The Gesualdo Hex – Music, Myth, and Memory - Hardcover

Watkins, Glenn

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0393071022 ISBN 13: 9780393071023

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2010

Synopsis

In this vivid tale of adultery and intrigue, witchcraft and murder, Glenn Watkins explores the fascinating life of the Renaissance composer Carlo Gesualdo―a life suffused with scandal and bordering on the fantastical. An isolated prince, Gesualdo had a personal life that was no less eccentric and bewildering than the music he composed; his biography has often clouded our perception of his oeuvre, which music scholars have periodically dismissed as a late Renaissance deformation of little consequence.

Today, however, Gesualdo’s music, once deemed so strange as to be unperformable, stands as one of the most vibrant legacies of the late Italian Renaissance with an undeniable impact on a host of twentieth-century musicians and artists. The incendiary details of Gesualdo’s life recede, and his grip on our musical imagination comes to the fore. Watkins challenges our preconceptions of what has become a nearly mythic persona, weaving together the cumulative experience of some of the most vibrant artists of the past century from Stravinsky and Schoenberg to Abbado and Herzog.

Beyond questions of mere influence, however, The Gesualdo Hex offers a profound meditation on cultural memory and historical awareness: how composers attempt to shape the legacy they will bequeath to the world, and how music and history inevitably take on a new guise as they are revisited by subsequent generations and reinterpreted in light of contemporary experience. In examining Gesualdo’s life, music, myth, and memory intertwine with one another to reveal an uncanny affinity with our own time. With his elegant and engaging prose, Watkins asks us to grapple with our understanding not only of art and the artists who create it but also of history itself.

About this title

About the Author

Glenn Watkins is the author of four books, including Proof Through the Night: Music and the Great War and Gesualdo: The Man and His Music, and is coeditor of Gesualdo’s complete works. He lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

From the Back Cover

"An amazingly rich book with shocking news about Gesualdo's life and elegantly wise thoughts about avant-garde composing in the 1950s. Gesualdo's music is the guide through this labyrinth." --Louis Andriessen

"Watkins' book sheds light on the emergence of Gesualdo's oeuvre and its peculiar identification with musical modernity, the latter being taken in its most general (or better, contradictory) sense. This unexpected encounter, as this book demonstrates, did not happen by chance but was due rather to a resurgence, a swelling tide." --Pierre Boulez

"Glenn Watkins brings together his twin passions: Gesualdo and the twentieth-century experimentalists who heard in the music of this Renaissance visionary a distant echo of their own bold stylistic moves. Balancing detailed evidence with reflections on the often unexpected course of cultural history, The Gesualdo Hex represents a magnificent capstone to a distinguished career." --Susan McClary, Distinguished Professor of Music, UCLA

"The sweep of Watkins' book is truly impressive. His grasp of the milieus of Schoenberg, Stravinsky, and Boulez is as complete as it is of Gesualdo himself. Watkins has devoted his life to the study of this melancholic man--and it shows. The book is destined to become a classic." --Peter Phillips, director, the Tallis Scholars

"Thirty-five years after publishing Gesualdo's still-definitive life and works, Glenn Watkins offers remarkable new biographical information, and searching and provocative musings about the composer's surprisingly significant place in our musical culture." --Richard Cohn, professor of music, Yale University

Edition details

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2010
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0393071022
• ISBN 13: 9780393071023
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 400