Music and the Language of Love: Seventeenth-Century French Airs

Music and the Language of Love: Seventeenth-Century French Airs
ISBN-10
0253000858
ISBN-13
9780253000859
Category
Music
Pages
408
Language
English
Published
2011-04-07
Publisher
Indiana University Press
Author
Catherine Gordon-Seifert

Description

Simple songs or airs, in which a male poetic voice either seduces or excoriates a female object, were an influential vocal genre of the French Baroque era. In this comprehensive and interdisciplinary study, Catherine Gordon-Seifert analyzes the style of airs, which was based on rhetorical devices of lyric poetry, and explores the function and meaning of airs in French society, particularly the salons. She shows how airs deployed in both text and music an encoded language that was in sensuous contrast to polite society's cultivation of chaste love, strict gender roles, and restrained discourse.

Similar books