VENICE AND THE MADRIGAL IN THE MID-SIXTEENTH CENTURY.

Format:

Book

Thesis/Dissertation

Author/Creator:

Feldman, Martha.

Contributor:

University of Pennsylvania.

Subjects (All):

Music.

0413.

Penn dissertations--Music.

Music--Penn dissertations.

Local Subjects:

Penn dissertations--Music.

Music--Penn dissertations.

0413.

Physical Description:

731 pages

Contained In:

Dissertation Abstracts International 48-08A.

System Details:

Mode of access: World Wide Web.

text file

Summary:

The Musica nova of Adrian Willaert, a large collection of madrigals and motets composed around 1540 to 1545, has long been considered a monument of the Italian Renaissance. The madrigals in this collection explored a new approach to secular music: all but one were grave settings of Petrarch's sonnets, comparable in style to the sacred motets. Willaert's style was codified by his pupils in Venice, principally Perissone Cambio, Girolamo Parabosco, and Baldassare Donato. Related to this style are also the stunning madrigals of Cipriano de Rore's First Book of 1542, whose relationship to Venetian developments is enigmatic.

The austere style of the Venetian madrigal in the 1540s has tended to resist critical explanation. Scholars have drawn broad connections between the Venetian madrigal and a heightened literary consciousness at Venice. But they have said little about the specific realization of Venetian literary ideals in musical practices, or about the mechanisms for the transmission of stylistic ideals between literary figures and musicians.

This thesis attempts to explain the striking changes in Venetian secular style through examination of the indigenous literary culture. The first chapter traces the Ciceronian rhetorical ideals set forth by Bembo in his Prose della volgar lingua (1525) through the generation of Venetian literary theorists that succeeded him at Venice. The second chapter demonstrates how the rhetorical canons of literary theory reshaped the musical ideals of the Venetian theorists, Giovanni del Lago and Gioseffo Zarlino. Chapters 3 to 5 present critical analyses of Venetian madrigals that embodied the values of contemporary literati. Finally, Chapter 6, using the Venetian academy of Domenico Venier, proposes a cultural matrix for the dissemination of literary ideals to musicians in the mid-sixteenth century.

Notes:

Thesis (Ph.D. in Music)--Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, University of Pennsylvania, 1987.

Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 48-08, Section: A, page: 1923.

Local Notes:

School code: 0175.

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