Emiliano Ricciardi, a music historian, has been designated a Spotlight Scholar for 2024 at UMass Amherst. The Spotlight Scholars initiative highlights academic members who are working to promote positive social change via research, scholarship, and creative activities.
Ricciardi directs a digital humanities project that allows students and performers to study and be inspired by the writings of Italian poet Torquato Tasso.
Emiliano Ricciardi, a young student of literature and music in Italy, was routinely exposed to works from the Italian Renaissance, which are an important element of Italian culture. This time, spanning the 15th and 16th centuries, represented the transition from the Middle Ages to modernity and was notable for its thriving arts, such as poetry and music.
While studying literature at the University of Rome and violin performance at the Conservatorio di Musica Santa Cecilia, Ricciardi—a native of Southern Italy—was drawn to the writings of Torquato Tasso, usually regarded as the most important poet of late-16th century Italy. Tasso’s extensive body of work was set to music by almost all secular vocal composers in Europe at the period, and it also served as an inspiration for visual artists. Even though these writings are hundreds of years old, Ricciardi discovers that the themes they address remain universal.
Ricciardi, an associate professor of music history at UMass Amherst, praised Tasso’s poetry for its deep exploration of human emotions and passions. “It’s almost like a lesson in love. Even if these writings were written for a specific context hundreds of years ago, they nonetheless reveal a lot about humans in the year 2024.”
Furthermore, the musical treatments for Tasso’s lyrics are breathtakingly gorgeous and “fascinatingly complex,” with many voice lines intertwined. “The beauty of the intertwining voices in this music draws you in and highlights hidden details and meanings of the poetry,” he said.
Ricciardi earned his master’s degree at the University of Cambridge before moving on to Stanford University for his doctorate. At Stanford, he joined the Center for Computer Assisted Research in the Humanities (CCARH) and used cutting-edge digital technology to study Tasso’s poetry and music, which aided his long-term career.
Ricciardi founded the Tasso in Music Project with CCARH’s Dr. Craig Sapp, a renowned expert in music encoding and computational analysis. Since its inception in 2017, the project has emerged as one of the most prominent internet projects dedicated to the study of Renaissance culture. This unusual feat has received two grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities: Scholarly Editions and Translations (2016-19) and Digital Humanities Advancement (2022-25). In 2021, the project won an honorable mention for the Digital Innovation Award by the Renaissance Society of America, the world’s leading scholarly organization focusing on culture from 1300 to 1700. Today, Ricciardi serves as the project’s director and general editor, with critical editions of over 800 sets of Tasso’s poetry encoded in a variety of non-commercial electronic formats. Ricciardi and his associates transcribe and revise the compositions from Renaissance notation to modern notation, making them accessible to today’s researchers and musicians. The versions include significant critical annotations and commentary.
Furthermore, computational tools developed by Ricciardi and Sapp allow scholars to perform sophisticated analyses on the entire repertoire—which would be impossible for a human to do manually—shedding new light on scholarly research questions such as the occurrence of specific rhythmic, melodic, or harmonic patterns across the repertory. The site also includes encodings of Italian literary passages with English translations, as well as interactive text mark-ups to identify syllables, stress, rhyme, and variants found in various sources.
According to Ricciardi, the Tasso in Music Project website is frequently visited by a diverse group of literary scholars, music historians and theorists, performers, and anyone interested in Italian Renaissance culture.
One of Ricciardi’s primary goals for the project is to revitalize the lovely music in this repertoire and make it accessible to modern singers. To that purpose, he has included elements in the project that cater to the demands of performers, such as transposing a composition’s pitch or examining scores in their original notation.
