Music and the Language of Love : Seventeenth-Century French Airs / Catherine Gordon-Seifert.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Gordon, Catherine E. (Catherine Elizabeth)

Series:

Musical meaning and interpretation.

Music and the early modern imagination.

Musical meaning and interpretation

Music and the early modern imagination

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Love in music.

Love songs--France--17th century--History and criticism.

Love songs.

Music--France--17th century--History and criticism.

Music.

Genre:

Electronic books.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (409 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Bloomington : Indiana University Press, c2011.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Simple songs or airs, in which a male poetic voice either seduces or excoriates a female object, were an influential vocal genre of the French Baroque era. In this comprehensive and interdisciplinary study, Catherine Gordon-Seifert analyzes the style of airs, which was based on rhetorical devices of lyric poetry, and explores the function and meaning of airs in French society, particularly the salons. She shows how airs deployed in both text and music an encoded language that was in sensuous contrast t

Contents:

Music and texts: an overview of the sources: A general description of the air ; The publications ; The composers ; Publications by Lambert, Bacilly, La Barre, and Le Camus: a description ; The song texts ; Poetic structure ; Style or elocution: figurative language and poetic syntax ; Poetry and rhetoric

Rhetoric and meaning in the seventeenth-century French air: Seventeenth-century French sources on rhetoric and music ; Persuading the passions

Musical representations of the primary passions: The primary passions ; The agitated passions ; The modest passions ; The neutral passion: Le contentement ; Summary

Setting the texts: Painful love ; Bittersweet love ; Enticing love ; Joyous love ; Summary

Form and style: the organization and function of expressions, syntax, and rhetorical figures: Form (disposition) ; The organization of expressions in short airs ; The organization of expressions in long airs ; Form in single-strophe airs ; The rhetorical sections of a piece: their function and expression ; Style (elocution): poetic structure, punctuation, and rhetorical figures

L'art du chant: performing French airs: À haute voix: the importance of orality ; The art of proper singing: tone and style ; Ornamentation ; The pronunciation of seventeenth-century French ; Syllabic quantity ; Tempo ; Le mouvement ; Repeats ; Basso continuo accompaniment

Salon culture and the mid-seventeenth-century French air: The French air and conversation ; Musical seductions ; Galanterie and the air: undercurrents of eroticism and lessons of morality ; Women singing airs as men

The late-seventeenth-century air and the rhetoric of distraction ; The air after 1670 ; Songs and the rhetoric of distraction ; Pleasure, airs, and the new rhetoric ; The legacy of Lambert, Bacilly, Le Camus, and La Barre.

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references (p. [345]-367) and index.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

1-283-23577-3

9786613235770

0-253-00085-8

OCLC:

747411069