Reconsidering the Lament: Form, Content, and Genre in Italian Chamber Recitative Laments: 1600-1640

Scholars have considered Italian chamber recitative laments only a transitional phenomenon between madrigal laments and laments organized on the descending tetrachord bass. However, the recitative lament is distinguished from them by its characteristic attitude toward the relationship between music and text. Composer of Italian chamber recitative laments attempted to express more subtle, refined and sometimes complicated emotion in their music. For that purpose, they intentionally created discrepancies between text and music. Sometimes they even destroy the original structure of text in order to clearly deliver the composer's own voice. The basic syntactic structure is deconstructed and reconstructed along with their reading and according to their intention. The discrepancy between text and music is, however, expectable and natural phenomena since text cannot be completely translated or transformed to music and vice versa. The composers of Italian chamber recitative laments utilized their innate heterogeneity between two materials (music and text) as a metaphor that represents the semantic essence of the genre, the conflict. In this context, Italian chamber recitative laments were a real embodiment of the so-called seconda prattica and through the study of them, finally, we more fully able to understand how the spirit of late Renaissance flourished in Italy in the first four decade of the seventeenth century.

Grantor dc:publisher

University of North Texas

Year dc:date

2004

Author dc:creator

• Chung, Kyung-Young

Contributors dc:contributor

• Brothers, Lester
• Bush, Deanna D.
• Heidlberger, Frank

• Vocal music -- Italy -- 17th century -- History and criticism.
• music
• text
• recitative lament
• composer's voice
• syntactic structure

Statement dc:rights

• Use restricted to UNT Community
• Copyright
• Chung, Kyung-Young
• Copyright is held by the author, unless otherwise noted. All rights reserved.

Language dc:language

English

Identifier

oclc: 60660871
https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc4668/
ark: ark:/67531/metadc4668

OAI identifier oai:identifier

info:ark/67531/metadc4668