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 Cultures of Empire Rethinking Venetian Rule 1400 1700 written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-07-27 with total page 516 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book investigates perceptions, modes, and techniques of Venetian rule in the early modern Eastern Mediterranean (1400–1700) between colonial empire, negotiated and pragmatic rule; between soft touch and exploitation; in contexts of former and continuous imperial belongings; and with a focus on representations and modes of rule as well as on colonial daily realities and connectivities.

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 European Music 1520 1640 written by James Haar and published by Boydell Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 606 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries - the so-called Golden Age of Polyphony - represent a time of great change and development in European music, with the flourishing of Orlando di Lasso, Palestrina, Byrd, Victoria, Monteverdi and Schütz among others. The thirty chapters of this book, contributed by established scholars on subjects within their fields of expertise, deal with polyphonic music - sacred and secular, vocal and instrumental - during this period. The volume offers chronological surveys of national musical cultures (in Italy, France, the Netherlands, Germany, England, and Spain); genre studies (Mass, motet, madrigal, chanson, instrumental music, opera); and is completed with essays on intellectual and cultural developments and concepts relevant to music (music theory, printing, the Protestant Reformation and the corresponding Catholic movement, humanism, concepts of 'Renaissance' and 'Baroque'). It thus provides a complete overview of the music and its context. Contributors: GARY TOMLINSON, JAMES HAAR, TIM CARTER, GIULIO ONGARO, NOEL O'REGAN, ALLAN ATLAS, ANTHONY CUMMINGS, RICHARD FREEDMAN, JEANICE BROOKS, DAVID TUNLEY, KATE VAN ORDEN, KRISTINE FORNEY, IAIN FENLON, KAROL BERGER, PETER BERGQUIST, DAVID CROOK, ROBIN LEAVER, CRAIG MONSON, TODD BORGERDING, LOUISE K. STEIN, GIUSEPPE GERBINO, ROGER BRAY, JONATHAN WAINWRIGHT, VICTOR COELHO, KEITH POLK

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 Singing to the Lyre in Renaissance Italy written by Blake Wilson and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020 with total page 487 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first comprehensive study of the dominant form of solo singing in Renaissance Italy prior to the mid-sixteenth century.

Download or read book Renaissance Fun written by Philip Steadman and published by UCL Press. This book was released on 2021-04-13 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Renaissance Fun is about the technology of Renaissance entertainments in stage machinery and theatrical special effects; in gardens and fountains; and in the automata and self-playing musical instruments that were installed in garden grottoes. How did the machines behind these shows work? How exactly were chariots filled with singers let down onto the stage? How were flaming dragons made to fly across the sky? How were seas created on stage? How did mechanical birds imitate real birdsong? What was ‘artificial music’, three centuries before Edison and the phonograph? How could pipe organs be driven and made to play themselves by waterpower alone? And who were the architects, engineers, and craftsmen who created these wonders? All these questions are answered. At the end of the book we visit the lost ‘garden of marvels’ at Pratolino with its many grottoes, automata and water jokes; and we attend the performance of Mercury and Mars in Parma in 1628, with its spectacular stage effects and its music by Claudio Monteverdi – one of the places where opera was born. Renaissance Fun is offered as an entertainment in itself. But behind the show is a more serious scholarly argument, centred on the enormous influence of two ancient writers on these subjects, Vitruvius and Hero. Vitruvius’s Ten Books on Architecture were widely studied by Renaissance theatre designers. Hero of Alexandria wrote the Pneumatics, a collection of designs for surprising and entertaining devices that were the models for sixteenth and seventeenth century automata. A second book by Hero On Automata-Making – much less well known, then and now – describes two miniature theatres that presented plays without human intervention. One of these, it is argued, provided the model for the type of proscenium theatre introduced from the mid-sixteenth century, the generic design which is still built today. As the influence of Vitruvius waned, the influence of Hero grew.

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 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 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 Oxford Handbook of Timbre written by Emily I. Dolan and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-09-15 with total page 740 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite its importance as a central feature of musical sounds, timbre has rarely stood in the limelight. First defined in the eighteenth century, denigrated during the nineteenth, the concept of timbre came into its own during the twentieth century and its fascination with synthesizers and electronic music-or so the story goes. But in fact, timbre cuts across all the boundaries that make up musical thought-combining scientific and artistic approaches to music, material and philosophical aspects, and historical and theoretical perspectives. Timbre challenges us to fundamentally reorganize the way we think about music. The twenty-five essays that make up this collection offer a variety of engagements with music from the perspective of timbre. The boundaries are set as broad as possible: from ancient Homeric sounds to contemporary sound installations, from birdsong to cochlear implants, from Tuvan overtone singing to the tv show The Voice, from violin mutes to Moog synthesizers. What unifies the essays across this vast diversity is the material starting point of the sounding object. This focus on the listening experience is radical departure from the musical work that has traditionally dominated musical discourse since its academic inception in late-nineteenth-century Europe. Timbre remains a slippery concept that has continuously demanded more, be it more precise vocabulary, a more systematic theory, or more rigorous analysis. Rooted in the psychology of listening, timbre consistently resists pinning complete down. This collection of essays provides an invitation for further engagement with the range of fascinating questions that timbre opens up.

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.

Download or read book Hierarchy in Natural and Social Sciences written by Denise Pumain and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2006-02-09 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hierarchy is a form of organisation of complex systems that rely on or produce a strong differentiation in capacity (power and size) between the parts of the system. It is frequently observed within the natural living world as well as in social institutions. According to the authors, hierarchy results from random processes, follows an intentional design, or is the result of the organisation which ensures an optimal circulation of energy for information. This book reviews ancient and modern representations and explanations of hierarchies, and compares their relevance in a variety of fields, such as language, societies, cities, and living species. It throws light on concepts and models such as scaling laws, fractals and self-organisation that are fundamental in the dynamics and morphology of complex systems. At a time when networks are celebrated for their efficiency, flexibility and better social acceptance, much can be learned about the persistent universality and adaptability of hierarchies, and from the analogies and differences between biological and social organisation and processes. This book addresses a wide audience of biologists and social scientists, as well as managers and executives in a variety of institutions.

Download or read book Renaissance Transactions written by Valeria Finucci and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Edited collection discusses the first historically important debate on what constitutes modern literature, which focused on two 16th century works: ORLANDO FURIOSO and GERUSALEMME LIBERATA.

Download or read book The Early Baroque Era written by Curtis Price and published by Springer. This book was released on 1993-11-09 with total page 411 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: