Music and the Language of Love: Seventeenth-Century French Airs by Catherine Gordon-Seifert (review)

Abstract

FRANCE Music and Language of Love: Seventeenth-Century French Airs. By Catherine Gordon-Seifert. (Music and Early Modern Imagination; Musical Meaning and Interpretation.) Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011. [viii, 390 p. ISBN 9780253354617. $44.95.] Music examples, illustrations, bibliography, index.Catherine Gordon-Seifert uncovers a salon culture obsessed with painful pleasure and (mostly) pleasing pain of love in Music and Language of Love: Seventeenth-Century French Airs. Her study focuses on serious airs of four composers active during 1650s and 1660s: Michel Lambert, Benigne de Bacilly, Joseph Chabanceau de La Barre, and Sebastien Le Camus. This period is significant for emergence of a new style that combined Italian monody with French courtly love song. Instead of placing their lady on a pedestal, these lovers berate her for her cruelty and faithlessness, all while deploring their inability to eradicate her image from their hearts. The serious air would eventually embody much that was characteristic of French vocal style, and with study Gordon-Seifert seeks to demonstrate what is significant about air as an artistic object, as well as to show how this repertory takes on a collective and significance and offers insight into love, relationships, [and] attitudes toward a woman's place in society (p. 4). Her understanding of music and culture that fostered it is nuanced and penetrating; further, she implements a novel system of stylistic analysis using principles of that will serve as a model to other scholars of French baroque song.Passion for spoken word ran high among some elements of seventeenthcentury French society, and nowhere more so than in ruelles, or salons, where it constituted a primary diversion. This was, after all, a culture that gave us jeux d'esprit and treatises on art of conversation. Gordon-Seifert successfully draws upon contemporary sources on poetics, rhetoric, and music to illustrate not only importance of orality to culture, but also how expressivity, inflection, and tone mattered as much, if not more, than written words themselves. The intent of serious air was, above all else, to move passions, and Gordon-Seifert builds a convincing case for why principles of apply. This music sought to persuade and thrill listener with a logically ordered discourse, containing appeals to senses that salon participants would have recognized as elements of gallant conversation.Gordon-Seifert develops relationship between poetry, and composition of airs over chapters 1-5. As she puts it: the analysis of airs is organized according to four of five components of most relevant to composition and performance: invention (inventio, or an identification of topic and means of portraying it), disposition (dipositio, or arrangement and organization of expressions), style or elocution (elocutio, or syntax, diction, and figures), and pronunciation (actio, or performance) (p. 7). She includes abundant musical examples, which she uses to bolster her argument that particular combinations of musical devices carried specific meaning (p. 57). Seven of principal passions and their textual and musical representations are explored, just as musical idiosyncrasies (meter changes, misplaced bar lines, etc.) are analyzed for their affective significance. Gordon-Seifert persuasively compares double, or ornamented repeat, with what rhetoricians termed confirmation, a portion of a speech in which speaker strengthens propositions set forth in introduction. Chapters 7-8 explore veiled erotic language of airs and chart eventual backlash against them as wider distribution of published collections began to alarm church officials. Interestingly, Gordon- Seifert points out that rhetoric and eloquence were grounds on which air was attacked (p. …