Full Description
One impression that stands out from this collection is the extent to which improvisation was an important factor in all of the arts. As each of the authors assembles a case by ferreting out bits and pieces of information having to do with a single art, the weight of the assembled material lends additional strength to each case. By considering the overall picture that results, as well as that made by each of the individual studies, the reader is able to see much more clearly the role played by improvisation from the late Middle Ages through to the time of Shakespeare and beyond. A careful reading of the essays brings with it the awareness that to ignore improvisation is to distort the art in a major way. In light of the present volume, the very concept of faithful historical re-creation takes on a much broader and more complex character.
Contents
Contents Illustrations Foreward Improvisation in the Arts by Domenico Pietropaolo Music Cantare all'improvviso: Improvising to Poetry in Late Medieval Italy by Timothy J. McGee Performance Practice, Experimental Archaeology, and the Problem of the Respectability of Results by Randall A. Rosenfeld Instrumentalists and Performance Practices in Dance Music, c. 1500 by Keith Polk Dance Improvisation and Embellishment in Popular and Art Dances in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Italy by Barbara Sparti Disorder in Order: Improvisation in Italian Choreographed Dances of the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries by Jennifer Nevile Ornamentation and Improvisation in Sixteenth-Century Dance by G. Yvonne Kendall Drama Improvisation in Medieval Drama by Clifford Davidson Medieval and Modern Deletions of Repellent Passages by Linda Marie Zaerr Shakespeare's Rhetorical Riffs by Jane Freeman The Improvising Vice in Renaissance England by David N. Klausner Art Improvisation in the Visual Arts: The View from Sixteenth-Century Italy by Leslie Korrick Index
