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78 Cards in this Set
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The prologue of Tragedi en Musique functioned not merely to frame the narrative, but also to celebrate the king, ritualizing the monarchy (and his victories) within not merely the operatic form, or the gods being depicted, but also the sources that gave them rise (the king becomes the originator of Homer, Euripides, Tasso). Early French opera withdrew the person of the king from the stage while nonetheless retaining his overwhelming presence. Of course, ironically, if the king’s victories allow for pastoral utopia that begin the prologues to arise, it stands to reason that this utopic circumstance fuels the amorous intrigues and passions of the story…Louis becomes the very agent of chaos sown by the narrative.
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Downing Thomas, “The Opera King” Aesthetics of Opera in the Ancien Regime, 1647–1785 2002
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An intervention against scholars that focus strictly on the presence or absence of exotic music in cross–cultural exchanges (c.f. Ralph Locke). Instead suggests that Lully’s musical depiction of aboriginals instead stressed their place within the French empire, mimicking the way that he set other “non–savage” characters in his other operas. That was part of a larger assimilationist ideology being proffered by the government…nevertheless, there still lurked the thread that complete incorporation would undermine the French people, and aspects of alterity remained.
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Olivia Bloechl, “Savage Lully” Native American Song at the Frontiers of Early Modern Music 2008
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The recitative of French Baroque opera, with its constant changing time was created by Lully in the 1660s from the model of French tragedy.
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Lois Rosow, “French Baroque Recitative as an Expression of Tragic Declamation” 1983
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An exploration of the unique power structure within Louis XIV’s court. Heller discusses the musical institutions and centralization that occurred within the arts under Louis, before moving into a discussion into the French genres and styles proffered by Lully to prop up the monarch. The results were mixed: on one hand, the king used music and art to control and manipulate his courtiers, while on the other hand, the very arts he nurtured provided a means for the aristocracy to counter the propaganda of the monarchy.
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Wendy Heller, “Power and Pleasure at the Court of Louis XIV” Music in the Baroque: Western Music in Context 2014
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An intervention against the belief that public and private displays of opera were solely displays of sovereign power. ––– want to leave space for personal expression and affective production in what he argues were “flexible structures of feeling.” He explores this through the Opera productions of late 17th c Naples under Spanish Viceroys. Through this affective network, the people didn’t need to see sovereign power onstage (like Louis XIV), but rather they just needed to internalize the optimism and eroticism already made manifest in the music.
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Louise K Stein
A Viceroy Behind the Scenes: Opera, Production, Politics, and Financing in 1680s Naples |
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Charts the early opera endeavours of the Arcadians on a single topic, the myth of Endymion and Diana. We follow the development of Arcadian ideals from libretti by Queen Christina, Francesco de Lemene, and finally Pietro Metastasio. It was Metastasio that resolved many of the irregularities in these early efforts towards reform.
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Bruno Forment
Moonlight on Enymion: In Search of Arcadian Opera, 1688–1721 2008 |
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Traces the multitude of operatic traditions that crept up with the acsension of Cardinal Ottoboni to the papacy in 1690, after the forced conservatism of his predecessor. Pivotally, Ottoboni was an important member of the Accademy of Arcadia, which had just begun, and it was beginning to develop. Discusses the ways that Arcadian ideals were shaped from the tension of public and private during Innocent’s conservative reign, while remarking on the neoclassical ideals and modern realities voiced within the group’s ranks.
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Stefanie Tcharos
Enclosures, Crises, Polemics: Opera Production in 1690s Arcadian Rome Opera’s Orbit 2011 |
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A look at the migration of Italian musicians (and culture) North of the Alps. On one hand, these figures were condemned as “other” or effeminate for their musical, religious and cultural sensibilities. But, on the other hand, the musicians played an important role in courtly life and culture.
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Reinhardt Strohm
Italian Operistic North of the Alps, 1700–1750 |
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A summary of the long corresponndence between Burney and Martini. Although they had a productive friendship, the two men were very difficult. Burney was a product of the Enlightenment, believing in musical progress, and a firm advocate of Encyclopedist like Rousseau and Diderot. Martini, on the other hand, believed in the supremacy of church music in an increasingly secular age.
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Howard Brotsky
Doctor Burney and Padre Martini: Writing a General History of Music 1979 |
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Using Orpheus as a metaphor for Burney’s music travels, Agnew loooks at how these musical travelogues offer a counter–narrative about the international political and cultural reputation of Germany t the turn of the 1700s. Germany, subordinate to behemoths like France and Italy began looking beyond its border for intellectual stimulus and recognition, and it found an outlet through Burney and the prototype of the British empire.
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Vanessa Agnew
Argonaut Orpheus Enlightenment Orpheus: The Pursuit of Music in Other Worlds 2008 |
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Viceroy under Spanish–lead Naples
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Marquis of Carpio
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Pope who advocated for opera–filled Rome (and member of the Arcadians)
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Cardinal Ottoboni
AKA. Pope Alexander the VIII His Grandnephew Pietro Ottoboni was also important (patron of Corelli, A. Scarlatti, and Vivaldi, godfather to Metastasio) |
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Advocates for an understanding of music that acquired meaning from melody and the subjective expectations of listeners. Musical meaning, then, is communicated via a commonly understood set of idioms and vocabulary. Of course, because musical meaning emerges from intersubjective convention, our interpretation of music is always already tied to a community of similar tastes. Therefore: All acts of listening both reflect and are reflective of our embeddedness within shared networks of cultural experience.
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Jean–Jacques Rousseau
Essay on the Origin of Language 1781 |
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Laments the present state of opera, which focusses too strongly on melody and sensousness and neglectsits subservience to poetry and narrative. He condemns modern opera’s fixation on “sweet sonorous words” implying he would like the text to have more substance, although this is not for a political reason (cd. Algarotti and de Tillot) but rather an ethical one, as he believes listeners are being rendered effeminate through this empty spectacle.
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Ludovico Muratori
On Perfect Italian Poetry 1706 |
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Charts the political uncertainty entwined within Parisian opera in the 18c through three distinct episode: (1) the attempts to bring Italian opera to Paris in the 1750s; (2) the attempts of 2 theatres to establish French opera for a lower–middle and bourgeoisie audience; (3) the rivalry between Gluck and Piccini; (4) the state of opera after the revolution.
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Michael Fried
An Instinct for Paraody and a Spirit for Revolution: Parisian Opera, 1752–1800 CH18 2009 |
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––– wants to connect Figaro criticism with the prevailing theatrical discourses occuring in Vienna during the period. He suggests that Viennese theatre entoned an ethical and social rubric couched in spectacle and irony, which manifested in the conclusion to Mozart and DuPonte’s Marriage of Figaro
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Edmund Goering
Ironic Modes, Happy Endings: Figaro Criticism and the Enlightened Stage 2011 |
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An intervention against the prevailing treatment of Rameau (pluralistically charting changing theories versus extracting a single theoretical throughline). Rather Christensen embeds Rameau’s changing method within the epistemological models and languages of 18th c. Science. Each chapter focuses on a larger scientific tradition: cartesianism, Mersenne’s neoplatonism, materialist mechanism, pantheism and occasionality doctrins, experimental physics, Newton’s theory of gravity, Locke’s sensationalist epistemology.
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Thomas Christensen
Rameau and Musical Thought in the Enlightenment 2004 |
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A look at the shifting ideologies that facilitated the shift from a primarily vocal to instrumental music. Rather than looking at the music itself, ––– hangs his argument on the philosophical and theoretical writings of the period. Pivotally, this shift was fascilitated by a changing relationship to Mimesis, particularily as 19th century composers moved away from vague representation towards greater verisimilitude, as composers portrayed finally shaded, individualized, and personal emotions instead of stock effects. Rameau’s theories rehabilite non–vocal genres (non–mimetic), Rousseau origins of language (primarily mimetic and vocal–centric, a sketchy utopian model), D’Alembert as the middle ground (expanding Rameau beyond major and minor triads and seventh, but like Rousseau, culturally contingent).
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John Neubauer
The Emancipation of Music from Language: Departures from Mimesis in Eighteenth–Century Aesthetics 1984 |
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Derrida takes issues with Rousseau’s proclivity to make a utopia of the spoken word, while denigrating the written word. Suggests that Rousseau creates a binarism between nature and culture, which intones a deeper seperations.
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Derida
On Grammatology |
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A chapter that explores the discourses of nature that persisted in the debate between Rameau and Rousseau. Both composers sought to embed their discussions about music (harmony versus melody) within some form of natural theology. (Rameau corps sonore = a natural acoustical principle, while Rousseau’s origins of language = natural human behaviour).
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Jeremy Begbie
The Nature of Music: Rameau, Rousseau, and Natural Theology Music, Modernity, and God: Essays in Listening 2013 |
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Gives a deliberately anachronistic reading of the various Querelle throughout this period, engaging with the larger conflict on two seperate fronts: (1) political, the division between French and Italian musics, and by extension, peoples, cultural influences, etc.; (2) aesthetic, as these Querelle anticipate and prepare the way for the changing aesthetics from Baroque to Galant musical ideologies (about the passions and musical meaning) to more fluid and individualistic Romantic aesthetics (esp. important in the shift from vocal to instrumental music).
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Thomas Downing
Music and the Origins of Language: Theories from the French Enlightenment 1995 |
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There is a long history in the 18th c. of equating stage machinery with the marvelous, which in turn symbolized the presence of deity onstage. Rousseau and the Encyclopedists balked at presence of marvelous (and thus machinery), and Gluck, a follower of them, was widely regarded to believe likewise. Nevertheless, Gluck did not eliminate the machine but rather he turned to musical affect to render these objects more palateable and meaningful for an enlightenment audience.
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Tili Cuille
Mavelous Machines: Revitalizing Enlightenment Opera 2011 |
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A journey through the various reform efforts that occured throughout the 18th c. Beginning with the theatrical reform in London through David Garick (a Shakespeare actor), Hearts traverses the reform ideologies of the Encyclopedists, Algarotti and de Tillot, and finally Gluck. One final exchange, a disastrous pasticcio on Gluck’s Orfeo ed Aricia makes clear that this reform attitude was hardly universal.
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Daniel Heartz
From Garrick to Gluck: The Reform of Theatre and Opera in the Mid–Eighteenth Century 1968 |
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Examines how Rameau, Rousseau, and Gretry incorporated “dangerous” gestures into the pantomimes they wrote for their operas. In these three composers, pantomime was presented as a type of dance opposite to the convention of courtly social dance. The significant of this binarism began to change around 1750. Where Rameau dismissed the pantomime in Pygmalion as “uncultured,” the pantomimes of Rousseau’s Le Devin du Village and Gretry’s Cephale et Procris condemn high culture (and praise pantomimic forms). Although social dances were still the backbone of most french operas, pantomimes provided an experimental interface through which composers contested the meaning of expressive topoi: it thus emerged as a vehicle for progressive social thinking.
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Hedy Law
“Tout Dans ses Charmes, est Dangereux”: Music, Gesture, and the Dangers of French Pantomime, 1748–1775 2010 |
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Looks at the operatic reform occuring in Parma, inspired by Francesco Algarotti and enacted by prime minister Du Tillot. These reformers believed that opera could have the capacity to educate and elevate the population, if the spectacle of Italian opera (which focusses on “empty” virtuosity) were banished. This was accomplished by a unique fusion of French and Italianate practices, manifesting in a mounting of “Ipolitto ed Aricia” by Traetta.
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Martha Feldman
Programming Nature, Parma 1759 Opera and Sovereignty |
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Interested in the liminal space spaces between 18th c. operatic genres, namely the so–called “semiseria” (alternatively, tragicomedy or heroicomedy) opera that theoretically has a foot in both seria and buffa styles. ––– suggests that the union of buffa (usually set in contemporary times and funny) with seria (set in the past and serious) yields a unique union in which the trappings of the present intensify the audience’s sentimental bond with the action onstage (c.f. Jim Chandler on the sentimental mode)
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Stefano Castelvecchi
Sentimental Opera: Questions of Genre in the Age of Bourgeois Drama 2013 |
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Querelle des bouffons
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A Musical and Literary dispute waged between 1752–54 over the respective merits of French and Italian music in French. The conflict was catalyzes by a performance of Pergolesi’s La Serva Padrona, under an Italian troupe lead by Bambini. They were brought to Italy by the French opera when Louis XV released his control over the floundering opera company. Needing money, this was an easy way of cutting costs. Therefore: The Italians usurped the importance of France’s “tragedie lyrique” (much to the chagrine of the pro–French side), but it did so while generating considerable revenue for the floundering French opera.
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Building on the courtly behaviour that arose in the mid– to late–18th century, –––– advances his schema theory based on a musical culture that emphasizes expectation and mannerisms. The emphasis on taking these familiar figures and deploy them in ways considered witte and subtle to the educated listener. Success stemmed from the ability to remain both legible and in fashion.
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Robert Gjerdingen
Music in the Galant Style 2007 |
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Situating the Galant around a constellation of Enlightenment themes—cties over nature, order over chaos, cosmopolitan brotherhood over nationalistic antagonism— ––– locates the era in the city centers of Europe. Literally each chapter covers the happenings in the city.
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Daniel Heartz
Music in the European Capitals: The Galant Style, 1720–1780 2003 |
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CPE Bach had a complex relationship with Hande;’s memory and music. In many ways, he praised the composer’s skill and valued his music, but Handel’s memory and fame were often at the expense of his father’s, which lead CPE Bach to be skeptical (esp. in his less than favourable interactions with Charles Burney, who venerated Handel). Consider also the famed chartiy concert where Carl Philip programmed both sections of Bach’s Mass, Handel’s Messiah, and his own compositions.
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David Schulenberg
CPE Bach and Handel: A Son of Bach Confronts Music History and Criticism 1992 |
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Explores the ways in which history in the late 18th c. was conceived at the meeting point between portrait collectors, the physiognomist, and the anecdotist. Exploring the nework of ideas and cultural practices by focussing on the collecting of individual countenances and their visual and literary repreenttion. CPE Bach’s prolific portrait collection may be understood as a significant music–historiographical project, which played an important role to contemporary historians.
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Annette Richards
Carl Philip Emanuel Bach, Portraits, and the Physiognomy of Music History 2013 |
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There has been a tendency in Boccherini reception to compare his music to landscape painting and tableau vivant, canvases in which the realization of sensibilite was for the view to produce via engagement. Both canvas and painting required time and patience to understand—willingness to let eyes and ears wander. Thus, the sensible reader enters into the experience and engages with it, and in doing so, they are transformed by it. (Basically, compare this to film theory: the conventions of the music fascilitated a suture with the artwork that would be impossible if expectations were thwarted).
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Elisabeth Le Guin
Gestures and Tableaux Boccherini’s Body: An Essay on Carnal Musicology 2006 |
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An examination of the metrical power communicated by rhythmm in Mozart’s Da Ponte operas. ––– suggests that rhythm—number, order, eight of accents, tempo—is a primary agent of “human postures” (and thus) human characters. This process was available to Buffa in a way unavailable to Seria, especialy through the use of dance rhythms, which could be overcoded and undercoded to negotiate eclesiastical and galant characterizations (lofty, mature, dignified versus bawdy, jovial, immature)
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Wye Allenbrook
Rhythmic Gesture in Mozart: Le Nozze di Figaro and Don Giovanni 1986 |
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As the first opera written by a women, and one of the first to be performed outside Italy, La Liberazione was written by Caccini for the arrival of a Prince from Poland (who revived the work in Warsaw three years later). The piece was commissioned by Mary Magdelena, the wife of the Medici ruler at the time; it was also printed under her protection 5 years later. The opera tells of two sorceresses, sensual Alcina and moralistic Melissa, as they battle for the soul and body of the warrior Ruggiero. Melissa is reckoned to be a thinly disguised portrait of the formidable Maria Maddalena herself.
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Francesca Caccini, La liberazione di Ruggiero (“The Liberation of Ruggiero”) (1625)
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Written for the funeral service of the Count of Reuss–Gera. The piece unfolds over three sections, featuring a motet and two larger chorus pieces. Varwig (“Death, Life and Afterlife” from The Lives of Heinrich Schutz) mention this “echo” effect, which was often deployed by composers to suggest a connection to the beyond—emphasized by the Gabrielli effect of the antiphonal choir). The three effects are: (1) a prevailing tendency that the delights of the afterlife cannot be depicted musically, so the echo obfuscates the text; (2) it is important to remember that this fullfilled the role of the funeral rite during a period (30 Year War) when people were dying on mass. Musical and verbal tribute of this nature elevated the deceased over the dead.
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Heinrich Schutz,Musikalische Exequien (“Funeral Music”) (1635–36)
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The only surviving public Venetian opera that we have from Monteverdi (although we know that he wrote two others), the libretto recounts the fall of the Roman empire as told by Tacitus, as Poppea, mistress to the emperor Nero overcomes the emperor’s wife Ottavia. The schemes of Poppea see that the philosopher Seneca (the emblem of stoicism) be made to commit suicide. This work is very important in many papers, mainly for its librettist Busenello and his ties to the Academia degli Incognito.
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Claudio Monteverdi, L’Incoronazione di Poppea (“TheCoronation of Poppea”) (1643)
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The opera recounts the love of Dido (Queen of Carthage) forthe Trojan hero Aeneas, and her subsequent anguish when he leaves her. Thelament occurs at the end of the work when Dido bid adieu to Aeneas, to whom sheprofesses that she will die after his death. The ground bass reinforces thislink, reinscribing the lament continuously throughout the encounter. Specialnote, on the soundtrack to Band ofBrothers, Dido’s lament is scored instrumentally and renamed “Nixon’s Walk.”
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Henry Purcell, Dido and Aeneas, “When I am Laid to Rest” (1680) (aka. Dido’s Lament)
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The infamous intermezzo that sparked the Qurelle des Bouffons, this two–acter describes the plotting of a maid servant to marry her master. Remarkably, the work inverts the social order, by showing the clever maid manipulating the curmudgeonly master—an inversion that we would continue to see in longer Opera buffa like Mozart’s Figaro.
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Giovanni Pergolesi, La Serva Padrona (1733)
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Written in the wake of Queen Caroline’s death, who was afriend of Handel and an amateur musician herself. Receiving the text from thesub–dean of Westminister abbey, based on passages from the book of Job andLamentations. Handel would later parody the work in his 1739 Oratorio Israel in Egypt, in which the dourcharacter of the anthem is translated into the oppression experienced by theIsraelites suffering in Egypt and mourning the death of Joseph. The connectionbetween the anthem and oratorio lend a retrospective biblical subtext to theQueen’s death, just as Joseph’s death takes on a more regal bearing.
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G.F. Handel, FuneralAnthem for Queen Caroline (“The Ways of Zion do Mourn”) (1737)
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As figures like Christoph Wolff (1991) and John Butt (1991) have already studied, the mass may have been assembled for a variety of purposes such as for the Catholic court in Dresden (given the Catholic orientation of the work) or even for the court of Frederick the Great (unlikely given the Enlightened atmosphere of the court). Today, it is more likely assumed the work was composed as a specimen book, collecting the various different styles from the past two hundred: the material spans from the stile antico of Palestrina (Kyrie II) through to anticipating the more progressive styles of the Galant (Christe Eleison) (c.F Robert Marshall, “Bach the Progressive.” Also of interest is the passacaglia descending lament bass from the Credo, “Crucifixus” (itself based on the early Cantata, Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Zagen).
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J.S. Bach, Mass in BMinor (1749)
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Haydn was inspired to write the work during his two London tours where he was exposed to the large–scale work of the Handel oratorio. The work is comprised of three sources: genesis, the book of Psalms, and John Milton’s Paradise Lost. In the final form of the oratorio, the text is structured as recitative passages of the text of Genesis, often set to minimal accompaniment, interspersed with choral and solo passages setting Swieten's original poetry to music. Swieten incorporated excerpts from Psalms for choral movements. The showstopper comes at the moment that God creates the sun (“And god said, let their be light”), during which the orchestra enters on a surprising and sublime moment (c.f. Emily Dolan, The Work of the Orchestra in Haydn’s Creation).
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Franz Joseph Haydn, The Creation (1798)
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An intervention against the notion that counterpoint is abstract or devoid of signification. Rather, Yeardsley asserts that counterpoint in Bach’s day was saturated with ideological, social, political, and theological meaning. For instance: (1) Death and Counterpoint, a practice of using counterpoint to contemplate death as the perfection of counterpoint became an expression of god’s perfection, (2) alchemy and music, taking contrapuntal basics and combining them into priceless treasures; (3) counterpoint and class, as the “Musical Offering” is a means of prostrating Bach to Frederick the Great, (4) Bach as Machine, as the “Art of Fugue” functions as a kind of meta–music or proto algorithmic music.
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David Yearsley
Bach and the Meaning of Counterpoint 2002 |
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A biography of Bach, told from the view of a “musical science,” comparing Enlightenment beliefs like Newton’s notion of Gravity to the learned style of J.S. Bach. Wolff depicts Bach’s style as a kind of natural philosophy. This manifests in many ways: (1) his emphatic and consistent application of counterpoint, (2) development of the compositional arts, (3) keyboard virtuosity and development of new manual and pedal techniques, (4) intense development of musical insturment technology, (5) ability to synthesize above elements of the musical science into a unified structure.
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Christoph Wolff
Johann Sebastian Bach: The Learned Musician 2000 |
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Begins with Berger’s thesis of cyclic versus linear time and music (c.f. Bach’s Cycles/Mozart’s arrows) exploring whether the amorphous attitudes suggested by Berger (and John Butt) can be actually mapped on to music in a specific way. She journeys through various notions of time (clocks, scientific time, leisure time) and explores how they might manifest in Bach’s music (esp. the passions).
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Bettina Varwig
Metaphors of Time and Modernity in Bach 2012 |
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Looks at Bach’s compositions after 1730, tracing how the composer adopts more progressive idioms. He suggest this influence comes from two sources: (1) the influence of the more progressive electorate in Dresden, (2) his participation in the Collegium Musicum (a learned soceity of amateurs that discussed philosophy). In the music (esp. the secular cantatas of the period), we can hear the influence of the Galant (c.f. Christe Eleison from Mass in B minor)
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Robert Marshall
Bach the Progressive: Observations on his Later Work 1976 |
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Berger argues that as Europe’s notion of time was transformed, so too was their conception of usic. The turning point was roughly in the middle of the 18th century. When it came to thinking about music, Bach’s world was still largely medieval: a cyclic world that was pervaded by God’s eternity. By Mozart’s era, on the other hand, this began to breakdown, as time became secularized, dynamic, and linear.
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Karol Berger
Bach’s Cycles, Mozart’s Arrow: An Essay on the Origins of Musical Modernity 2007 |
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Traces a line of continuation from Palestrina (via Frescobaldi, Schutz, and Fux) to Bach. Looks at the ways in which the Stile Antico is leveraged in Bach’s output, almost consistently deployed to underscore Latin liturgical music. For our purposes, see Kyrie II from the Mass in B Minor
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Christoph Wolff
Bach and the Tradition of the Palestrina Style Bach: Essays on His Life and Music 1991 |
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Bach's Mass in B minor
Stile Antico versus Moderno Passacaglia |
As figures like Christoph Wolff (1991) and John Butt (1991) have already studied, the mass may have been assembled for a variety of purposes such as for the Catholic court in Dresden (given the Catholic orientation of the work) or even for the court of Frederick the Great (unlikely given the Enlightened atmosphere of the court). Today, it is more likely assumed the work was composed as a specimen book, collecting the various different styles from the past two hundred: the material spans from the stile antico of Palestrina (Kyrie II) through to anticipating the more progressive styles of the Galant (Christe Eleison) (c.F Robert Marshall, “Bach the Progressive.” Also of interest is the passacaglia descending lament bass from the Credo, “Crucifixus” (itself based on the early Cantata, Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Zagen).
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A look at specific kind of musical repetition—the chaccone. McClary charts how each iteration of this essentially consistent pattern was imbued with a unique social and cultural meaning. Indeed, the meaning of these partns differed drastically from time and place: the origins from New World mexico of liberation and moral corruption, the Italian Ciaccona where it worked its way into monody, but as an allusion to dance; the French Chaccone where the dance rhythms were subordinated to ornaments and contrapuntal virtuosity (before Lully made it for dance again).
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Susan McClary
Cycles of Repetition: Chacon, Ciaconna, Chaconne, and “the Chaconne” Reading Music: Selected Essays 2007 |
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Manuscripts of Italian keyboard music from the early 17th century often contain textual problems. Schulenberg examines pieces by Ercole Pasquini and Frescobaldi, offering suggestions with rhythms, articulation, and ornamentation.
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David Schulenberg
Some Problems of Text, Attribution, and Performance in Early Italian Baroque Music 1998 |
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An intervention into the prevailing tendency to ignore solo instrumental pieces. While there are scant records for much solo instrumental music, Silbiger suggests that such music—played by the violin, recorder, organist, harpsichordist, lutenist, guitarist—could be heard in many important venues—the church, chapel, monastery, palaces, taverns, and homes—but it was likely so incorporated into the fabric of musical life that no one discusses it.
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Alexander Silbiger
Fantasy and Craft: The Solo Instrumentalist CH17 2005 |
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A general look at the realities of musical life in Dresden with the accesnsion of Georg II, the elector of Saxony. With Kapelmeister Heinrich Schutz, the court’s performing forces were expanded and took on a more Italianate (and quasi operatic) quality.
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Mary Frandsen
The Italianate Hopfkappelle of Johann Georg II, 1656–80 Crossing Confessional Boundaries 2006 |
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While most Lutheran worship during the 16th c. was restricted to chorales and scripture verses, by the 17th c. a new form of devotional music emerged, influenced by a new ideological trend that emphasized an interiorized source of piety, increasingly informed by the language and concepts of medieval mysticism. As a result, throughout the 17th c. we begin to see an influx of devotional music.
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Mary Frandsen
Music and Devotion in the Schutz Era |
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An anlysis of Schutz’s “Musicalische Exequiewm,” which was written for the funeral of Heinrich Reuss. Varwig builds on the typical narrative—that the piece symbolizes the sublimity of a well–prepared passage from life, to death, to afterlife—complicating it with the era’s own conflicted notion of death (everyone was dying during the 30 year war!!). In short, the Lutheran notion of death was transformed during the 30 year war.
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Bettina Varwig
Life, Death, and Afterlife Histories of Heinrich Schutz 2011 |
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Letters that depict the detioriorating conditionsin the court of Georg II, as Schutz atrempted to get through the 30 year war. Provides an overview of Schutz’s life (including the story of mentored by Giovanni Gabrielli) and requests that he be replaced, or that he be given an assistant.
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Heinrich Schutz
Memorandum to the Elector of Saxony Strunk Source Reader 1651 |
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Heinrich Schutz
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1585–1672
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Johan Georg II
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Elector of Saxony
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Thirty Year War (Dates)
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1618–1648
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Schutz's Funeral Music (a piece)
Who was it written for? What is it comprised of? What are major ideological streams? |
Musikalische Exequien (“Funeral Music”) (1635–36)
Written for the funeral service of the Count of Reuss–Gera. The piece unfolds over three sections, featuring a motet and two larger chorus pieces. Varwig (“Death, Life and Afterlife” from The Lives of Heinrich Schutz) mention this “echo” effect, which was often deployed by composers to suggest a connection to the beyond—emphasized by the Gabrielli effect of the antiphonal choir). The three effects are: (1) a prevailing tendency that the delights of the afterlife cannot be depicted musically, so the echo obfuscates the text; (2) it is important to remember that this fullfilled the role of the funeral rite during a period (30 Year War) when people were dying on mass. Musical and verbal tribute of this nature elevated the deceased over the dead. |
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––– comes against the Received Said model (RSM) which holds that Orientalist styles are merely related to previous orientalisms (the discourses of the Orient), foreclosing any productive interaction between the self and other through music. ––– instead suggests that the reality is more complex and that the Hindostannie air represents not merely an understanding of the self through the other, but also the other’s impact on the self.
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Nicholas Cook
Encountering the Other, Redefining the Self: Hindostannie Airs, Haydn’s Folksong Settings and the Common Practice Style Music and Orientalism in the British Empire |
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The third book in a trilogy dresbin gthe history and development of “classical” music from 1720–1780, from the beginning of the Galant through to the foundation of the 1st Viennese school. Heartz engages in useful compare and contrast, tempering his history by looking at the subtle differences between composers and works.
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Daniel Heartz: Mozart, Haydn, and Early Beethoven, 1781–1802 2009
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A reception history of Haydn’s music during the early 19th century. ––– looks at the reception of Haydn’s music and traces the fault line when modes of listening shift from an 18th century Enlightenment model of rhetoric to a 19th c. Romanticism model of contemplation. Haydn appears to straddle this fault line, as listeners talk about his music very differently than they do Beethoven.
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Mark Evan Bonds Rhetoric versus Truth: Listening to Haydn in the Age of Beethoven Haydn and the Performance of Rhetoric 2007
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We know that Prince Esterhazy was a great lover of spoken theatre, and there is even evidence to suggest that Haydn composed incidently music for these performances (including rumour of music for Hamelt). ––– speculates that music of these “lost” works were actually incorporated into Haydn’s symphonic pieces. Indeed, she speculates that much of the music exemplifying the Sturm and Drang was either originally destined for the stage, or composed with a view towards later overtures and ent’ractes. In short, Haydn’s music can perhaps be better understood through a dramatic lens rather than a traditional (absolute) music lens.
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Elaine Sisman Haydn’s Theater Symphonies 1990
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Haydn’s Tageszeiten Symphonies, three four–movement symphonic works, each about a different time of day (morning, midday, evening) offers us not only a glimpse at Haydn’s own rhetorical language regarding the movement of the suns (themes that would reemerge at the end of the 17c with The Creation and The Seasons), but also located these themes in the dominant Enlightenment ideas about time and the sun.
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Elaine Sisman Haydn’s Solo PoeticsL The Tagzeiten Symphonies and Enlightenment Knowledge 2013
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––– makes an intervention against Romantic periodization as defined by the ascendancy of “absolute music.” Rather, she sees the switch from enlightenment to romantic ideology as founded in the orchestra and the effects that it is able to produce. Looking at Haydn’s Creation as an example, she sees romanticist discourses emerging from the composer’s careful management of expectation—the incredible creation of light (as a surprising moment) is an effect precisely becausr the audience does not expect it, a musical mode that counters the gallant mode of expectation.
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Emily Dolan The Work of the Orchestra in Haydn’s Creation 2010
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A look at the orthographic context underlying Monteverdi’s works, from orfeo, Arianna, the 1610 Vespers, and Ballo delle Ingrade
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Tim Carter
Musical Sources The Cambridge Companion to Monteverdi 2007 |
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Rhetoric of Seduction
Rhetoric of Lament Explores the ways that gender is constructed in Monteverdi’s operas by looking at 17th century sources of sexual identity, namely strength of oration and rhetoric. She argues that gender identity was constructed throughout musical techniques that “convince” the listener, like an orator—masculine identity being skilled in this, while feminine (innocent) identity be clumbsy. Looking at Orfeo, Euridice, and Poppea through this lens, we can see not only how sexuality manifested, but also how it changed over the course of the early 17th century. This begins to breakdown because of Marino |
Susan McClary
Concstruction of Gender in Monteverdi's Dramatic Music 1989 |
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Traces the descending tetrachord from Monteverdi to Cavalli and beyond, looking at how it was transformed (musically, narratively, semiotically) as an emblem of the lament.
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Ellen Rosand
The Descending Tetrachord: An Emblem of Lament 1979 |
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looks at the gender politics implied by the Monteverdi–Artusi debate, nothing the way Artusi essentially argues that modern music in feminine, and that it feminizes its listener. Monteverdi, on the other hand, argues that modern music is masculine. In doing so, he begins the discourse of composer as a male entity that continues to persist throughout music history.
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Suzanne Cusick
Gendering Modern Music: Thoughts on the Artusi–Monteverdi Controversy 1993 |
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--- pushes against the commonly held belief that Monteverdi’s late madrigals (book 7 and onward) which are much more complicated than the previous ones, are operating under a more modern Marino framework. Rather, these works are neoclassical in inspiration, coming from a platonic influence.
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Geoffrey Chew
The Platonic Agenda of Monteverdi's Seconda Prattica: A Case Study from the 8th book of Madrigals 1993 |
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Being Monteverdi’s last opera, L’Incoranazione is a surprisingly erratic work. It’s the first surviving historical opera, but everyone seems to get a happy ending. The incogniti influence is also confusing, as the work is dedicated to Francesco Landano (leader of the Incogniti) and the incogniti influence would explain the livaciousness throughout the work. There is no one to empathize with!
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Tim Carter
L'Incoranzione di Poppea Monteverdi's Musical Theatre 2002 |
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The erotic triangle between Nero–Popea–Otho in L’Incoranazione di poppea is given a political lens as the women of Poppea signify the decay of Roman society (then, contrasted aginst Venice). Here, Venetian gender politics map onto the characters Ottavia, Poppea, and Drusilla. Octavia, in particular, is cast narratively and musically in a tragic light, which Heller reads as a mutation of the politics present in the original source by Tacitus (likely because of the Incogniti influence).
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Wendy Heller
Disprezzata Regina: Women and Empire Emblems of Eloquence: opera and Women's Voices in 17th Century Venice 2004 |
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In defense of Rosand’s interpretation, Heller offers a reading of L’Incoranazione that looks at the opera and the Incogniti influence on parts of a conservative political ideology that simultaneously celebrates venice as a conservative bastion and a liberal excess. This dualism was cast along gendered lines, where the social gratification of men was celebrated against the sexual condemnation of women. Seneca and Tacitus were an important part of this discourse, with incogniti values denigrating both (esp. Seneca).
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Wendy Heller
Tacitus Incognito: Opera as History in "L'Incoranazione di Poppea" 1999 |
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The author looks at long melissmas occurring in seemingly inappropriate words (like on “the” for 4 measures rather than the following words “beauty”) and tracks this aesthetic to the Accademie degli Incogniti, an academy active during the 1630s. This group emphasized an aesthetic that foregrounded: (1) the concept of nothingness, and (2) the singing of the nightingale. It was these twin tropes that created the vocal excessiveness that arcadians disparaged at the beginning of the 18th century.
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Mauro Calcagno
Signifying Nothing: On the Aesthetics of Pure Voice in Early Venetian Operas 2003 |
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Was one of the first articles to explore the impact of Incogniti ideology on Poppea. In specific, Rosand argues that the uncertainty (moral/political/social) is rooted in Incogniti dialectics between Nero’s need for instant gratification and Seneca’s reward beyond the grave. Furthering this plurality is the simultaneous celebration of Rome’s decadence and condemnation of its excess. The dueling ideologies hinge on Seneca’s death at the midpoint of the opera. Monteverdi’s music doesn’t cooperate with this program though…
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Ellen Rosand
Seneca and the Interpretation of L'Incoranazione di Poppea 1985 |
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An important early intervention against the male dominated music history, this one looking at Franceca Caccini, a musica (all–around musician) for the Medici court from 1600s to the late 1630s. She is widely celebrated as the first woman composer of opera. In Caccini’s output, we can see how the court likely perceived her as an object deployed to service the pleasure and interests of the patron: Nevertheless, there is evidence to believe she was also able to leverage her gender to curry favor in the court.
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Suzzane Cuscik
Francesca Caccini at the Medici Court: Music and the Circulation of Power 2009 |
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An investigation into the weeds of early 17c opera in Venice. The Glixons delve into production of the business, delving into the various roles and social dynamics built into this emerging market.
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Beth and Jonathan Glixon
Inventing the Business of Opera: The Impressario and His World in 17c. Venice 2006 |
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While courtly and academic opera was an important foundation for the public (or mercenario, says Ottoneli) opera in Venice, this latter form was closely tied to the unique sociopolitical structure of the Venetian republic, closely entwining with different publics (aristocratic and peasantry) within its evolving structures and markets.
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Ellen Rosand
Origins and Sources Opera in 17c. Venice: The Creation of a Genre 2007 |
