Monteverdi's voices : a poetics of the Madrigal /

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Includes bibliographical references and index.Introduction -- The apprentice composer -- The madrigal "book" -- Monteverdi's performers -- Poetic voices -- Songbirds -- Monteverdi's "mistakes" -- Musical (im)pertinence -- The "representative" style -- Playing with time."Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643) was the leading composer in late Renaissance and early Baroque Italy. In addition to operas and sacred music, he wrote a large corpus of madrigals throughout his long career in Cremona, Mantua, and Venice. These settings for vocal ensemble (later, plus instruments) of Italian lyric, epic, and dramatic poetry were intended for chamber performance. They are microcosms of Italian musical and literary culture of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, an integral part of the intellectual, artistic, and practical worlds of creation and performance at the time. Their poets included the major figures of the day-Torquato Tasso, Battista Guarini, and Giambattista Marino-as well as the classics, not least Petrarch. Their music embraces a wide range of contemporary styles both responding to, and reacting against, trends of the time. Each poem set by Monteverdi posed a number of challenges, forcing him to make choices about how to represent its poetic voice or voices with a group of singers that might not match them in terms of number or gender. How did Monteverdi play with poetry, sound, and time, and with the performers with whom he worked so closely? And what impact do the various answers to these questions have on our own efforts to bring these stunning works alive to modern ears?"--