Download or read book Understanding Italian Opera written by Tim Carter and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2015-09-16 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Opera is often regarded as the pinnacle of high art. A "Western" genre with global reach, it is where music and drama come together in unique ways, supported by stellar singers and spectacular scenic effects. Yet it is also patently absurd -- why should anyone break into song on the dramatic stage? -- and shrouded in mystique. In this engaging and entertaining guide, renowned music scholar Tim Carter unravels its many layers to offer a thorough introduction to Italian opera from the seventeenth to the early twentieth centuries. Eschewing the technical musical detail that all too often dominates writing on opera, Carter begins instead where the composers themselves did: with the text. Walking readers through the relationship between music and poetry that lies at the heart of any opera, Carter then offers explorations of five of the most enduring and emblematic Italian operas: Monteverdi's The Coronation of Poppea; Handel's Julius Caesar in Egypt; Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro; Verdi's Rigoletto; and Puccini's La Bohème. Shedding light on the creative collusions and collisions involved in bringing opera to the stage, the various, and varying, demands of the text and music, and the nature of its musical drama, Carter also shows how Italian opera has developed over the course of music history. Complete with synopses, cast lists, and suggested further reading for each work discussed, Understanding Italian Opera is a must-read for anyone with an interest in and love for this glorious art.
Download or read book From Madrigal to Opera written by Mauro Calcagno and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2012-04-18 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In this bold, highly original book, Mauro Calcagno ventures into areas where no other scholar has tread. He explores the Petrarchian view of the self over a century-long arc from the early madrigal to the beginnings of opera, with Monteverdi's masterpieces taking center stage. A brilliant tour de force, From Madrigal to Opera proffers a remarkable new way to look at music, performance, and reception that rings true not only for the early modern period but also for our own age. A must read for scholars, performers, and lovers of early music."—Jane A. Bernstein, author of Print Culture and Music in Sixteenth-Century Venice "The mini-renaissance of early modern music studies continues apace, and Mauro Calcagno's From Madrigal to Opera is its latest, particularly impressive installment. Drawing on methodological impulses from a variety of sources—linguistics, phenomenology, narratology, and, above all, performance studies—Calcagno pays close attention to the interplay of the abstract text and live performance in both early opera and late madrigal. Common strategies, rooted in Petrarch's poetic practice, indeed united the two genres. This book will shape the discussion of early modern vocal music in the coming years."—Karol Berger is the author of Bach's Cycle, Mozart's Arrow: An Essay on the Origins of Musical Modernity. "In this pathbreaking study, Calcagno offers a new and dynamic interpretation of the relationship between Monteverdi's madrigals and operas based on perceptions of subjectivity expressed in Renaissance literature—the poetry of Petrarch in particular. Calcagno interprets Monteverdi's work as realizing a Petrarchan notion of the dialogical self, a concept that extends well beyond the early modern period to illuminate and enrich our own experience of virtually any vocal work in performance. This book should be required reading not only for those interested in music and text of the Early Modern period, but for anyone involved in performance studies."—Ellen Rosand, author of Monteverdi's Last Operas: A Venetian Trilogy.
Download or read book The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity written by Aby Warburg and published by Getty Publications. This book was released on 1999 with total page 872 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of essays by the art historian Aby Warburg, these essays look beyond iconography to more psychological aspects of artistic creation: the conditions under which art was practised; its social and cultural contexts; and its conceivable historical meaning.
Download or read book Music and Science in the Age of Galileo written by V. Coelho and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 1992-11-30 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of essays exploring the relations between music and the scientific culture of Galileo's time. It takes a broad historical approach towards understanding such topics as the role of music in Galileo's experiments and in the scientific revolution
Download or read book City Culture and the Madrigal at Venice written by Martha Feldman and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2023-11-10 with total page 569 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Martha Feldman's exploration of sixteenth-century Venetian madrigals centers on the importance to the Venetians of Ciceronian rhetorical norms, which emphasized decorum through adherence to distinct stylistic levels. She shows that Venice easily adapted these norms to its long-standing mythologies of equilibrium, justice, peace, and good judgment. Feldman explains how Venetian literary theorists conceived variety as a device for tempering linguistic extremes and thereby maintaining moderation. She further shows how the complexity of sacred polyphony was adapted by Venetian music theorists and composers to achieve similar ends. At the same time, Feldman unsettles the kinds of simplistic alignments between the collectivity of the state and its artistic production that have marked many historical studies of the arts. Her rich social history enables a more intricate dialectics among sociopolitical formations; the roles of individual printers, academists, merchants, and others; and the works of composers and poets. City Culture offers a new model for situating aesthetic products in a specific time and place, one that sees expressive objects not simply against a cultural backdrop but within an integrated complex of cultural forms and discursive practices. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1995.
Download or read book Opera in Seventeenth Century Venice written by Ellen Rosand and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2007-10-09 with total page 712 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In this elegantly constructed study of the early decades of public opera, the conflicts and cooperation of poets, composers, managers, designers, and singers—producing the art form that was soon to sweep the world and that has been dominant ever since—are revealed in their first freshness."—Andrew Porter "This will be a standard work on the subject of the rise of Venetian opera for decades. Rosand has provided a decisive contribution to the reshaping of the entire subject. . . . She offers a profoundly new view of baroque opera based on a solid documentary and historical-critical foundation. The treatment of the artistic self-consciousness and professional activities of the librettists, impresarios, singers, and composers is exemplary, as is the examination of their reciprocal relations. This work will have a positive effect not only on studies of 17th-century, but on the history of opera in general."—Lorenzo Bianconi
Download or read book Women and the Circulation of Texts in Renaissance Italy written by Brian Richardson and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-03-26 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first comprehensive guide to women's promotion and use of textual culture, in manuscript and print, in Renaissance Italy.
Download or read book Divining the Oracle written by Massimo Ossi and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2003-07-15 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Claudio Monteverdi's historical position in music has been compared to that of Shakespeare in literature: almost exact contemporaries, each worked from traditional beginnings to transform nearly every genre he attempted. In this book, Massimo Ossi delves into the most significant aspect of Monteverdi's career: the development, during the first years of the seventeenth century, of a new compositional style he called the seconda prattica or "second manner." Challenged in print for the unconventional aspects of his music, Monteverdi found himself at the center of a debate between defenders of Renaissance principles and the newest musical currents of the time. The principles of the seconda prattica, Ossi argues in this sophisticated analysis of Monteverdi's writings, music, and approaches to text-setting, were in fact much more significant to the course of Monteverdi's career than previously thought by modern scholars-not only did Monteverdi continue to pursue their aesthetic and theoretical implications for the rest of his life, but they also affected his dramatic compositions as well as his chamber vocal music and sacred works. Ossi "divines the oracle" of Monteverdi's ambiguous theoretical concepts in a clear way and in terms of pure music; his book will enhance our understanding of Monteverdi as one of the most significant figures in western music history.
Download or read book Gramophone Long Playing Classical Record Catalogue written by and published by . This book was released on 1954 with total page 592 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Modal Subjectivities written by Susan McClary and published by University of California Press. This book was released on 2019-10-22 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this boldly innovative book, renowned musicologist Susan McClary presents an illuminating cultural interpretation of the Italian madrigal, one of the most influential repertories of the Renaissance. A genre that sought to produce simulations in sound of complex interiorities, the madrigal introduced into music a vast range of new signifying practices: musical representations of emotions, desire, gender stereotypes, reason, madness, tensions between mind and body, and much more. In doing so, it not only greatly expanded the expressive agendas of European music but also recorded certain assumptions of the time concerning selfhood, making it an invaluable resource for understanding the history of Western subjectivity. Modal Subjectivities covers the span of the sixteenth-century polyphonic madrigal, from its early manifestations in Philippe Verdelot's settings of Machiavelli in the 1520s through the tortured chromatic experiments of Carlo Gesualdo. Although McClary takes the lyrics into account in shaping her readings, she focuses particularly on the details of the music itself—the principal site of the genre's self-fashionings. In order to work effectively with musical meanings in this pretonal repertory, she also develops an analytical method that allows her to unravel the sophisticated allegorical structures characteristic of the madrigal. This pathbreaking book demonstrates how we might glean insights into a culture on the basis of its nonverbal artistic enterprises.
Download or read book Early Music Printing in German Speaking Lands written by Andrea Lindmayr-Brandl and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-03-14 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book draws upon the rich information gathered for the online database Catalogue of early German printed music / Verzeichnis deutscher Musikfrühdrucke (vdm), the first systematic descriptive catalogue of music printed in the German-speaking lands between c. 1470 and 1540, allowing precise conclusions about the material production of these printed musical sources. Chapters 8 and 9 of this book are freely available as downloadable Open Access PDFs at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.
Download or read book Musicians Mobilities and Music Migrations in Early Modern Europe written by Gesa zur Nieden and published by transcript Verlag. This book was released on 2016-10-31 with total page 429 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the 17th and 18th century musicians' mobilities and migrations are essential for the European music history and the cultural exchange of music. Adopting viewpoints that reflect different methodological approaches and diversified research cultures, the book presents studies on central scopes, strategies and artistic outcomes of mobile and migratory musicians as well as on the transfer of music. By looking at elite and non-elite musicians and their everyday mobilities to major and minor centers of music production and practice, new biographical patterns and new stylistic paradigms in the European East, West and South emerge.
Download or read book Monteverdi and the End of the Renaissance written by Gary Tomlinson and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1987 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Combining a close study of Monteverdi's secular works with recent research on late Renaissance history, Gary Tomlinson places the composer's creative career in its broad cultural context and illuminates the state of Italian music, poetry, and ideology in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Download or read book The Idea of the Book in the Middle Ages written by Jesse Gellrich and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2019-03-15 with total page 407 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book assess the relationship of literature to various other cultural forms in the Middle Ages. Jesse M. Gellrich uses the insights of such thinkers as Levi-Strauss, Foucault, Barthes, and Derrida to explore the continuity of medieval ideas about speaking, writing, and texts.
Download or read book The Signifier and the Signified written by F. Noske and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 428 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The studies collected in this volume deal with the interpretation of opera. In most cases the results are based on structural analysis, a concept which may require some clarification in this context. During the past de cade 'structure' and 'structural' have become particularly fashionable terms lacking exact denotation and used for the most divergent purposes. As employed here, structural analysis is concerned with such concepts as 'relationship', 'coherence' and 'continuity', more or less in contrast to formal analysis which deals with measurable material. In other words, I have analysed the structure of an opera by seeking and examining factors in the musico-dramatic process, whereas analysts of form are generally preoccupied with the study of elements contained in the musical object. Though admittedly artificial, the dichotomy of form and structure may elucidate the present situation with regard to the study of opera. Today, nearly one hundred years after the death of Wagner, the proclaimed anti thesis of Oper und Drama is generally taken for what it really was: a means to propagate the philosophy of its inventor. The conception of opera (whether 'continuous' or composed of 'numbers') as a special form of drama is no longer contested. Nevertheless musical scholarship has failed to draw the consequences from this view and few scholars realize the need to study general theory of drama and more specifically the dramatic experience.
Download or read book Staging Euridice written by Tim Carter and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-12-02 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Newly-discovered evidence underpins this comprehensive account of the creation and staging of the earliest surviving 'opera', Euridice.
Download or read book The Letters of Claudio Monteverdi written by Claudio Monteverdi and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1980-10-31 with total page 470 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comprehensive edition of Monteverdi's letters which span the years 1601-43 and give an unrivalled picture of the composer's life in Mantua, Venice and Parma, his thoughts on the aesthetics of opera, his colleagues, and his own works. Extensive commentaries introduce each letter.
