Monteverdi

Monteverdi

Author: Richard Wistreich

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-07-05

Total Pages: 561

ISBN-13: 1351557971

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Claudio Monteverdi is now recognized as the towering figure of a critical transitional moment of Western music history: relentless innovator in every genre within chamber, church and theatre music; self-proclaimed leader of a 'new dispensation' between words and their musical expression; perhaps even 'Creator of Modern Music'. During recent years, as his arrestingly attractive music has been brought back to life in performance, so too have some of the most outstanding musicologists focussed intensely on Monteverdi as they worked through the 'big' questions in the historiography and hermeneutics of early Baroque music, including musical representation of language; compositional theory; social, institutional, cultural and gender history; performance practices and more. The 17 articles in this volume have been selected by Richard Wistreich to exemplify the best scholarship in English and because each, in retrospect, turns out to have been a ground-breaking contribution to one or more significant strands in Monteverdi studies.


Monteverdi's Last Operas: A Venetian Trilogy

Monteverdi's Last Operas: A Venetian Trilogy

Author: Ellen Rosand

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2007-12-03

Total Pages: 508

ISBN-13: 9780520933279

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Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643) was the first important composer of opera. This innovative study by one of the foremost experts on Monteverdi and seventeenth-century opera examines the composer's celebrated final works—Il ritorno d'Ulisse (1640) and L'incoronazione di Poppea (1642)—from a new perspective. Ellen Rosand considers these works as not merely a pair but constituents of a trio, a Venetian trilogy that, Rosand argues, properly includes a third opera, Le nozze d'Enea (1641). Although its music has not survived, its chronological placement between the other two operas opens new prospects for better understanding all three, both in their specifically Venetian context and as the creations of an old master. A thorough review of manuscript and printed sources of Ritorno and Poppea, in conjunction with those of their erstwhile silent companion, offers new possibilities for resolving the questions of authenticity that have swirled around Monteverdi's last operas since their discovery in the late nineteenth century. Le nozze d'Enea also helps to explain the striking differences between the other two, casting new light on their contrasting moral ethos: the conflict between a world of emotional propriety and restraint and one of hedonistic abandon.


The Cambridge Companion to Monteverdi

The Cambridge Companion to Monteverdi

Author: John Whenham

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2007-12-13

Total Pages: 480

ISBN-13: 1139828223

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Claudio Monteverdi is one of the most important figures of 'early' music, a composer whose music speaks powerfully and directly to modern audiences. This book, first published in 2007, provides an authoritative treatment of Monteverdi and his music, complementing Paolo Fabbri's standard biography of the composer. Written by leading specialists in the field, it is aimed at students, performers and music-lovers in general and adds significantly to our understanding of Monteverdi's music, his life, and the contexts in which he worked. Chapters offering overviews of his output of sacred, secular and dramatic music are complemented by 'intermedi', in which contributors examine individual works, or sections of works in detail. The book draws extensively on Monteverdi's letters and includes a select discography/videography and a complete list of Monteverdi's works together with an index of first lines and titles.


Music in the Flesh

Music in the Flesh

Author: Bettina Varwig

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2023-08-04

Total Pages: 380

ISBN-13: 0226826880

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"Music in the Flesh reimagines the lived experiences of music-making subjects (composers, musicians, listeners) in the long European seventeenth century. There are countless historical testimonies of the powerful effects of music upon early-modern bodies, described as moving, ravishing, painful, dangerous, curative, miraculous, and encompassing "the circulation of the humors, purification of the blood, dilation of the vessels and pores. In asking what this all meant at the time, the author considers musical scores and their surrounding texts as "somatic scripts" that afford a range of somatic actions and reactions and can give us a glimpse into the historical embodied experience of organized sound. Starting from the Lutheran hymns and their accompanying intellectual traditions and ritual practices in German-speaking lands, the book moves with ease across repertories and regions, sacred and vernacular musics, domestic and public settings in order to sketch a "physiology of music" that is as historically illuminating as it is relevant for present-day performing practices and that sheds unprecedented light on how subjectivity was embodied through sound in early-modern Europe"--


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 “priceless” study of the life and career of the Renaissance-era Italian who was the first woman to have composed an opera (Gender & History). “Extraordinary in its breadth, its detail, its insight, and its worth to all participants in early music…. Its contribution is not limited to the musical world, however, as Cusick’s remarkable command and analysis of her material…has immense value for scholars engaged in cultural studies, performance studies, history, politics, or the study of difference.”—Renaissance Quarterly 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.


Reimagine to Revitalise

Reimagine to Revitalise

Author: Charulatha Mani

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2021-08-19

Total Pages: 145

ISBN-13: 1108910629

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How can the classical Karnatik music of South India illuminate performers' and researchers' understanding of the art music of seventeenth-century Italy, and specifically Monteverdi's operas? Both art forms attach great value to the skill of vocal ornamentation, and by exploring the singer's practice moving between them, this Element reveals how intercultural approaches can enable the reconsideration of the history of Western music from a global perspective. Using methods from historical and comparative musicology, theory and practice-based research, Charulatha Mani analyses vocal ornamentation and technique and arrives at an innovative approach to studying musics from the past. Musical practice, the author argues, is an enactment of hybridity and the artistic product of plurality. Specifically, in early modern Europe the fluid movement of musicians from the East paved the way to a plurality of musical cultures. This finding holds deep implications for diversity in and decolonisation of current music performance and education.


The Cambridge Companion to Opera Studies

The Cambridge Companion to Opera Studies

Author: Nicholas Till

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2012-10-18

Total Pages: 365

ISBN-13: 1107495199

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With its powerful combination of music and theatre, opera is one of the most complex and yet immediate of all art forms. Once opera was studied only as 'a stepchild of musicology', but in the past two decades opera studies have experienced an explosion of energy with the introduction of new approaches drawn from disciplines such as social anthropology and performance studies to media theory, genre theory, gender studies and reception history. Written by leading scholars in opera studies today, this Companion offers a wide-ranging guide to a rapidly expanding field of study and new ways of thinking about a rich and intriguing art form, placing opera back at the centre of our understanding of Western culture over the past 400 years. This book gives lovers of opera as well as those studying the subject a comprehensive approach to the many facets of opera in the past and today.


Science in the Forest, Science in the Past

Science in the Forest, Science in the Past

Author: Willard McCarty

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2022-03-29

Total Pages: 230

ISBN-13: 1000566455

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Science in the Forest, Science in the Past: Further Interdisciplinary Explorations comprises of papers from the second of two workshops involving a group of scholars united in the conviction that the great diversity of knowledge claims and practices for which we have evidence must be taken seriously in their own terms rather than by the yardstick of Western modernity. Bringing to bear social anthropology, history and philosophy of science, computer science, classics and sinology among other fields, they argue that the use of such dismissive labels as ‘magic’, ‘superstition’ and the ‘irrational’ masks rather than solves the problem and reject counsels of despair which assume or argue that radically alien beliefs are strictly unintelligible to outsiders and can be understood only from within the system in question. At the same time, they accept that how to proceed to a better understanding of the data in question poses a formidable challenge. Key problems identified in the inaugural workshop, whose proceedings were published in HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory (2019) and in HAU Books (2020), provided the basis for asking how obvious pitfalls might be avoided and a new or revised framework within which to pursue these problems proposed. The chapters in this book were originally published in Interdisciplinary Science Reviews.


Women in Music

Women in Music

Author: Karin Pendle

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2012-07-26

Total Pages: 870

ISBN-13: 1135848130

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Women in Music: A Research and Information Guide is an annotated bibliography emerging from more than twenty-five years of feminist scholarship on music. This book testifies to the great variety of subjects and approaches represented in over two decades of published writings on women, their work, and the important roles that feminist outlooks have played in formerly male-oriented academic scholarship or journalistic musings on women and music.