City Culture and the Madrigal at Venice

Martha Feldman

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2023
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9780520310759
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Classical Music

Martha Feldman's exploration of sixteenth-century Venetian madrigals centers on the importance to the Venetians of Ciceronian rhetorical norms, which emphasized decorum through adherence to distinct stylistic levels. She shows that Venice easily adapted these norms to its long-standing mythologies of equilibrium, justice, peace, and good judgment. Feldman explains how Venetian literary theorists conceived variety as a device for tempering linguistic extremes and thereby maintaining moderation. She further shows how the complexity of sacred polyphony was adapted by Venetian music theorists and composers to achieve similar ends.   At the same time, Feldman unsettles the kinds of simplistic alignments between the collectivity of the state and its artistic production that have marked many historical studies of the arts. Her rich social history enables a more intricate dialectics among sociopolitical formations; the roles of individual printers, academists, merchants, and others; and the works of composers and poets. City Culture offers a new model for situating aesthetic products in a specific time and place, one that sees expressive objects not simply against a cultural backdrop but within an integrated complex of cultural forms and discursive practices.

Many titles in the Voices Revived program are also newly available as ebooks, offered at a discounted price to support wider access to scholarly work.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS 1
• TABLES AND FIGURES
• PLATES
• ABBREVI ATIONS
• PREFACE
• Part 1. PATRONS AND ACADEMIES IN THE CITY
• Chapter 1 FLEXIBILITY IN THE BODY SOCIAL
• Chapter 2 FLORENTINES IN VENICE AND THE MADRIGAL AT HOME
• Chapter 3 PETRARCHIZING THE PATRON Vernacular Dialogics and Print Technology
• Chapter 4 RITUAL LANGUAGE, NEW MUSIC Encounters in the Academy of Domenico Venier
• Part 2. RHETORICAL UNDERPINNINGS
• Chapter 5 CURRENTS IN VENETIAN LITE RARY AND LINGUISTIC THEORY The Consolidation of Poetry and Rhetoric
• Chapter 6 CURRENTS IN VENETIAN M USIC THEORY The Consolidation of Music und Rhetoric
• Parts 3 • PETRARCHISM AND THE REPERTORY OF VENETIAN MADRIGALS
• Chapter 7 THE MADRIGALS OF ADRIAN WILLAERT
• Chapter 8 THE ENIGMA OF RORE Books One and Two for Five Voices
• Chapter 9 WILLAERT’S PROTEGES AT SAN MARCO Codification, Dissemination, and Subversion
• Chapter 10 EPILOGUE “SOPRA LE STANZE DEL PETRARCA IN LAUDE DELLA MADONNA” Rore’s Vergine Cycle of1548
• APPENDIX: DOCUMENTS CITED IN CHAPTER 3
• SELECTIVE BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX