(It.: ‘musician’).
The Latin term ‘musicus’ was first used to distinguish the music theorist from a mere practitioner, ‘a man who, by his reason, has engaged in the science of music, not in order to practise it but from a speculative interest’ (Boethius, 6th century). Later, in its Italian form, the word came to mean a professional musician as opposed to an amateur, a sense that can be found as late as 1781 in Padre Martini’s Storia della musica. The term was also used in the 17th and 18th centuries to refer specifically to the operatic castrato. However, during this period it also took on a new and increasingly derogatory sense. For example, P.F. Tosi, himself a castrato, referred to singers in his Opinioni de’ cantori antichi, e moderni (1723) by such respectful terms as ‘cantore’, ‘soprano’, ‘maestro’ and even ‘professore’; when he used ‘musico’, which he did rarely, he implied a mediocre singer. Similarly, J.A. Scheibe’s criticism of J.S. Bach in 1737 was made all the more inflammatory by his application of the equivalent German term ‘Musikant’ to the composer. In his 1738 response J.A. Birnbaum complained that ‘the hon. Court Composer is called the most eminent of the Musicanten in Leipzig. This expression smacks too strongly of the mean and low, … [for] there is hardly any difference between Musicanten and beer-fiddlers’ (H.T. David and A. Mendel, The Bach Reader, 1966, p.237–52). In the first half of the 19th century the term – usually Primo musico – was revived to refer to operatic male roles of a type that would formerly have been sung by castratos but were now written for women, usually in the contralto or mezzo-soprano range. See also Primo musico and Virtuoso.
OWEN JANDER, ELLEN T. HARRIS