[...]... “us,” and they project everyone else into a kind of timeless, unconscious arcadia.5 Thus, the decades preceding our countdown year often count as interesting insofar as their cultural practices point toward the advent of the new; but to the extent that they align themselves with soon-to-be-obsolete genres and techniques, they still seem to belong to the old world, the backdrop up against which the innovations... range, theorists classify the mode as authentic; when the diapente occurs on top with the final in the middle of the range, they label it plagal (Fig 7) Clearly, when the composition involves genuinely equal-voiced polyphony, some of the voices will occupy the plagal range and others the authentic Theorists such as Zarlino recommend that composers and analysts privilege tenor and soprano above the other... from the premise that human subjectivity has a history—a history for which modern scholars may receive invaluable insights from the arts.17 Most New Historicists depend principally on literature, theater, and painting for their evidence; they rarely refer to music as a resource (except in the work of Theodor Adorno or Carl Schorske),18 in large part because of the specialized training demanded by the. .. their homeland in the guise of the Lady But on the other hand, the musical settings that comprise madrigal composition often articulate astonishingly modern insights into subjectivity, for in the process of converting lyrics into the more corporeal and time-oriented medium of music, they necessarily bring to bear aspects of human experience and cultural assumptions not available to poetry The historiographer... at its most ingenious Of course, not everyone has celebrated this particular strategy Some of Monteverdi’s own contemporaries, including most prominently Vincenzo Galilei (the father of the astronomer), complained that the contrapuntal excesses of late the cultural work of the madrigal 3 sixteenth-century madrigals prevented the intelligible projection of the words; such critics advocated instead a solo-voice... antiquated dissertation (the parts on modal theory and the Monteverdi madrigals) But it also includes a lengthy backstory concerning the madrigal before Monteverdi If the dissertation represents a Siegfrieds Tod stage of the project, Modal Subjectivities subjects you to the whole Ring: what you need to know in order to make sense of the ending I have not been entirely idle in the years since I finished that... Over the course of a good century, madrigal composers anticipate Descartes in performing the crucial break with traditional epistemologies, plunging musical style and thought into an extraordinary crisis of authority, knowledge, power, and identity They do so, however, not by repudiating the modal edifice they had inherited from centuries of scholastic theorizing but rather by systematizing, allegorizing,... however, having the ability to convey all these sentiments at once, as though one could read the lines of Mirtillo’s speech together vertically as a score The resulting performance, alas, would amount to little more than noise, each string of words canceling out the others; instead of a realistic representation of Mirtillo’s conflicting aªects we would get something akin to John Cage tuning in randomly... matter of course: namely, music And in his madrigal setting of Mirtillo’s lament, Claudio Monteverdi manages to achieve the simultaneity toward which Guarini gestures Given the performing force of five independent voices, the composer can actually superimpose the sentiments of the first four lines of text, allowing them to circulate within the same space and time Thus, in the first motive two voices divide... matter) saw their task as enhancing and interpreting their chosen texts, and we can come to understand their signifying practices in part by following correspondences with words But if the music of the madrigal matters (and I submit that it does), then we must examine how it produces its powerful imagery over and above—and sometimes in contradiction to the lyrics how to do things with modes Music theorists . the University of California Press Associates. Modal Subjectivities self-fashioning in the italian madrigal Susan McClary university of california press berkeley los angeles london University of. studies. Whereas the dissertation stuck closely to treatises and formal analysis, Modal Subjectivities brings the madrigal to the interdisciplinary project concerned with tracing the histories of. Musicologists trip all over themselves to explain away this embarrassing convention, so far removed from the realistic expressivity of seventeenth-century solo singing. They gain support from sixteenth-century