16 december 2010

Arms and Love: A Radical Reflection on Text, Metrics, and Music in the Italian Madrigal

Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso (1532) and Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata (1581) belong to the height of Italian literature. Commanding particular attention were the lament-passages they contained, where characters sorrowed over loves unrequited or reft from them by sword and death. For composers desirous of moving their listeners through music, the emotional nature of such texts was irresistible. Already in the sixteenth century Gabrieli, Wert, and Monteverdi (along with a host of lesser-known luminaries) took up these laments, folding into the new madrigal-genre the borrowed themes of arms and love.

While analyses of the relationship between text and music almost always focus on the influence of the text’s meaning, this research focuses instead on the form of the text as a determining factor. I distinguish between those formal features that are specific to the lament as unicum (the textual accents) and the general features of the lament as type (the influence of the stanza). All this to discover the extent to which the lament’s metrical form, with meaning held only as a contributor to this last, shapes and structures the music built upon it.

Alma van der Berg recently defended her doctoral thesis on a literary, metrical and musicological analysis of the laments by Ariosto and Tasso at the University of Amsterdam. She received her Master’s degree (cum laude) in Italian literature at the same university. Originally she is a violinist and a violin teacher, a profession she never left completely. She presented studies on the relationship between text and music in the United States, Italy and Austria. In the last years she taught courses in musico-literary studies in the Department of Musicology and courses about Italian Renaissance literature in the Department of Italian at the University of Amsterdam.