Music of Words and Words in Music: The Sound of Gravità in the Italian Madrigal

Abstract

Music of Words and Words in MusicThe Sound of Gravità in the Italian Madrigal Giuseppe Gerbino I would like to introduce the topic of this essay with a somewhat counterintuitive question: Is language like music? What may appear counterintuitive is the order in which the terms of the comparison are introduced. So formulated, the question suggests the possibility of a musical theory of language based on the idea that music provides a modeling framework to analyze and describe salient properties of language. For decades, especially after the linguistic turn in the humanities, scholars have often asked the opposite question: Is music like language? In an attempt to unlock the enigma of musical signification, we have turned to semiotics and linguistics, looking for structural similarities between language and music while probing the sound interface between structure and meaning. It is natural for us to accept the idea that music must function like language, that sound structures should be reducible to a musical syntax reflecting deep-seated correspondences between language and music. My intention here is not to praise or refute the claims of this linguistic model, a model that to some extent had an important precedent in the classical tradition that linked music to rhetoric. More simply, I would like to draw attention to what is by now a less familiar way of thinking about language, one that assumes that on some level language in general, and poetry in particular, relies on musical procedures to communicate information. This is an important dimension of Renaissance theories of language, starting of course with Pietro Bembo. It was a view of language that was less concerned with establishing syntactical parallels between music and language and more interested in exploring and exploiting the role that sound effects play in the construction of meaning.1 It was the aural dimension of language, its ability to reinforce meaning and engender emotional pleasure through the sense of hearing, that provided the impetus [End Page 251] for an investigation into the nature of the acoustic sensoriality of linguistic communication. We can easily recognize in this approach the underlying humanistic preoccupation with eloquence, with the verbal and vocal spell of rhetorical persuasion in all its sonorous plenitude. My interest in the stylistic category of gravità—the sound-content of language expressing gravity or seriousness of thought and affect—stems from this sound-based conception of a highly formalized use of language against the backdrop of, and often in competition with, the musical principles of signification. Indeed, transposed to the polyphonic madrigal of the sixteenth century, the same idea of stylistic gravitas confronts us with the interaction between poetic sound and musical sound in the heyday of secular polyphony, amid literary disputes over the status of poetry as a medium of both beauty and knowledge. The second book of Pietro Bembo's Prose della vulgar lingua looms large here. However, my primary concern is not the alchemy of gravità and piacevolezza (pleasingness), which for Bembo should regulate the delicate balance between the subject matter of poetry and its form, and not even the art of variazione (variation), with which the poet ensures the correct balance of gravità and piacevolezza as language moves along the curve of stylistic decorum. Although both gravità and piacevolezza are defined by the acoustic properties of verse, it is the sound of gravitas in its double condition of poetic sound and musical sound that constitutes the object of my analysis. In a recent and important study, Andrea Afribo argues that, in the second half of the sixteenth century, some theorists and poets such as Minturno and Tasso started to challenge the primacy that Bembo had originally assigned to piacevolezza.2 Their view tended to shift the balance in favor of gravità and the values associated with a philosophically and morally high form of poetry that no longer had piacevolezza as its primary goal. In its turn, the shift entailed a reconfiguration of the relationship between poetic sound and poetic content. What was at stake was more than a mere matter of phonology. It was, rather, a phonology of thought: poetry that primarily appeals to the sense of hearing versus poetry that primarily appeals to the intellect...