Singing to the Lyre in Renaissance Italy

Singing to the Lyre in Renaissance Italy
Author: Blake Wilson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 487
Release: 2020
Genre: History
ISBN: 1108488072

The first comprehensive study of the dominant form of solo singing in Renaissance Italy prior to the mid-sixteenth century.

The Cambridge History of Fifteenth-Century Music

The Cambridge History of Fifteenth-Century Music
Author: Anna Maria Busse Berger
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 1058
Release: 2015-07-16
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1316298299

Through forty-five creative and concise essays by an international team of authors, this Cambridge History brings the fifteenth century to life for both specialists and general readers. Combining the best qualities of survey texts and scholarly literature, the book offers authoritative overviews of central composers, genres, and musical institutions as well as new and provocative reassessments of the work concept, the boundaries between improvisation and composition, the practice of listening, humanism, musical borrowing, and other topics. Multidisciplinary studies of music and architecture, feasting, poetry, politics, liturgy, and religious devotion rub shoulders with studies of compositional techniques, musical notation, music manuscripts, and reception history. Generously illustrated with figures and examples, this volume paints a vibrant picture of musical life in a period characterized by extraordinary innovation and artistic achievement.

George Frideric Handel

George Frideric Handel
Author: Paul Henry Lang
Publisher: Courier Corporation
Total Pages: 794
Release: 2012-04-30
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0486144593

Exceptionally full, detailed study of the man, his music and times. Childhood, music training, years in London; analysis of Messiah and other works; much more. Introduction. Includes 35 illustrations.

Exploring Art Song Lyrics

Exploring Art Song Lyrics
Author: Jonathan Retzlaff
Publisher: OUP USA
Total Pages: 577
Release: 2012-05-11
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 019977532X

Drawing generously from four centuries of Italian, German and French art song, Exploring Art Song Lyrics embraces the finest of the literature and presents the repertoire with unprecedented clarity and detail. Each of the over 750 selections comprises the original poem, a concise English translation, and an IPA transcription which is uniquely designed to match the musical setting. Enunciation and transcription charts are included for each language on a single, easy to read page. A thorough discussion of the method of transcription is provided in the appendix. With its wide-ranging scope of repertoire, and invaluable tools for interpretation and performance, Exploring Art Song Lyrics is an essential resource for the professional singer, voice teacher, and student.

Singing Sappho

Singing Sappho
Author: Melina Esse
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 208
Release: 2021-04-06
Genre: Music
ISBN: 022674180X

From the theatrical stage to the literary salon, the figure of Sappho—the ancient poet and inspiring icon of feminine creativity—played a major role in the intertwining histories of improvisation, text, and performance throughout the nineteenth century. Exploring the connections between operatic and poetic improvisation in Italy and beyond, Singing Sappho combines earwitness accounts of famous female improviser-virtuosi with erudite analysis of musical and literary practices. Melina Esse demonstrates that performance played a much larger role in conceptions of musical authorship than previously recognized, arguing that discourses of spontaneity—specifically those surrounding the improvvisatrice, or female poetic improviser—were paradoxically used to carve out a new authority for opera composers just as improvisation itself was falling into decline. With this novel and nuanced book, Esse persuasively reclaims the agency of performers and their crucial role in constituting Italian opera as a genre in the nineteenth century.

Renaissance Florence

Renaissance Florence
Author: Roger J. Crum
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 30
Release: 2006-04-03
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0521846935

This book examines the social history of Florence from the fourteenth through to sixteenth centuries.

Women and the Circulation of Texts in Renaissance Italy

Women and the Circulation of Texts in Renaissance Italy
Author: Brian Richardson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 299
Release: 2020-03-26
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1108477690

The first comprehensive guide to women's promotion and use of textual culture, in manuscript and print, in Renaissance Italy.

The Noisy Renaissance

The Noisy Renaissance
Author: Niall Atkinson
Publisher: Penn State Press
Total Pages: 280
Release: 2016-09-16
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0271077832

From the strictly regimented church bells to the freewheeling chatter of civic life, Renaissance Florence was a city built not just of stone but of sound as well. An evocative alternative to the dominant visual understanding of urban spaces, The Noisy Renaissance examines the premodern city as an acoustic phenomenon in which citizens used sound to navigate space and society. Analyzing a range of documentary and literary evidence, art and architectural historian Niall Atkinson creates an “acoustic topography” of Florence. The dissemination of official messages, the rhythm of prayer, and the murmur of rumor and gossip combined to form a soundscape that became a foundation in the creation and maintenance of the urban community just as much as the city’s physical buildings. Sound in this space triggered a wide variety of social behaviors and spatial relations: hierarchical, personal, communal, political, domestic, sexual, spiritual, and religious. By exploring these rarely studied soundscapes, Atkinson shows Florence to be both an exceptional and an exemplary case study of urban conditions in the early modern period.

Sing Aloud Harmonious Spheres

Sing Aloud Harmonious Spheres
Author: Jacomien Prins
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 496
Release: 2017-09-05
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1351664182

This is the first volume to explore the reception of the Pythagorean doctrine of cosmic harmony within a variety of contexts, ranging chronologically from Plato to 18th-century England. This original collection of essays engages with contemporary debates concerning the relationship between music, philosophy, and science, and challenges the view that Renaissance discussions on cosmic harmony are either mere repetitions of ancient music theory or pre-figurations of the ‘Scientific Revolution’. Utilizing this interdisciplinary approach, Renaissance Conceptions of Cosmic Harmony offers a new perspective on the reception of an important classical theme in various cultural, sequential and geographical contexts, underlying the continuities and changes between Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. This project will be of particular interest within these emerging disciplines as they continue to explore the ideological significance of the various ways in which we appropriate the past.

Music and Visual Culture in Renaissance Italy

Music and Visual Culture in Renaissance Italy
Author: Chriscinda Henry
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 411
Release: 2023-05-24
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1000875334

The chapters in this volume explore the relationship between music and art in Italy across the long sixteenth century, considering an era when music-making was both a subject of Italian painting and a central metaphor in treatises on the arts. Beginning in the fifteenth century, transformations emerge in the depiction of music within visual arts, the conceptualization of music in ethics and poetics, and in the practice of musical harmony. This book brings together contributors from across musicology and art history to consider the trajectories of these changes and the connections between them, both in theory and in the practices of everyday life. In sixteen chapters, the contributors blend iconographic analysis with a wider range of approaches, investigate the discourse surrounding the arts, and draw on both social art history and the material turn in Renaissance studies. They address not only paintings and sculpture, but also a wide range of visual media and domestic objects, from instruments to tableware, to reveal a rich, varied, and sometimes tumultuous exchange among musical and visual arts and ideas. Enriching our understanding of the subtle intersections between visual, material, and musical arts across the long Renaissance, this book offers new insights for scholars of music, art, and cultural history. Chapter 15 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.