Music and the Language of Love

Simple songs or airs, in which a male poetic voice either seduces or excoriates a female object, were the most influential vocal genre of the French Baroque era. In this comprehensive and interdisciplinary study, Catherine Gordon-Seifert analyzes the style of airs, which was based on rhetorical devices of lyric poetry, and explores its function and meaning in French society, particularly the salons. She shows how airs deployed in both text and music an encoded language that was in sensuous contrast to polite society's cultivation of chaste love, strict gender roles, and restrained discourse.

Catherine Gordon-Seifert is Associate Professor of Music and Chair of the Music Department at Providence College.

Acknowledgments	p. xi
Note on Quotations, Translations, and Musical Examples	p. xiii
Introduction	p. 10
Music and Texts: An Overview of the Sources	p. 11
A General Description of the Air	p. 11
The Publications	p. 12
The Composers	p. 13
Publications by Lambert, Bacilly, La Barre, and Le Camus: A Description	p. 17
The Song Texts	p. 22
Poetic Structure	p. 32
Style or Elocution: Figurative Language and Poetic Syntax	p. 35
Poetry and Rhetoric	p. 40
Rhetoric and Meaning in the Seventeenth-Century French Air	p. 41
Seventeenth-Century French Sources on Rhetoric and Music	p. 41
Persuading the Passions	p. 52
Musical Representations of the Primary Passions	p. 58
The Primary Passions	p. 60
The Agitated Passions	p. 64
The Modest Passions	p. 78
The Neutral Passion: Le Contentement	p. 87
Summary	p. 89
Setting the Texts	p. 96
Painful Love	p. 98
Bittersweet Love	p. 126
Enticing Love	p. 129
Joyous Love	p. 132
Summary	p. 133
Form and Style: The Organization and Function of Expressions, Syntax, and Rhetorical Figures	p. 138
Form (Disposition)	p. 138
The Organization of Expressions in Short Airs	p. 139
The Organization of Expressions in Long Airs	p. 144
Form in Single-Strophe Airs	p. 151
The Rhetorical Sections of a Piece: Their Function and Expression	p. 153
Style (Elocution): Poetic Structure, Punctuation, and Rhetorical Figures	p. 158
L'Art du Chant: Performing French Airs	p. 185
À Haute Voix: The Importance of Orality	p. 186
The Art of Proper Singing: Tone and Style	p. 188
Ornamentation	p. 192
The Pronunciation of Seventeenth-Century French	p. 202
Syllabic Quantity	p. 210
Tempo	p. 216
Le Mouvement	p. 217
Repeats	p. 218
Basso Continuo Accompaniment	p. 220
Salon Culture and the Mid-Seventeenth-Century French Air	p. 230
The French Air and Conversation	p. 230
Musical Seductions	p. 237
Galanterie and the Air: Undercurrents of Eroticism and Lessons of Morality	p. 243
Women Singing Airs as Men	p. 260
The Late-Seventeenth-Century Air and the Rhetoric of Distraction	p. 268
The Air after 1670	p. 268
Songs and the Rhetoric of Distraction	p. 271
Pleasure, Airs, and the New Rhetoric	p. 275
The Legacy of Lambert, Bacilly, Le Camus, and La Barre	p. 280
Appendix: Translations for Musical Examples and Emblems	p. 289
Notes	p. 297
Bibliography	p. 345
Index	p. 369
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

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Music and the Language of Love

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