Full Description
The entanglement of music and literature of the early modern period is rich with exchanges, dialogues, and disputes. These entanglements present a fascinating counterpoint to early modernity, and in many ways serve as complicit witnesses to their times and places. The Routledge Companion to Early Modern Music and Literature considers musico-literary production from the period 1500-1800, as well as its contemporary resonances, and seeks to unpick these often knotty intersections.
Following in the footsteps of The Routledge Companion to Music and Modern Literature (edited by Rachael Durkin, Peter Dayan, Axel Englund, and Katharina Clausius), the 28 chapters within consider this transformative time through four thematic groupings—music and early modern writings, political voices, staging the early modern, and afterlives—and invite readers to marvel at the miscellany of interactions between early modern musics and literatures from the sixteenth to the twenty-first centuries. This Companion is therefore a valuable addition to the bookshelves of those looking to grapple with the early modern musico-literary relationship.
Contents
Prologue: Intermedial Earliness,
Part I: Music and Early Modern Writings, Writing the Music of the 'New World': Representing Alterity in Early Modern French Accounts of Tupinamba Songs, Translating Echoes: British interpretations of Indian rāgamālā poetry and painting in the eighteenth century, The Spring Grass Studio Anthology of Qin Music and Musical Writings (Chuncaotang qinpu): A Vignette of Music, Prose, and Literati Ideals in Eighteenth-Century Hangzhou, China, Popularising the Morris Dance in William Kemp's Nine Daies Wonder, Thwick-a-thwack: Metallic Music in Early Modern London, Composer Anecdotes and the Musical Press in the Late 18th Century, Pudica Siren: Multilingual Poetic Tributes to the Italian Singer Leonora Baroni in Seicento Rome,
Part II: Political Voices, Ballads, Ayres, and Collective Memory in the Performance of Refrains in Early Modern England, Moll Cutpurse, Mad Tom, and the Politics of Noise in Early Modern London, Unsung Songs: Sonic Histories in 'Thomas of Woodstock', Pastoral Allegories in 16th-Century Madrigals: A Symbolic Framework for Crisis and Rebirth, The Medium of Life: Learned Wit in the Catch and Glee Repertoire, Songs as Pornography in Eighteenth-Century England,
Part III: Staging the Early Modern, Performing Nothing: Shakespeare Plays with Music, Interweaving Song: Communal Female Singing and Sewing on the Early Modern English Stage, 'With Tears I Complain about Thee': Literary Traditions of Lovesickness and Lamenting on the Spanish Musical Stage, Discovery and Disguise: Tracing the Bellman's Cry in Early Modern English Drama, 'Listen to the speech of a good orator': Rhetoric and recitative at the intersection of speech and song, Image, Text, and Sound in Lorenzo da Ponte and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's Così fan tutte (1790), Textual strategies in contemporary Shakespeare opera adaptations: The Tempest (Thomas Adès) and Hamlet (Brett Dean),
Part IV: Early Modern Afterlives, 'I strive thy name to sing': Music, Metaphor and Meaning in 17th-Century English Devotional Lyrics and their modern afterlives, Paracelsus, Fouqué, Hoffmann: Elemental Spirits and the 'Quest for Nature' in German Romantic Literature and Opera, Salon Culture and the Fluid Boundaries of Art in the Early Romantic: The intertwinement of Music and Poetry in Louise Reichardt's Songs, Tolkien, the Gawain-Poet, and Music, 'Pop Petrarchism': The Love Songs by The Beatles as a Petrarchan Songbook, As Others See Us: Robert Burns and National Identity in Scottish Folk and Popular Music 1970s-1980s, Back to Bach: Music and Universality in Richard Powers's The Gold Bug Variations, 'All sorts of flowers that grow up from the earth': John Darnielle's uses of the past.
