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Desire and Pleasure in Seventeenth-Century Music

Online ISBN:
9780520952065
Print ISBN:
9780520247345
Publisher:
University of California Press
Book

Desire and Pleasure in Seventeenth-Century Music

Published online:
20 September 2012
Published in print:
6 March 2012
Online ISBN:
9780520952065
Print ISBN:
9780520247345
Publisher:
University of California Press

Abstract

In this book, Susan McClary examines the mechanisms through which seventeenth-century musicians simulated extreme affective states—desire, divine rapture, and ecstatic pleasure. She demonstrates how every major genre of the period, from opera to religious music to instrumental pieces based on dances, was part of this striving for heightened passions by performers and listeners. While she analyzes the social and historical reasons for the high value placed on expressive intensity in both secular and sacred music, she also links images of desire and pleasure to the many technical innovations of the period. McClary shows how musicians—whether working within the contexts of the Reformation or Counter-Reformation, absolutist courts or commercial enterprises in Venice—were able to manipulate known procedures to produce radically new ways of experiencing time and the Self.

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