Francesca Caccini at the Medici Court
Francesca Caccini at the Medici Court

Author: Suzanne G. Cusick

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2015-11-07

Total Pages: 482

ISBN-13: 022633810X

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A contemporary of Shakespeare and Monteverdi, and a colleague of Galileo and Artemisia Gentileschi at the Medici court, Francesca Caccini was a dominant musical figure there for thirty years. Dazzling listeners with the transformative power of her performances and the sparkling wit of the music she composed for more than a dozen court theatricals, Caccini is best remembered today as the first woman to have composed opera. Francesca Caccini at the Medici Court reveals for the first time how this multitalented composer established a fully professional musical career at a time when virtually no other women were able to achieve comparable success. Suzanne G. Cusick argues that Caccini’s career depended on the usefulness of her talents to the political agenda of Grand Duchess Christine de Lorraine, Tuscany’s de facto regent from 1606 to 1636. Drawing on Classical and feminist theory, Cusick shows how the music Caccini made for the Medici court sustained the culture that enabled Christine’s power, thereby also supporting the sexual and political aims of its women. In bringing Caccini’s surprising story so vividly to life, Cusick ultimately illuminates how music making functioned in early modern Italy as a significant medium for the circulation of power.

Desire and Pleasure in Seventeenth-Century Music
Desire and Pleasure in Seventeenth-Century Music

Author: Susan McClary

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2012-03-06

Total Pages: 239

ISBN-13: 0520952065

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In this book, 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. While she analyzes the social and historical reasons for the high value placed on expressive intensity in both secular and sacred music, and she also links desire and pleasure to the many technical innovations of the period. 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.

Studies in Music, Words, and Imagery in Early Modern Europe
Studies in Music, Words, and Imagery in Early Modern Europe

Author: Barbara Russano Hanning

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-08-20

Total Pages: 344

ISBN-13: 1040106773

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Characterized by an interdisciplinary approach, these essays highlight the relationship between music and poetry in Italian secular works of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, examine the role of images in shedding light on the cultural context in which these and other works came into being (music iconography), and explore the binaries and similarities of the arts in this period. Insights about early opera are complemented by discussions of accompanied solo song, or monody, both genres new to Italian music at the turn of the seventeenth century. Many chapters focus on specific images, ranging from the figure of Apollo and his significance as the earliest operatic protagonist, to an early eighteenth-century representation of a salon concert and its “ensemblisation” of events that likely occurred serially. Others include discussions and analyses of musical poetics, from Tasso’s influence on the Italian madrigal to Rinuccini’s authorship of the earliest opera libretti. Another focuses on history while narrating the circumstances under which opera came into being in late Renaissance Florence. Addressed in large measure to teachers and students, Studies in Music, Words, and Imagery in Early Modern Europe presents a range of subjects that broaden our perspective on the era. Certain essays take a specifically pedagogical approach, while others are more apt to interest music historians or those familiar with Italian versification. All are presented with a view toward making more accessible essays that do not fit neatly into one subject area but cross boundary lines between music, words, and images.

Histories of Heinrich Schütz
Histories of Heinrich Schütz

Author: Bettina Varwig

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2011-11-03

Total Pages: 267

ISBN-13: 1139502018

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Bettina Varwig places the music of the celebrated Dresden composer Heinrich Schütz in a richly detailed tapestry of cultural, political, religious and intellectual contexts. Four key events in Schütz's career - the 1617 Reformation centenary, the performance of his Dafne in 1627, the 1636 funeral composition Musikalische Exequien and the publication of his motet collection Geistliche Chormusik (1648) - are used to explore his music's resonances with broader historical themes, including the effects of the Thirty Years' War, contemporary meanings of classical mythology, Lutheran attitudes to death and the afterlife as well as shifting conceptions of time and history in light of early modern scientific advances. These original seventeenth-century circumstances are treated in counterpoint with Schütz's fascinating later reinvention in nineteenth- and twentieth-century German musical culture, providing a new kind of musicological writing that interweaves layers of historical inquiry from the seventeenth century to the present day.

Voice Machines
Voice Machines

Author: Bonnie Gordon

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2023-05-31

Total Pages: 429

ISBN-13: 0226825140

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"The castrato phenomenon stretched from the late sixteenth century, when castrati first appeared in Italian courts and churches, through the eighteenth century, when they occupied a celebrity status on the operatic stage. Throughout this time, the voice of the castrato--hailed as uniquely strong, flexible and expressive--contributed to a dramatic expansion of the musical vocabulary and to finding new ways to embody the poetic text. For us today, the castrato also highlights the porous relationship of voices and instruments/machines and the inherent materiality of sound. In her revealing study, Bonnie Gordon asks what it meant that the early-modern period produced a caste of technologically altered male singers and she uses the castrato as a critical provocation for asking questions about the interrelated histories of music, technology, sound, the limits of the human body, and what counts as human"--

Debussy Redux
Debussy Redux

Author: Matthew Brown

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 2012-04-09

Total Pages: 238

ISBN-13: 0253357160

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"In a study that is both scholarly and highly entertaining, Matthew Brown explores pop culture's appropriations of Debussy's music in everything from '30s swing tunes, '40s movie scores, '50s lounge/exotica, '70s rock and animation, '80s action films, and Muzak. The book, however, is far more than a compendium of fascinating borrowings. The author uses these musical transfers to tackle some of the most fundamental aesthetic issues relevant to the music of all composers, not just Debussy." David Grayson -- Book jacket.

Seventeenth-Century Opera and the Sound of the Commedia Dell’Arte
Seventeenth-Century Opera and the Sound of the Commedia Dell’Arte

Author: Emily Wilbourne

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2016-11-21

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 022640157X

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In this book, Emily Wilbourne boldly traces the roots of early opera back to the sounds of the commedia dell’arte. Along the way, she forges a new history of Italian opera, from the court pieces of the early seventeenth century to the public stages of Venice more than fifty years later. Wilbourne considers a series of case studies structured around the most important and widely explored operas of the period: Monteverdi’s lost L’Arianna, as well as his Il Ritorno d’Ulisse and L’incoronazione di Poppea; Mazzochi and Marazzoli’s L’Egisto, ovvero Chi soffre speri; and Cavalli’s L’Ormindo and L’Artemisia. As she demonstrates, the sound-in-performance aspect of commedia dell’arte theater—specifically, the use of dialect and verbal play—produced an audience that was accustomed to listening to sonic content rather than simply the literal meaning of spoken words. This, Wilbourne suggests, shaped the musical vocabularies of early opera and facilitated a musicalization of Italian theater. Highlighting productive ties between the two worlds, from the audiences and venues to the actors and singers, this work brilliantly shows how the sound of commedia performance ultimately underwrote the success of opera as a genre.