anything similar in the field of European music. For instance, the Italian ISBN (Index of National Service for Libraries) describes 1395 documents relative to Martini’s Canons out of a total amount of about 3000 documents relative to all canons in general. As a matter of fact, Martini’s Canons are about 800.

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