Modal Subjectivities

by McClary, Susan

• ISBN13: 9780520234932
• ISBN10: 0520234936
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2004-12-01
• Publisher: Univ of California Pr

Summary

In this boldly innovative book, renowned musicologist Susan McClary presents an illuminating cultural interpretation of the Italian madrigal, one of the most influential repertories of the Renaissance. A genre that sought to produce simulations in sound of complex interiorities, the madrigal introduced into music a vast range of new signifying practices: musical representations of emotions, desire, gender stereotypes, reason, madness, tensions between mind and body, and much more. In doing so, it not only greatly expanded the expressive agendas of European music but also recorded certain assumptions of the time concerning selfhood, making it an invaluable resource for understanding the history of Western subjectivity. Modal Subjectivitiescovers the span of the sixteenth-century polyphonic madrigal, from its early manifestations in Philippe Verdelot's settings of Machiavelli in the 1520s through the tortured chromatic experiments of Carlo Gesualdo. Although McClary takes the lyrics into account in shaping her readings, she focuses particularly on the details of the music itself--the principal site of the genre's self-fashionings. In order to work effectively with musical meanings in this pretonal repertory, she also develops an analytical method that allows her to unravel the sophisticated allegorical structures characteristic of the madrigal. This pathbreaking book demonstrates how we might glean insights into a culture on the basis of its nonverbal artistic enterprises.

Author Biography

Susan McClary is Professor of Musicology at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Table of Contents

List of Examples	vii
Acknowledgments	ix
Introduction: The Cultural Work of the Madrigal	1	(37)
Night and Deceit: Verdelot's Machiavelli	38	(19)
The Desiring Subject, or Subject to Desire: Arcadelt	57	(21)
Radical Inwardness: Willaert's Musica nova	78	(23)
The Prisonhouse of Mode: Cipriano de Rore	101	(21)
A Coney Island of the Madrigal: Wert and Marenzio	122	(24)
The Luxury of Solipsism: Gesualdo	146	(24)
The Mirtillo/Amarilli Controversy: Monteverdi	170	(24)
I modi	194	(27)
Appendix: Examples	221	(148)
Index	369