Author: James Haar
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520329961
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 272
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Book Description
These essays illuminate the changing nature of text-music relationships from the time of Petrarch to Guarini and, in music, from the madrigals of Giovanni da Cascia to those of Gesualdo da Venosa. Haar traces a line of development from the stylized rhetoric of Trecento song through the popularizing trends of Quattrocento music and on to the union of verbal and musical cadence that marked the high Renaissance in sixteenth-century Italian music. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1986.
Author: Lauren Jennings
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317057104
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 313
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Book Description
The metaphor of marriage often describes the relationship between poetry and music in both medieval and modern writing. While the troubadours stand out for their tendency to blur the distinction between speaking and singing, between poetry and song, a certain degree of semantic slippage extends into the realm of Italian literature through the use of genre names like canzone, sonetto, and ballata. Yet, paradoxically, scholars have traditionally identified a 'divorce' between music and poetry as the defining feature of early Italian lyric. Senza Vestimenta reintegrates poetic and musical traditions in late medieval Italy through a fresh evaluation of more than fifty literary sources transmitting Trecento song texts. These manuscripts have been long noted by musicologists, but until now they have been used to bolster rather than to debunk the notion that so-called 'poesia per musica' was relegated to the margins of poetic production. Jennings revises this view by exploring how scribes and readers interacted with song as a fundamentally interdisciplinary art form within a broad range of literary settings. Her study sheds light on the broader cultural world surrounding the reception of the Italian ars nova repertoire by uncovering new, diverse readers ranging from wealthy merchants to modest artisans.
Author: Stefano Dall'Aglio
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317000994
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 293
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Book Description
This book studies the uses of orality in Italian society, across all classes, from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century, with an emphasis on the interrelationships between oral communication and the written word. The Introduction provides an overview of the topic as a whole and links the chapters together. Part 1 concerns public life in the states of northern, central, and southern Italy. The chapters examine a range of performances that used the spoken word or song: concerted shouts that expressed the feelings of the lower classes and were then recorded in writing; the proclamation of state policy by town criers; songs that gave news of executions; the exercise of power relations in society as recorded in trial records; and diplomatic orations and interactions. Part 2 centres on private entertainments. It considers the practices of the performance of poetry sung in social gatherings and on stage with and without improvisation; the extent to which lyric poets anticipated the singing of their verse and collaborated with composers; performances of comedies given as dinner entertainments for the governing body of republican Florence; and a reading of a prose work in a house in Venice, subsequently made famous through a printed account. Part 3 concerns collective religious practices. Its chapters study sermons in their own right and in relation to written texts, the battle to control spaces for public performance by civic and religious authorities, and singing texts in sacred spaces.
Author: Konrad Eisenbichler
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351545175
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 294
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Book Description
Eleonora di Toledo was a powerful and influential woman who, over the course of nearly a quarter century (1539-62), contributed profoundly to the cultural flowering of ducal Florence. Her patronage of some of the leading artists of the time, her support of newly arrived Jesuit preachers, her involvement in charitable activities, her unfailing devotion to her husband and his policies, not to mention her successful farming and business ventures are only some of the areas where her influence was unambiguously exercised and felt. She also provided the House of Medici with a full stable of children to re-invigorate the failing family line, ensure male succession even in the face of unexpected calamities, and provide enough females to establish marriage connections with a variety of noble and ruling houses in Italy. In spite of all these contributions, Eleonora has attracted little attention from scholars. This apparent disinterest may be a factor of Eleonora's personal style, or of the bad press that, as a Spanish noblewoman, she quickly received from her Florentine subjects, or of modern antipathy for some of the basic characteristics of ducal Florence. An examination of her impact on Tuscany is long overdue. In fact, a fuller, more nuanced understanding of the duchess can shed a more profound light not only on her as a person, or on her impact on Tuscan culture in the sixteenth century, but also on the contribution of female consorts to the vitality of a successful early-modern state. The essays collected here bring together a variety of scholars working in various disciplines. While many of the articles take their cue from art history (a natural reflection of the innovative research recent art historians have carried out on the duchess), they also reach out towards other disciplines - political history, literature, spectacle, and religion to mention just a few. In so doing, they expand our understanding of Eleonora's place in her society and reveal a very complex,
Author: F. Alberto Gallo
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226279695
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 192
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Book Description
Writing for general readers and specialists alike, Gallo illuminates the artistic, cultural, social, and political dimensions of secular music, vocal and instrumental. His account also sheds new light on the potent influence of French culture in Italian courtly life.
Author: Mauro Calcagno
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520267680
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 342
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Book Description
"In this bold, highly original book, Mauro Calcagno ventures into areas where no other scholar has tread. He explores the Petrarchian view of the self over a century-long arc from the early madrigal to the beginnings of opera, with Monteverdi's masterpieces taking center stage. A brilliant tour de force, From Madrigal to Opera proffers a remarkable new way to look at music, performance, and reception that rings true not only for the early modern period but also for our own age. A must read for scholars, performers, and lovers of early music."—Jane A. Bernstein, author of Print Culture and Music in Sixteenth-Century Venice "The mini-renaissance of early modern music studies continues apace, and Mauro Calcagno's From Madrigal to Opera is its latest, particularly impressive installment. Drawing on methodological impulses from a variety of sources—linguistics, phenomenology, narratology, and, above all, performance studies—Calcagno pays close attention to the interplay of the abstract text and live performance in both early opera and late madrigal. Common strategies, rooted in Petrarch's poetic practice, indeed united the two genres. This book will shape the discussion of early modern vocal music in the coming years."—Karol Berger is the author of Bach's Cycle, Mozart's Arrow: An Essay on the Origins of Musical Modernity. "In this pathbreaking study, Calcagno offers a new and dynamic interpretation of the relationship between Monteverdi's madrigals and operas based on perceptions of subjectivity expressed in Renaissance literature—the poetry of Petrarch in particular. Calcagno interprets Monteverdi's work as realizing a Petrarchan notion of the dialogical self, a concept that extends well beyond the early modern period to illuminate and enrich our own experience of virtually any vocal work in performance. This book should be required reading not only for those interested in music and text of the Early Modern period, but for anyone involved in performance studies."—Ellen Rosand, author of Monteverdi's Last Operas: A Venetian Trilogy.
Author: Marlene L. Eberhart
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000225100
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 275
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Book Description
Embodiment, Expertise, and Ethics in Early Modern Europe highlights the agency and intentionality of individuals and groups in the making of sensory knowledge from approximately 1500 to 1700. Focused case studies show how artisans, poets, writers, and theologians responded creatively to their environments, filtering the cultural resources at their disposal through the lenses of their own more immediate experiences and concerns. The result was not a single, unified sensory culture, but rather an entangling of micro-cultural dynamics playing out across an archipelago of contexts that dotted the early modern European world—one that saw profound transitions in ways people used sensory knowledge to claim ethical, intellectual, and practical authority.
Author: Rebecca Cypess
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022631944X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 334
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Book Description
'Curious and Modern Inventions' offers an insight into the motivating forces behind music, tracing it to a new conception of instruments of all sorts - whether musical, artistic, or scientific - as vehicles of discovery.
Author: Elena Abramov-van Rijk
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1317054881
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 159
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Book Description
This book takes its departure from an experiment presented by Vincenzo Galilei before his colleagues in the Florentine Camerata in about 1580. This event, namely the first demonstration of the stile recitativo, is known from a single later source, a letter written in 1634 by Pietro dei Bardi, son of the founder of the Camerata. In the complete absence of any further information, Bardi’s report has remained a curiosity in the history of music, and it has seemed impossible to determine the true nature and significance of Galilei's presentation. That, unfortunately, still remains true for the music, which is lost. Yet we know a crucial fact about this experiment, the poetic text chosen by Galilei: it was an excerpt from the Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri, the Lament of Count Ugolino. Starting from this information the author examines the problem from another angle. Investigation of the perception of Dante’s poetry in the sixteenth century, as well as a deeper enquiry into cinquecento poetic theories (and especially phonetics) leads to a reconstruction of Galilei’s motives for choosing this text and sheds light on some of the features of his experiment.
Author: Jon Banks
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351543458
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 212
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Book Description
Though individual pieces from the late fifteenth century are widely accepted as being written for instruments rather than voices, they are traditionally considered as exceptions within the context of a mainstream of vocal polyphony. After a rigorous examination of the criteria by which music of this period may be judged to be instrumental, Dr Jon Banks isolates all such pieces and establishes them as an explicit genre alongside the more commonly recognized vocal forms of the period. The distribution of these pieces in the manuscript and early printed sources of the time demonstrate how central instrumental consorts were to musical experience in Italy at this time. Banks also explores the social background to Italian music-making, and particularly the changing status of instrumentalists with respect to other musicians. Convincing evidence is put forward in particular for the lute ensemble to be a likely performance context for many of the surviving sources. The book is not intended to be a prescriptive account for the role of instruments in late medieval music, but instead restores an impressive but largely overlooked consort repertory to its rightful place in the history of music.
