Music and the language of love: seventeenth-century French airs

Abstract

Acknowledgments Note on Quotations, Translations, and Musical Examples Introduction 1. Music and Texts: An Overview of the Sources A General Description of the Air The Publications The Composers Publications by Lambert, Bacilly, La Barre, and Le Camus: A Description The Song Texts Poetic Structure Style or Elocution: Figurative Language and Poetic Syntax Poetry and Rhetoric 2. Rhetoric and Meaning in the Seventeenth-Century French Air Seventeenth-Century French Sources on Rhetoric and Music Persuading the Passions 3. Musical Representations of the Primary Passions The Primary Passions The Agitated Passions The Modest Passions The Neutral Passion Summary 4. Setting the Texts Painful Love Bittersweet Love Enticing Love Joyous Love Summary 5. Form and Style: The Organization and Function of Expressions, Syntax, and Rhetorical Figures Form (Disposition) The Organization of Expressions in Short Airs The Organization of Expressions in Long Airs Form in Single-Strophe Airs The Rhetorical Sections of a Piece: Their Function and Expression Style (Elocution): Poetic Structure, Punctuation, and Rhetorical Figures 6. L'Art du Chant: Performing French Airs A Haute Voix The Art of Proper Singing Ornamentation The Pronunciation of Seventeenth-Century French Syllabic Quantity Tempo Le Mouvement Repeats Basso Continuo Accompaniment 7. Salon Culture and the Mid-Seventeenth-Century French Air The French Air and Conversation Musical Seductions Galanterie and the Air: Undercurrents of Eroticism and Lessons of Morality Women Singing Airs as Men 8. The Late-Seventeenth-Century Air and the Rhetoric of Distraction The Air after 1670 Songs and the Rhetoric of Distraction Pleasure, Airs, and the New Rhetoric The Legacy of Lambert, Bacilly, Le Camus, and La Barre Notes Bibliography Index