Review: Singing Games in Early Modern Italy: The Music Books of Orazio Vecchi, by Paul Schleuse

Abstract

Book Review| December 01 2017 Review: Singing Games in Early Modern Italy: The Music Books of Orazio Vecchi, by Paul Schleuse Singing Games in Early Modern Italy: The Music Books of Orazio Vecchi, by Paul Schleuse. Music and the Early Modern Imagination. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015. x, 372 pp. Andrew Dell'Antonio Andrew Dell'Antonio ANDREW DELL'ANTONIO is Distinguished Teaching Professor in the Musicology/Ethnomusicology Division of the Butler School of Music and Associate Dean of Undergraduate Studies in the College of Fine Arts at the University of Texas at Austin. He blogs at The Avid Listener and is coauthor of the textbook The Enjoyment of Music, both from W. W. Norton. He is coeditor of the new series Music and Social Justice from the University of Michigan Press. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Journal of the American Musicological Society (2017) 70 (3): 861–866. https://doi.org/10.1525/jams.2017.70.3.861 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Andrew Dell'Antonio; Review: Singing Games in Early Modern Italy: The Music Books of Orazio Vecchi, by Paul Schleuse. Journal of the American Musicological Society 1 December 2017; 70 (3): 861–866. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/jams.2017.70.3.861 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentJournal of the American Musicological Society Search The cover of Paul Schleuse's Singing Games, with its image of Caravaggio's The Cardsharps, is a perfect evocation of the book's central conclusion: that homosocial music making was central to the self-fashioning of elite male identity in early modern Italy because of the game-like nature of participatory amateur song. Schleuse convincingly describes how the printed output of Orazio Vecchi (1550–1605) exemplifies both the sonic and the socially normative nature of such practice, which taught the appropriateness (and limits) of juxtaposition between literary sophistication and erotic braggadocio, helping to define the discursive power of the subcourtly and aspirationally courtly classes. Like his contemporaries, Vecchi wrote on commission for public spectacles at the end of the sixteenth century and beginning of the seventeenth, involving professional singers and instrumentalists in an increasingly sophisticated and elaborate tradition designed to delight receptive upper-class listeners. Schleuse suggests that traces of some of those works... You do not currently have access to this content.