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Desire and Pleasure in Seventeenth-Century Music

Susan McClary author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:University of California Press

Published:16th Mar '12

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Desire and Pleasure in Seventeenth-Century Music cover

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, and she also links 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, Absolutists courts or commercial enterprises in Venice - were able to manipulate known procedures to produce radically new ways of experiencing time and the Self.

"Passionate, learned and often thrilling." Clevelandclassical.com "Lively and engaging... [A] brilliant musical mapping of the seventeenth century." -- Tess Knighton Times Literary Supplement (TLS) "An enjoyable study... Skillfully dissected in a series of well-chosen examples." -- Patricia Howard The Musical Times "Admirably documented and researched." -- Gerald Seaman The European Legacy: Toward New Paradigms

ISBN: 9780520247345

Dimensions: 229mm x 152mm x 33mm

Weight: 635g

356 pages