Voice, Slavery, and Race in Seventeenth-Century Florence

by Wilbourne, Emily

• ISBN13: 9780197646915
• ISBN10: 0197646913
• eBook ISBN(s): 9780197646922
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2023-11-17
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• More Book Details

Summary

Grounded in new archival research documenting a significant presence of foreign and racially-marked individuals in Medici Florence, this book argues for the relevance of such individuals to the history of Western music and for the importance of sound-particularly musical and vocal sounds-to systems of racial and ethnic difference. Many of the individuals discussed in these pages were subject to enslavement or conditions of unfree labor; some labored at tasks that were explicitly musical or theatrical, while all intersected with sound and with practices of listening that afforded full personhood only to particular categories of people. Integrating historical detail alongside contemporary performances and musical conventions, this book makes the forceful claim that operatic musical techniques were-from their very inception-imbricated with racialized differences. Author Emily Wilbourne offers both a macro and micro approach to the content of this book. The first half of the volume draws upon a wide range of archival, theatrical and historical sources to articulate the theoretical interdependence of razza (lit. "race"), voice, and music in early modern Italy; the second half focuses on the life and work of a specific, racially-marked individual: the enslaved, Black, male soprano singer, Giovannino Buonaccorsi (fl.1651-1674). Voice, Slavery, and Race in Seventeenth-Century Florence reframes the place of racial difference in Western art music and provides a compelling pre-history to later racial formulations of the sonic.

Author Biography

Emily Wilbourne is Associate Professor of Musicology at Queens College and the Graduate Center in the City University of New York. She has previously published Seventeenth-Century Opera and the Sound of the Commedia dell'Arte (2016) and Lesbian/Opera: Elena Kats-Chernin's Iphis and Matricide: The Musical (2022); a collection of essays, co-edited with Suzanne G. Cusick, Acoustemologies in Contact: Sounding Subjects and Modes of Listening in Early Modernity (2021) is available via open access.

Table of Contents

Prologo
Introduction

ACT ONE
Scene 1: Songs to Entertain Foreign Royalty
Scene 2: Comic Songs Imitating Foreign Voices
Scene 3: Music all'usanza loro (or Performed in a Foreign Way)
Scene 4: "Turkish Music" in Italy
Scene 5: Trumpets and Drums Played by Enslaved Musicians
Scene 6: Scholarly Transcriptions of Foreign Musical Sounds
Scene 7: Music Proper to Enslaved Singers

Intermezzo: Thinking from Enslaved Lives

ACT TWO
Scene 8: Introducing Giovannino Buonaccorsi
Scene 9: Buonaccorsi Sings on the Florentine Stage
Scene 10: Buonaccorsi as Court Jester
Scene 11: Buonaccorsi as a Black Gypsy
Scene 12: Buonaccorsi as a Soprano
Scene 13: Buonaccorsi Sings on the Venetian Stage

Intermezzo II: Thinking from Giovannino Buonaccorsi's Life
Epilogo (Axiomatic)
Index