ABSTRACT

Eroticism in Early Modern Music contributes to a small but significant literature on music, sexuality, and sex in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe. Its chapters have grown from a long dialogue between a group of scholars, who employ a variety of different approaches to the repertoire: musical and visual analysis; archival and cultural history; gender studies; philology; and performance. By confronting musical, literary, and visual sources with historically situated analyses, the book shows how erotic life and sensibilities were encoded in musical works. Eroticism in Early Modern Music will be of value to scholars and students of early modern European history and culture, and more widely to a readership interested in the history of eroticism and sexuality.

chapter |18 pages

Introduction

Encoding the Musical Erotic

chapter 2|16 pages

Fa mi la mi so la

The Erotic Implications of Solmization Syllables

chapter 4|32 pages

Imitating the Rustic and Revealing the Noble

Masculine Power and Music at the Court of Ferrara

chapter 6|31 pages

“Non è sì denso velo”

Hidden and Forbidden Practice in Wert's Ottavo libro de madrigali a cinque voci (Venice: Gardano, 1586)

chapter 7|28 pages

“Lo Here I Burn”

Musical Figurations and Fantasies of Male Desire in Early Modern England

chapter 8|23 pages

Ovid's Ironic Gaze

Voyeurism, Rape, and Male Desire in Cavalli's La Calisto

chapter 9|34 pages

“Precious” Eroticism and Hidden Morality

Salon Culture and the Mid-Seventeenth-Century French Air