Singing Games in Early Modern Italy

Paul Schleuse

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In Italy during the late cinquecento, printed music could be found not only in the homes of the wealthy or the music professional, but also in lay homes, courts, and academies. No longer confined to the salons of the elite, music took on the role of social play and recreation. Paul Schleuse examines these new musical forms through a study of the music books of Italian priest, poet, and composer, Orazio Vecchi. Composed for minor patrons and the wider music-buying public, Vecchi's madrigals took as their subjects game-playing, drinking, hunting, battles, and the life of the street. Schleuse looks at how music and game-playing allowed singers and performers to play the roles of exemplary pastoral characters and also comic, foreign, and "rustic" others in ways that defined and ultimately reinforced social norms of the times. His findings reposition Orazio Vecchi as one of the most innovative composers of the late 16th century.

Introduction
1. The Four-Voice Canzonetta as (and in) Recreational Polyphony
2. Intertextuality in Vecchi's Canzonettas and Madrigals, 1583-1590
3. Forest and Feast: The Music Book as Metaphor
4. L'Amfiparnaso: Picturing Theatre & The Problem of the "Madrigal Comedy"
5. Competition and Conversation: Games as Music
6. Representation and Identity in Musical Performance
Appendix: Vecchi, L'hore di recreatione from Madrigali a sei (1583).
Notes
Works Cited
Index

Sujets

• Musique
• Histoire de la musique
• Europe
• Music
• History
• Madrigal
• Musicology
• History of classical music traditions
• Criticism
• Italian Renaissance
• Multiple signal classification

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 08 juin 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253015044
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 4 Mo

Extrait

Singing Games in Early Modern Italy
MUSIC AND THE EARLY MODERN IMAGINATION Massimo Ossi, editor
Singing Games
in Early Modern Italy
The Music Books of Orazio Vecchi
PAUL SCHLEUSE
This book is a publication of
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS
Office of Scholarly Publishing
Herman B Wells Library 350
1320 East 10th Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
2015 by Paul Schleuse
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z 39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Cataloging information is available from Library of Congress
ISBN 978-0-253-01501-3 (cloth)
ISBN 978-0-253-01504-4 (ebook)
1 2 3 4 5 20 19 18 17 16 15
FOR PRESCOTT with love and gratitude
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 The Four-Voice Canzonetta as (and in) Recreational Polyphony
2 Intertextuality in Vecchi s Canzonettas and Madrigals, 1583-1590
3 Forest and Feast: The Music Book as Metaphor
4 L Amfiparnaso: Picturing Theater and the Problem of the Madrigal Comedy
5 Competition and Conversation: Games as Music
6 Representation and Identity in Musical Performance
Appendix: Vecchi, L hore di recreatione, from Madrigali a sei (1583)
Notes
Works Cited
Index
Acknowledgments
In a book about the pleasures of recreational singing it seems especially appropriate to thank not only some of those who made it possible but also those who made the process of writing it enjoyable.
Among many teachers I should first thank Rodney Haedge, my choir director at La Porte High School, who introduced me to the pleasure of singing madrigals with Orazio Vecchi s setting of Il bianco e dolce cigno. Many years later in graduate school I arrived back at Vecchi through the guidance first of Barbara Russano Hanning and then of my dissertation advisor, Ruth DeFord. Both have been great sources of truly practical wisdom in my life as a researcher and teacher.
Work on this book has benefited enormously from the thoughtful comments of readers official and unofficial, including Massimo Ossi, Anthony Newcomb, Laurie Stras, and Seth Coluzzi; their recommendations have made the book you are now holding much better. Many other colleagues have been generously helpful in ways large and small; I would especially like to thank Allan Atlas, Bonnie Blackburn, Mauro Calcagno, Tim Carter, Lisa Colton, Anthony Cummings, Roger Freitas, Giuseppe Gerbino, Leofranc Holford-Strevens, Anne MacNeil, Melanie Marshall, John Milsom, Giulio Ongaro, Jessie Ann Owens, Massimo Privitera, Dennis Slavin, Jeremy Smith, Anne Stone, Andrew Weaver, and Anna Zayaruznaya.
Many of the ideas about recreational singing in this book came into focus through singing polyphony by Vecchi and his contemporaries in the company of good friends and talented musicians at workshops led by Peter Phillips, Andrew Carwood, Patrick Craig, Jan Coxwell, Deborah Roberts, Ghislaine Morgan, Don Grieg, and Jeffrey Skidmore. I am especially indebted to the members of the CUNY Graduate Center s informal Renaissance notation workshop, who have exemplified the fun of convivial singing from part books.
The publication of this book is supported by subventions from the Margarita Hanson Endowment and the AMS 75 PAYS Endowment of the American Musicological Society, funded in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. At Binghamton University my work has been supported by a Dean s Research Semester and travel funding from the Dean s Office of Harpur College of Arts and Sciences and by a fellowship from the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities. Also, the associates of the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies ( CEMERS ) have been a continuing source of collegial inspiration, especially Karen Barzman, Marilynn Desmond, Andrew Walkling, Olivia Holmes, Dana Stewart, Andrew Scholtz, and Tina Chronopoulos. Among other colleagues at Binghamton I must thank James Burns, Drew Massey, Tim Perry, Dan Davis, Christopher Bartlette, and Alice Mitchell of the Music Department; Sean Massey of the Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies; Bat-Ami Bar On of the Philosophy Department; Randy Friedman of the Department of Judaic Studies; Jennifer Stoever of the English Department; and in particular Harry Lincoln, professor of music emeritus, whose donated collection of microfilms and facsimiles in the library has been a wonderful-and wonderfully convenient-resource for my research.
For their assistance in research for this book I would like to thank the staffs of the Biblioteca Estense, the Archivio di Stato di Modena, the Archivio di Stato di Reggio Emilia, the Biblioteca Comunale di Correggio, the Museo Internazionale e Biblioteca della Musica di Bologna, the Staats- und Stadtbibliothek Augsburg, the Library and Muniment Room of Westminster Abbey, the British Library, the UC Berkeley Music Library, and the New York Public Library. I am also most grateful to the editorial staff at Indiana University Press for their clear and efficient help at every stage of the publication process.
Finally, I am grateful to my parents, Ginny Garrett and Bill Schleuse; my brothers, Martin and Stuart; my extended family of Garretts, McDermotts, Vanns, Fords, Hartlings, and Gehlings; and many other friends, but especially Joshua Ludzki, Alex Loughman, Amy Wielunski, Huntley Gill, Wick Taylor and Tom Lloyd, and Bill Kelley and Juan Escobar. They have all been a source of unflagging support and, when necessary, a welcome relief from work. Sarah Bridgman was a source of strength and clarity during the most difficult stages of producing the book. Most of all, my thanks and all my love to Prescott Vann, who has sustained me in every way.
Singing Games in Early Modern Italy
Introduction
The function of play in the higher forms which concern us here can largely be derived from the two basic aspects under which we mean it: as a contest for something or a representation of something. These two functions can unite in such a way that the game represents a contest, or else becomes a contest for the best representation of something.
The child [at play] is quite literally beside himself with delight, transported beyond himself to such an extent that he almost believes he actually is such and such a thing, without, however, wholly losing consciousness of ordinary reality. His representation is not so much a sham-reality as a realization in appearance: imagination in the original sense of the word.
-Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture
[The] search for suggestiveness is a deliberate move to open the work to the free response of the addressee. An artistic work that suggests is also one that can be performed with the full emotional and imaginative resources of the interpreter. Whenever we read poetry there is a process by which we try to adapt our personal world to the emotional world proposed by the text. This is all the more true of poetic works that are deliberately based on suggestiveness, since the text sets out to stimulate the private world of the addressee so that he can draw from inside himself some deeper response that mirrors the subtler resonances underlying the text.
-Umberto Eco, The Open Work
This book is about singing as social play and music written and published to function this way in late sixteenth-century Italy. It is about the poetry that singers of such music encounter and how they relate to the fictive voices in this poetry, either being transported beyond themselves (in Huizinga s formulation) or adapting [their] personal world to the emotional world proposed by the text (as Eco describes). The particular historical moment I address was one when such relations were shifting radically, and the function of recreational singing-at least as represented in the music books issued by the Venetian printing industry-was shifting with them. In the middle third of the century, madrigals and other forms of part-song were most typically used for group singing without a separate audience, or at least for an audience of the singers own peers. To be sure, instruments might double or replace voices in part-music, and more complex accompaniments might be improvised, but at midcentury these practices were ancillary to the kind of fully vocal realization implied by the texted part books in which madrigals were published. Larger-scale works written for performance at festive events were similarly the exception, not the rule. Solo performance by professional or quasi-professional singers was a practice still largely independent from the market for printed music.
Changes to this standard were under way by the 1570s, when, as Vincenzo Giustiniani reports, certain virtuoso solo singers inspired composers to create new styles of music both for solo voices and for group singing (my reading of Giustiniani s account opens chapter 1 ). By the 1580s Italy s wealthiest households were developing private, professionalized musical establishments whose display (and, often, concealment from display) marked their employers status and grandezza . This professionalization of performance has been widely studied both as a late cinquecento phenomenon and as a precondition for the seventeenth-century preference for monody as the dominant texture in opera and other forms of literate music. My subject, however, is the tradition of recreational singing that continued in courts, academies, informal ridotti (salons), a