Out of Obscurity
Marica Tacconi ’92 helps connect modern audiences with music previously lost to time.
In November, the Venice Music Project ensemble performed two concerts at the Scuola Grande dei Carmini in Venice, featuring baroque music last heard more than two centuries ago. On hand to introduce the works was musicologist Marica Tacconi ’92, whose research helped to bring them out of obscurity.
A distinguished professor of musicology and art history at Penn State’s College of Arts and Architecture, Tacconi studies the music, art and culture of late medieval and early modern Italy. During a research trip to Venice in the summer of 2019, she visited the Ospedaletto, or “Little Hospital,” a charitable institution that served foundling and orphan girls known as the putte.
The putte at the Ospedaletto “received incredible, very high-level musical educations from some of the great composers of the time,” including Antonio Vivaldi and Nicola Porpora, Tacconi says. The girls also gave public performances there, and Tacconi and her colleague Liesl Odenweller, the Venice Music Project’s artistic director and a soprano, were eager to experience the Ospedaletto’s intimate, elegant Sala della Musica.
At one end of the room was a striking fresco featuring female musicians, likely representing the putte, at the feet of Apollo, the Greek god of music. Tacconi noticed that one of the figures held in her hands a page of sheet music as she gazed serenely at the viewer.
“I wanted to find out what this music was,” Tacconi recalls. Drawing from the work of other scholars, she soon learned it was an aria from a lost opera by Pasquale Anfossi, which she then found in a library near Rome. The Venice Music Project performed the rediscovered aria in December 2023.
Tacconi has provided musicological expertise and collaborated with the Venice-based ensemble on about half a dozen concerts, each with “a different repertoire and each aimed at presenting music that has been neglected for centuries,” she says.
Recovering long-lost music is a deeply collaborative process, one that involves interpreting early musical notation on top of rehearsals and archival research—something Tacconi showed an aptitude for at Williams. A pianist and vocalist, she came to the college with plans to study music composition. Then a first-year student, she took a required survey course on pre-1750 music with Jennifer Bloxam, now the Herbert H. Lehman Professor of Music, emerita.
“I still remember going into that class thinking, ‘I’m not very interested in this subject,’” says Tacconi. “And then about 10 days later, I was absolutely hooked. I entered a soundscape that was completely foreign to me. My passion and curiosity were ignited.”
She continued to take courses and study with Bloxam, completing a junior and a senior thesis under her direction.
“Even as an undergraduate, Marica was keen to transcribe the old musical notation into modern notation so that student singers could bring forgotten pieces to life again,” Bloxam says. “It has been thrilling to see the seed of enthusiasm for early music that sprouted in class with me years ago blossom into such a vigorous and productive career.”
After Williams, Tacconi completed a Ph.D. in musicology at Yale, where she studied late medieval and early modern music in Florence under Bloxam’s mentor, Craig Wright—a coincidence and “not intentional,” Tacconi says with a laugh. She joined the Penn State faculty in 1998.
This past September, Tacconi returned to Williams as one of five alumni to receive Bicentennial Medals recognizing their distinguished achievement. During the ceremony, President Maud S. Mandel described her as the “Indiana Jones” of musical archaeology.
Now, as Tacconi continues her research, including an ongoing project on the lives of the putte at the Ospedaletto, she credits her Williams education with providing a “superb foundation” for her academic career.
“I’ve always been interested in interdisciplinary approaches,” she says. “It’s not just the music but understanding how that music reflects something bigger.”
Listen to an MP3 recording of the Ospedaletto aria: Pasquale Anfossi’s, “Contro il destin che freme” from his opera Antigono (Venice, 1773).
Liesl Odenweller, soprano
Venice Music Project Ensemble
recorded November 2023
Copyright: Venice Music Project (all rights reserved)
