Music and the Language of Love

A hard but rewarding read, and a must for would-be performers of 'airs.' . . . Highly recommended.

* Choice *

This book should, I feel, be on the shelves of everyone with a serious interest in the music of the French baroque. It is an extremely well-researched and thorough study of that most seminal of 17th-century French musical genres, the air sérieux.

* The Consort *

[Gordon-Seifert] has presented readers with an elegant, insightful study on a critical turning point in French baroque composition just before the premiere of Lully's groundbreaking Cadmus et Hermione in 1673. Scholars of seventeenth-century music, as well as singers interested in integrating these airs into their repertory, will find in it an approachable, valuable resource, as well as an engaging account of the social and cultural mores of the time.

* Notes *

[T]his book is a major contribution to our understanding of the rhetorical elements of the song texts and the way in which composers expressed them in their musical settings.

* Rhetorica *

Catherine Gordon-Seifert does a masterful job at conveying how rhetoric, text, and music interplay in French serious airs from the 1640s–1660s. Her analyses of text and music dig deep into the fabric of the repertoire. . . . By and large, Music and the Language of Love is a worthy contribution to the field that should find its way to any academic library with a serious music collection.

* Music Reference Services Quarterly *

[Gordon-Seifert] has provided an insightful and long overdue study of an important repertory that for many years has suffered from relative neglect. 2012

* Early Mus