The paper focuses on the sources of and existing links between the Aristotelian rhetoric and monodic music in late Renaissance and first Baroque in Italy. It describes a practice well know as "Recitar cantando", practice which will soon be changed in "Affektenlehre".
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Comparative Literature, vol. 70, Issue 4
The article reads Sigmund Freud and Claudio Monteverdi’s understanding of musicality, its affinity with rhetoric, and the way this relation informs their individual oeuvres. Both Monteverdi and Freud, each in his own way, were condemned to live with an aversion to musicality that strengthened their hermeneutics of psychic and discursive disturbance. Through the specific rhetorical figure of the musical lament found in psychoanalytical discourse, the article demonstrates the way dissonances implicate opera, the madrigal, and the talking-cure, making aporetic claims, especially in the face of Freud’s self-attestation—his resolute conviction that he was “ganz unmusikalisch”—which astonishingly matches Monteverdi’s own resistance to music.
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In Europe, between the years 1575 to 1625, a fundamental change appeared in the approach or underlying assumptions of the strategy to thought regarding the principles, composition, and musical performance. This paradigm shift was a combination of the inevitable evolution of the new Baroque style, the foundations of which can be traced way back into the Renaissance, with transformations purely built on forms and practices of the time; and secondly, a revolution brought about by the intellectual Camerata group of Count Giovanni de' Bardi of Florence spreading through the cultural centers of northern Italy including Rome, and France, Germany, Spain, and England. Concerning instrumental music, four distinct area shifts are seen: idiomatic writing, texture, instrument use, and orchestration. Although polyphonic voice parts were still prominent, it is this feature more than any other, that separates Renaissance music from Baroque.
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Journal of the American Musicological Society
. Nino Pirrotta, in his survey of Monteverdi's poetic choices, affords the Scherzi only limited space within a digression, engendered by a discussion of schematic forms in Orfeo, on Chiabrera and French-influenced classicism.'" Claudio Gallico, in one of the few studies specifically .
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Published in Intégral, vol. 28/29 (double issue), April 2016 Giovanni Maria Artusi’s famous condemnation of contrapuntal procedure in Monteverdi’s madrigal setting “Cruda Amarilli” comprises one half of what is probably the most famous theoretical-philosophical argument over western music in the early modern period. Artusi’s argument centered on misuse of mode and poor handling of contrapuntal dissonance, while Monteverdi’s and his brother Giulio Cesare’s contention was that, as Susan McClary has put it, “the words made me do it" (2004, 182). Thus, Monteverdi’s setting of Giovanni Battista Guarini’s dramatic-pastoral monologue is held up as the touchstone of the seconda pratica madrigal and Artusi’s examples of its poor counterpoint (as defined by Zarlino) are often thought of as its defining characteristic. Yet a number of scholars have recently demonstrated that in “Cruda Amarilli” and, indeed, in the late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Italian madrigal in general, dissonance treatment is only one significant musical element in stylistically informed hermeneutic interpretation. To be sure, the excerpts of Monteverdi’s madrigal that Artusi highlighted do respond to the text of the piece and are therefore expressive. However, a close reading of the musical and poetic texts by Monteverdi and other composers in his milieu reveals that the connection between words and music in these works runs deeper: strategic oppositions (and sometimes ambiguities) of mode, counterpoint, and style interact to create rich poetic interpretations in which dualities of emotion, characterization, affect, and symbolism often played a great role. In this article, I explore the specific compositional strategies that Monteverdi and two of his contemporaries—Luca Marenzio and Sigismondo d’India—used to create varying text expressions and interpretations in their respective settings of “Cruda Amarilli,” and I contextualize these composers’ literary and musical choices within the greater world of the Italian madrigal genre. While Monteverdi’s work relies on modal-cadential patterning to evoke Amaryllis’s dual nature referenced in the text, Marenzio’s and d’India’s compositional choices complicate this oft-cited opposition. I read Marenzio’s version as focusing less on the dual nature of Amaryllis’s name (see below) and more on the tension between remaining true and renunciation that is inherent in unrequited love; d’India’s setting turns back to Amaryllis, but paints her nature as ambiguous rather than binary.
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