By Elise Bickford Jorgens

The years 1957–1651 marked a interval of excessive success within the heritage of track. In The Well-Tun'd be aware Elise Bickford Jorgens reports altering musical conventions of English track relating to new styles in poetic flavor from the past due Elizabethan period during the Jacobean and Caroline years, basing her paintings at the premise that any musical surroundings of a poem is an interpretation of the poem itself. therefore through 1625, she contends, solo track in England had gone through a reported swap in musical kind, from the lute tune of previous many years to the monophonic continuo track. the looks of John Donne and particularly Ben Johnson and the Cavalier poets marked the death of the Elizabethan lyrical mode that had encouraged composers like John Downland, Thomas Campion, John Danyel, and Robert Jones.

Jorgen's commencing chapters describe and illustrate components of the craft of poetry and the musical conventions which could symbolize them. Her presentation is either transparent and thorough, and should be in particular useful for college kids and students of English literature who're no longer unavoidably musicians. She then discusses 4 significant different types of tune: Measured track, Dance Songs and Tuneful Airs, English Monody, and Pathetic Airs, and notes that impression upon them of Continental tune kinds. yet her significant attempt is to differentiate among them by way of mentioning their a number of attribute attitudes in the direction of the musical illustration of poetic texts. All 4 teams express styles of switch in the course of the first half the 17th century.

Jorgens concludes that the distinguished union of the "sister arts" for which Elizabethan tune was once popular was once more and more tricky to keep up after approximately 1610. Poets now not preferred these parts of poetic kind which may in flip produce wonderful musical types. Solo songs turned, with continuo composers like Henry and William Lawes, Nicholas Lanier, and John Wilson, both notated recitations of poetry or uncomplicated friendly trifles.

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The Well-Tun'd Word: Musical Interpretations of English Poetry, 1597-1651

The years 1957–1651 marked a interval of excessive fulfillment within the historical past of track. within the Well-Tun'd observe Elise Bickford Jorgens reports altering musical conventions of English tune in terms of new styles in poetic flavor from the overdue Elizabethan period during the Jacobean and Caroline years, basing her paintings at the premise that any musical environment of a poem is an interpretation of the poem itself.

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Extra info for The Well-Tun'd Word: Musical Interpretations of English Poetry, 1597-1651

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Both positions had, in turn, an influence on solo song in England where, although the desire to emulate Greek practice was not so abundantly spelled out as it was on the continent, we can nevertheless see evidence of striving for the same ideals. The French theories are particularly interesting for their overt connections with music; but to deal Music for Meter and Rhythm 23 with them, as we shall in detail in Chapter 3, we must briefly consider the metric principles of Classical Greek and Latin lyric poetry, their transfer to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century French poetry, and the effects they had on Elizabethan and early seventeenth-century English poets and composers.

A musical setting that emphasizes such devices must be able to represent their ironic as well as their merely descriptive function. If a poet put personal emotion and argument above finely detailed Prologue to Part I 17 craft, or if versification itself involved roughness designed to further thematic content, then the composer too had to seek ways to handle larger complexities than those involving only syllables and words. Nonetheless, not only metaphysical poetry but especially its more songlike Jacobean and Caroline successors did become the primary sources of texts; composers did look for techniques to represent words and syllables and the more complicated larger dimensions of poetry.

Elizabethan song verse demanded of musical rhythm that it reinforce the intricacies of poetic rhythm and meter that were integral parts of the poetic style. 14 Prologue to Part I If the Petrarchan lyric and the New Poetry represented major changes from the plain style of the Tudor poets, metaphysical poetry was at least as dramatic a revolution; although very little metaphysical verse was set to music, its effects on the relationship between music and poetry were perhaps even more far-reaching through their influence on the literary tastes of succeeding generations.

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