Monteverdi and the End of the Renaissance - Hardcover

Tomlinson, Gary

4.12

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9780193151512: Monteverdi and the End of the Renaissance

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0193151510 ISBN 13: 9780193151512

Publisher: Clarendon Press, 1987

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This is a study of the secular music of Claudio Monteverdi, the foremost Italian composer of the late Renaissance. Gary Tomlinson bases his narrative on the works themselves - nine books of madrigals, three complete operas and a fragment of a fourth, and numerous canzonette, scherzi, and arie, all written between 1584 and 1642 - but his approach is as much literary and cultural as purely musical. The relationship between music, poetry, and cultural ideology is at the core of the discussion, and Tomlinson pays particular attention to Monteverdi's position within the context of late Renaissance humanist and scholastic values. He also shows that the extraordinary variety of responses to poetry in Monteverdi's music was induced by the wide stylistic diversity of the poems themselves. For Monteverdi, the expressive power of music was a function of its relation to its text, and it is the unceasing imagination he brought to musical transfiguration of poetry which this book continually stresses. A book of interest for scholars and students of the music, literature, and culture of the Italian Renaissance.

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Review:

"In a manner worthy of the comprehensive power of Claudio Monteverdi's own musical intelligence, musicologist Gary Tomlinson has united in this extraordinary and provocative interdisciplinary study the skills of an astute historian with those of a sensitive literary scholar and perceptive music critic."--Barbara R. Hanning, "American Historical Review

About the Author:

Gary Tomlinson is Professor of Music at the University of Pennsylvania and a 1988 MacArthur Fellow.

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