Author: Touba Ghadessi
Publisher: Medieval Institute Publications
ISBN: 1580442765
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 221
Book Description
At the center of this interdisciplinary study are court monsters--dwarves, hirsutes, and misshapen individuals--who, by their very presence, altered Renaissance ethics vis-a-vis anatomical difference, social virtues, and scientific knowledge. The study traces how these monsters evolved from objects of curiosity, to scientific cases, to legally independent beings. The works examined here point to the intricate cultural, religious, ethical, and scientific perceptions of monstrous individuals who were fixtures in contemporary courts.
Portrait of a Castrato
Author: Roger Freitas
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521885213
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 433
Book Description
A fascinating insight into the life and music-making of the most documented musician of the seventeenth century, castrato Atto Melani.
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521885213
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 433
Book Description
A fascinating insight into the life and music-making of the most documented musician of the seventeenth century, castrato Atto Melani.
Portraits of Human Monsters in the Renaissance
Author: Touba Ghadessi
Publisher: Medieval Institute Publications
ISBN: 1580442765
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 221
Book Description
At the center of this interdisciplinary study are court monsters--dwarves, hirsutes, and misshapen individuals--who, by their very presence, altered Renaissance ethics vis-a-vis anatomical difference, social virtues, and scientific knowledge. The study traces how these monsters evolved from objects of curiosity, to scientific cases, to legally independent beings. The works examined here point to the intricate cultural, religious, ethical, and scientific perceptions of monstrous individuals who were fixtures in contemporary courts.
Publisher: Medieval Institute Publications
ISBN: 1580442765
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 221
Book Description
At the center of this interdisciplinary study are court monsters--dwarves, hirsutes, and misshapen individuals--who, by their very presence, altered Renaissance ethics vis-a-vis anatomical difference, social virtues, and scientific knowledge. The study traces how these monsters evolved from objects of curiosity, to scientific cases, to legally independent beings. The works examined here point to the intricate cultural, religious, ethical, and scientific perceptions of monstrous individuals who were fixtures in contemporary courts.
The Modern Castrato
Author: Patricia Howard
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199365210
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 265
Book Description
The Modern Castrato: Gaetano Guadagni and the Coming of a New Operatic Age chronicles the career of the most significant castrato of the second half of the eighteenth-century. Through a coincidence of time and place, Gaetano Guadagni was on the forefront of the heroic opera reform, and many forward-thinking composers of the age created roles for him. Author Patricia Howard reveals that Guadagni may have been the only singer of the time fully able to understand the demands and opportunities of this reform, as well to possess the intelligence and self-knowledge to realize that it suited his skills, limitations and temperament perfectly--making him the first castrato to embrace the concepts of modern singing. The first full-length biography of this outstanding singer, The Modern Castrato illuminates the everyday lives of eighteenth-century singers while spotlighting the historic high points of the century. Most famous for his creation of the role of Orpheus in Gluck's Orfeo ed Euridice, his career ranged widely and brought him into contact with many progressives theorists and composers such as Traetta, Jommelli, and Bertoni. Howard's focus on the development of Guadagni's career pauses on essential, related topics along the way, such as the castrato in society, the eighteenth-century revolution in acting, and the remarkable evidence for Guadagni's marionette theater. Howard also assesses Guadagni's surviving compositions, which give new insight into the quality and character of his voice as well as his technical and expressive abilities. The Modern Castrato is an engaging narrative that will prove essential reading for opera lovers and scholars of eighteenth-century music.
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199365210
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 265
Book Description
The Modern Castrato: Gaetano Guadagni and the Coming of a New Operatic Age chronicles the career of the most significant castrato of the second half of the eighteenth-century. Through a coincidence of time and place, Gaetano Guadagni was on the forefront of the heroic opera reform, and many forward-thinking composers of the age created roles for him. Author Patricia Howard reveals that Guadagni may have been the only singer of the time fully able to understand the demands and opportunities of this reform, as well to possess the intelligence and self-knowledge to realize that it suited his skills, limitations and temperament perfectly--making him the first castrato to embrace the concepts of modern singing. The first full-length biography of this outstanding singer, The Modern Castrato illuminates the everyday lives of eighteenth-century singers while spotlighting the historic high points of the century. Most famous for his creation of the role of Orpheus in Gluck's Orfeo ed Euridice, his career ranged widely and brought him into contact with many progressives theorists and composers such as Traetta, Jommelli, and Bertoni. Howard's focus on the development of Guadagni's career pauses on essential, related topics along the way, such as the castrato in society, the eighteenth-century revolution in acting, and the remarkable evidence for Guadagni's marionette theater. Howard also assesses Guadagni's surviving compositions, which give new insight into the quality and character of his voice as well as his technical and expressive abilities. The Modern Castrato is an engaging narrative that will prove essential reading for opera lovers and scholars of eighteenth-century music.
The Emotional Power of Music
Author: Tom Cochrane
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191504963
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 529
Book Description
How can an abstract sequence of sounds so intensely express emotional states? How does music elicit or arouse our emotions? What happens at the physiological and neural level when we listen to music? How do composers and performers practically manage the expressive powers of music? How have societies sought to harness the powers of music for social or therapeutic purposes? In the past ten years, research into the topic of music and emotion has flourished. In addition, the relationship between the two has become of interest to a broad range of disciplines in both the sciences and humanities. The Emotional Power of Music is a multidisciplinary volume exploring the relationship between music and emotion. Bringing together contributions from psychologists, neuroscientists, musicologists, musicians, and philosophers, the volume presents both theoretical perspectives and in-depth explorations of particular musical works, as well as first-hand reports from music performers and composers. In the first section of the book, the authors consider the expression of emotion within music, through both performance and composing. The second section explores how music can stimulate the emotions, considering the psychological and neurological mechanisms that underlie music listening. The third section explores how different societes have sought to manage and manipulate the power of music. The book is valuable for those in the fields of music psychology and music education, as well as philosophy and musicology
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191504963
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 529
Book Description
How can an abstract sequence of sounds so intensely express emotional states? How does music elicit or arouse our emotions? What happens at the physiological and neural level when we listen to music? How do composers and performers practically manage the expressive powers of music? How have societies sought to harness the powers of music for social or therapeutic purposes? In the past ten years, research into the topic of music and emotion has flourished. In addition, the relationship between the two has become of interest to a broad range of disciplines in both the sciences and humanities. The Emotional Power of Music is a multidisciplinary volume exploring the relationship between music and emotion. Bringing together contributions from psychologists, neuroscientists, musicologists, musicians, and philosophers, the volume presents both theoretical perspectives and in-depth explorations of particular musical works, as well as first-hand reports from music performers and composers. In the first section of the book, the authors consider the expression of emotion within music, through both performance and composing. The second section explores how music can stimulate the emotions, considering the psychological and neurological mechanisms that underlie music listening. The third section explores how different societes have sought to manage and manipulate the power of music. The book is valuable for those in the fields of music psychology and music education, as well as philosophy and musicology
The Cambridge Companion to Seventeenth-Century Opera
Author:
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521823595
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 379
Book Description
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521823595
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 379
Book Description
Desire and Pleasure in Seventeenth-Century Music
Author: Susan McClary
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520247345
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 356
Book Description
"Susan McClary examines the mechanisms through which seventeenth-century musicians simulated extreme affective states--desire, divine rapture, and ecstatic pleasure. She demonstrates how every major genre of the period, from opera to religious music to instrumental pieces based on dances, was part of this striving for heightened passions by performers and listeners. ... McClary shows how musicians--whether working within the contexts of the Reformation or Counter-Reformation, Absolutists courts or commercial enterprises in Venice--were able to manipulate known procedures to produce radically new ways of experiencing time and the Self."--Dust jacket.
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520247345
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 356
Book Description
"Susan McClary examines the mechanisms through which seventeenth-century musicians simulated extreme affective states--desire, divine rapture, and ecstatic pleasure. She demonstrates how every major genre of the period, from opera to religious music to instrumental pieces based on dances, was part of this striving for heightened passions by performers and listeners. ... McClary shows how musicians--whether working within the contexts of the Reformation or Counter-Reformation, Absolutists courts or commercial enterprises in Venice--were able to manipulate known procedures to produce radically new ways of experiencing time and the Self."--Dust jacket.
Opera as Soundtrack
Author: Jeongwon Joe
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317085485
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 224
Book Description
Filmmakers' fascination with opera dates back to the silent era but it was not until the late 1980s that critical enquiries into the intersection of opera and cinema began to emerge. Jeongwon Joe focusses primarily on the role of opera as soundtrack by exploring the distinct effects opera produces in film, effects which differ from other types of soundtrack music, such as jazz or symphony. These effects are examined from three perspectives: peculiar qualities of the operatic voice; various properties commonly associated with opera, such as excess, otherness or death; and multifaceted tensions between opera and cinema - for instance, opera as live, embodied, high art and cinema as technologically mediated, popular entertainment. Joe argues that when opera excerpts are employed on soundtracks they tend to appear at critical moments of the film, usually associated with the protagonists, and the author explores why it is opera, not symphony or jazz, that accompanies poignant scenes like these. Joe's film analysis focuses on the time period of the post-1970s, which is distinguished by an increase of opera excerpts on soundtracks to blockbuster titles, the commercial recognition of which promoted the production of numerous opera soundtrack CDs in the following years. Joe incorporates an empirical methodology by examining primary sources such as production files, cue-sheets and unpublished interviews with film directors and composers to enhance the traditional hermeneutic approach. The films analysed in her book include Woody Allen’s Match Point, David Cronenberg’s M. Butterfly, and Wong Kar-wai’s 2046.
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317085485
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 224
Book Description
Filmmakers' fascination with opera dates back to the silent era but it was not until the late 1980s that critical enquiries into the intersection of opera and cinema began to emerge. Jeongwon Joe focusses primarily on the role of opera as soundtrack by exploring the distinct effects opera produces in film, effects which differ from other types of soundtrack music, such as jazz or symphony. These effects are examined from three perspectives: peculiar qualities of the operatic voice; various properties commonly associated with opera, such as excess, otherness or death; and multifaceted tensions between opera and cinema - for instance, opera as live, embodied, high art and cinema as technologically mediated, popular entertainment. Joe argues that when opera excerpts are employed on soundtracks they tend to appear at critical moments of the film, usually associated with the protagonists, and the author explores why it is opera, not symphony or jazz, that accompanies poignant scenes like these. Joe's film analysis focuses on the time period of the post-1970s, which is distinguished by an increase of opera excerpts on soundtracks to blockbuster titles, the commercial recognition of which promoted the production of numerous opera soundtrack CDs in the following years. Joe incorporates an empirical methodology by examining primary sources such as production files, cue-sheets and unpublished interviews with film directors and composers to enhance the traditional hermeneutic approach. The films analysed in her book include Woody Allen’s Match Point, David Cronenberg’s M. Butterfly, and Wong Kar-wai’s 2046.
Women and Music in the Age of Austen
Author: Linda Zionkowski
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 1684485177
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 208
Book Description
Women and Music in the Age of Austen highlights the central role women played in musical performance, composition, reception, and representation, and analyzes its formative and lasting effect on Georgian culture. This interdisciplinary collection of essays from musicology, literary studies, and gender studies challenges the conventional historical categories that marginalize women’s experience from Austen’s time. Contesting the distinctions between professional and amateur musicians, public and domestic sites of musical production, and performers and composers of music, the contributors reveal how women’s widespread involvement in the Georgian musical scene allowed for self-expression, artistic influence, and access to communities that transcended the boundaries of gender, class, and nationality. This volume’s breadth of focus advances our understanding of a period that witnessed a musical flourishing, much of it animated by female hands and voices. Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 1684485177
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 208
Book Description
Women and Music in the Age of Austen highlights the central role women played in musical performance, composition, reception, and representation, and analyzes its formative and lasting effect on Georgian culture. This interdisciplinary collection of essays from musicology, literary studies, and gender studies challenges the conventional historical categories that marginalize women’s experience from Austen’s time. Contesting the distinctions between professional and amateur musicians, public and domestic sites of musical production, and performers and composers of music, the contributors reveal how women’s widespread involvement in the Georgian musical scene allowed for self-expression, artistic influence, and access to communities that transcended the boundaries of gender, class, and nationality. This volume’s breadth of focus advances our understanding of a period that witnessed a musical flourishing, much of it animated by female hands and voices. Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
There She Goes Again
Author: Aviva Dove-Viebahn
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 1978836139
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 153
Book Description
There She Goes Again interrogates the representation of ostensibly powerful women in transmedia franchises, examining how presumed feminine traits—love, empathy, altruism, diplomacy—are alternately lauded and repudiated as possibilities for effecting long-lasting social change. By questioning how these franchises reimagine their protagonists over time, the book reflects on the role that gendered exceptionalism plays in social and political action, as well as what forms of knowledge and power are presumed distinctly feminine. The franchises explored in this book illustrate the ambivalent (post)feminist representation of women protagonists as uniquely gifted in ways both gendered and seemingly ungendered, and yet inherently bound to expressions of their femininity. At heart,There She Goes Again asks under what terms and in what contexts women protagonists are imagined, envisioned, embodied, and replicated in media. Especially now, in a period of gradually increasing representation, women protagonists demonstrate the importance of considering how we should define—and whether we need—feminine forms of knowledge and power.
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 1978836139
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 153
Book Description
There She Goes Again interrogates the representation of ostensibly powerful women in transmedia franchises, examining how presumed feminine traits—love, empathy, altruism, diplomacy—are alternately lauded and repudiated as possibilities for effecting long-lasting social change. By questioning how these franchises reimagine their protagonists over time, the book reflects on the role that gendered exceptionalism plays in social and political action, as well as what forms of knowledge and power are presumed distinctly feminine. The franchises explored in this book illustrate the ambivalent (post)feminist representation of women protagonists as uniquely gifted in ways both gendered and seemingly ungendered, and yet inherently bound to expressions of their femininity. At heart,There She Goes Again asks under what terms and in what contexts women protagonists are imagined, envisioned, embodied, and replicated in media. Especially now, in a period of gradually increasing representation, women protagonists demonstrate the importance of considering how we should define—and whether we need—feminine forms of knowledge and power.
Singing of Arms and Men
Author: KELLEY. HARNESS
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197761593
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 345
Book Description
Equestrian ballets (balletti a cavallo) emerged as valued dramatic entertainments in early modern Europe, demonstrating the wealth and magnificence of the patrons who commissioned them as well as the horsemanship and military skills of the noblemen who rode in them. Author Kelley Harness undertakes the first comprehensive study of seventeenth-century Florentine horse ballets and shows how the balletto a cavallo played a crucial role in self-fashioning by the Medici family during the period. Horse ballets also provided participating noblemen a venue for demonstrating critical markers of masculine nobility and confirming their family's relationship to the Medici.
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197761593
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 345
Book Description
Equestrian ballets (balletti a cavallo) emerged as valued dramatic entertainments in early modern Europe, demonstrating the wealth and magnificence of the patrons who commissioned them as well as the horsemanship and military skills of the noblemen who rode in them. Author Kelley Harness undertakes the first comprehensive study of seventeenth-century Florentine horse ballets and shows how the balletto a cavallo played a crucial role in self-fashioning by the Medici family during the period. Horse ballets also provided participating noblemen a venue for demonstrating critical markers of masculine nobility and confirming their family's relationship to the Medici.