Eroticism in Early Modern Music [Hardcover]

Eroticism in Early Modern Musiccontributes to a small but significant literature on music, sexuality, and sex in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe. Its chapters have grown from a long dialogue between a group of scholars, who employ a variety of different approaches to the repertoire: musical and visual analysis; archival and cultural history; gender studies; philology; and performance. By confronting musical, literary, and visual sources with historically situated analyses, the book shows how erotic life and sensibilities were encoded in musical works. Eroticism in Early Modern Musicwill be of value to scholars and students of early modern European history and culture, and more widely to a readership interested in the history of eroticism and sexuality.

Contents: Preface; Introduction: encoding the musical erotic, Laurie Stras; The lascivious career of B-flat, Bonnie J. Blackburn; Fa mi la mi so la: the erotic implications of solmization syllables, Leofranc Holford-Strevens; Unmasking salacious subtexts in Lassos Neapolitan songs, Donna G. Cardamone; Imitating the rustic and revealing the noble: masculine power and music at the court of Ferrara, Melanie L. Marshall; The Ways (I Modi) of black-note erotica, Vanessa Blais-Tremblay; Non ? s? denso velo: hidden and forbidden practice in Werts Ottavo libro de madrigali a cinque voci (Venice: Gardano, 1586), Laurie Stras; Lo Here I Burn: musical figurations and fantasies of male desire in early modern England, Linda Phyllis Austern; Ovids ironic gaze: voyeurism, rape, and male desire in Cavallis La Calisto, Wendy Heller; Precious eroticism and hidden morality: salon culture and the mid-17th-century French air, Catherine Gordon-Seifert; Eroticized mourning in Henry Purcells Elegy for MarylÓ%