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This chapter presents several representative case studies of the groups or individuals involved in the dissemination of new, “unofficial” music within the Soviet Union during the mid-1960s as well as their venues, performers, and audiences, including a survey of Grigoriy Frid's Moscow Youth Musical Club and a history of Andrey Volkonsky's early music ensemble Madrigal. A brief, preliminary portrait of life within the Union of Composers and the government oversight of “unofficial” music in the second half of the 1960s (including a consideration of “bans”) provides the official framework and foil for the various “unofficial,” vnye venues and organizations that constitute this chapter's main subject matter. Grigoriy Frid Moscow Youth Musical Club Andrey Volkonsky Madrigal bans early music audiences venues performers vnye

Chapter five surveys the poems and musical experiments that both distracted Bradbury from story writing and renewed his creativity in the early 1970s. Television and film composer Lalo Schifrin put Bradbury’s Madrigals for the Space Age to music just as Bradbury’s accelerating output of poems led to the first of three volumes of verse with his trade publisher Alfred A. Knopf. His defiant articles on the termination of the Apollo lunar missions culminated in his December 1972 Playboy article, “From Stonehenge to Tranquility Base,” a title image meant to convey the all-too-brief period of human history devoted to reaching the heavens. Chapter five concludes with unsuccessful attempts by the United States government to negotiate a cultural exchange for Bradbury with the Soviet Union.

This chapter deals with the rise of the Philippine Madrigal Singers as ambassadors of a modern nation expanding into an international community and delves into the cultural politics that members of a nationalized ensemble experienced during the New Society of the Marcos regime. It traces the biography of the ensemble's founder, Andrea Veneracion,through the incorporation of the group as a national performing group under the auspices of the Cultural Center of the Philippines.

This chapter integrates material from the previous chapters, as the diverse nationalist history of the Philippines is celebrated and retold in music during the 1998 Centennial of Philippine independence from Spain. The Philippine Madrigal Singers are revisited, along with several recordings produced with support from the government through the Centennial Commission.

A powerful discourse on a flexible self emerges in the opening sonnet of Petrarch's Canzoniere, discussed also in musical settings by Monteverdi and Wert. Petrarch's view of the self was appropriated, inflected, and socialized in late Renaissance literary Petrarchism, of which the madrigal was an epiphenomenon. Representative figures of the literary side of Petrarchism practiced and theorized about a “rhetoric of voice and address,” a way in which poets communicated to readers/listeners, which was then appropriated by musicians.

Chapter 5 investigates the musical side of Petrarchism in the madrigal before Monteverdi, from the microlevel of verbal resonances and emphasis on specific words to the macrotextual level of modeling print collections of poems and madrigals on the Canzoniere. This range of possibilities is explored from the point of view of creators, performers, and listeners, in works by Verdelot, Arcadelt, Willaert, Rore, Wert, and Marenzio, focusing on these composers' appropriation of the voice of poets, as well as on the listeners' perception of it. Through madrigal books, musicians created stories that effectively met the expectations of listeners, who stored in their memories narrative patterns absorbed by reading poetry collections. These composers calibrated the relationships between narrator and characters in a variety of ways, assembling texts from disparate literary sources and modifying them to suit their own purposes.

Chapter 6 shows how, on the one hand, the composer develops his voice as narrator to such a degree that in Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda Monteverdi transforms the epic poetry of Torquato Tasso into a multimedia, semistaged piece. On the other hand, Monteverdi overcomes Petrarchism by creating full-fledged and flesh-and-blood characters well beyond the classic Petrarchan “lover.” In this process he adapts for his own purposes the poetics not only of Tasso but also of Giambattista Marino, the quintessential Baroque poet. Monteverdi's creation of fictional worlds is the result of madrigalistic and operatic techniques subsumed under the term focalization, meaning “perspective” or “point of view.” Narrator and characters project a focalizing effect by acquiring a visual dimension through which they see, perceive, and experience the events of a story, making the audience aware of them. Instrumental music also becomes a factor in this process. As a result, madrigal and opera become, in the hands of Monteverdi, multivocal and multifocal, with the potential of being developed as multimedia artworks.

The singers' use of pure voice as empty, nonverbal sounding music is traced back to the aesthetics of Marino. It enables singers to shift the audience's perspective toward the narrative power of music per se, as well as toward themselves. Today, the opera director, by locating and moving the singers within the performance space, becomes yet another agent in the chain of appropriations inaugurated by the Petrarchist poets and the madrigalists; and in filmed productions, the video director becomes the last link of this chain. In the highly relativistic world of Monteverdi's L'incoronazione di Poppea, characters such as Otho and the two soldiers provide a perspective on, respectively, Poppea and Seneca. Thanks to the focalizing effect generated by these characters, but also depending on the choices of opera or video directors, the audience perceives the events of the opera in a particular way, absorbing a worldview conveyed by the performance and mediating it with its own.

Beginning with Johannes Tinctoris, who states quite off-handedly and without much further explanation that mode also applies to polyphony, a series of intellectuals—including most prominently Pietro Aron and Heinrich Glareanus, in addition to Gioseffo Zarlino—grappled with formulating theories of modal polyphonic practice. This book explores a repertory too long neglected as a site of crucial cultural work: the sixteenth-century madrigal of Italy. It argues that, from around 1525, the Italian madrigal serves as a site—indeed, the first in European history—for the explicit, self-conscious construction in music of subjectivities. The book attempts to shake loose a version of early modern subjectivity too neatly packaged in recent studies and to encourage a process of historical revision that takes music as a point of departure. Furthermore, it demonstrates how sixteenth-century composers deployed modes in the service of a new cultural agenda that sought to perform dynamic representations of complex subjective states. This chapter deals with Claudio Monteverdi's “Ah, dolente partita,” in which he used the most familiar improvisatory progression in sixteenth-century music: the Romanesca.

It has become customary in musicology to situate the madrigal and music of the sixteenth century within a neoplatonic framework, with particular reliance on the Italian pythagorean Marsilio Ficino. Within that framework, concepts undeniably crucial to Renaissance culture (for example, harmonia) dominate, rising explicitly to the surface in polemical debates over compositional propriety in the fin de siècle madrigal. However, a wide range of intellectual contexts coexisted in the sixteenth century, some complementary but others mutually antagonistic. For instance, this same period also nurtured Baldassare Castiglione's Book of the Courtier (1528), a self-help guide for those who would pass themselves off as members of the elite, and Niccolò Machiavelli's The Prince (1513), which marks the beginning of modern political theory. Some of the first madrigals were composed for Machiavelli's 1526 production of his play La Mandragola (The Mandrake), among the most celebrated comedies in the Italian language. The French musician Philippe Verdelot figures among the earliest practitioners of the new genres of madrigals.

What is desire? Does it emanate from that part of the individual recognized as “the Self,” or does it spring up unbidden as an independent force and drive the Self in directions contrary to “the will?” And, given that these and still other possible understandings may occur at various times within the boundaries of a single human organism, what do they imply with respect to the definition of subjectivity? The twentieth century put such questions in the foreground of psychoanalytic theory, which trickled down quite rapidly into the arts and cultural criticism. Because the madrigal from the very outset seeks to simulate through music the interiority of desiring subjects—or selves subject to desire—it offers an extraordinary site for investigating the history of Selfhood. This chapter looks at a particular historical moment and the ways in which its musicians understood subjectivity: how sixteenth-century composers rendered in music notions of selfhood, interiority, and passions, focusing on one of the earliest architects of musical desire, Jacques Arcadelt.

Scholars have long acknowledged Adrian Willaert's Musica nova—a collection of motets and madrigals—as one of the great monuments of Western art. Recent research by Martha Feldman reveals that the collection seems to have been commissioned by and for a cluster of Florentine exiles living in Venice, Italy, and that the madrigal genre—especially Willaert's Petrarch-oriented compositions—served to cement cultural memory and to guarantee the continuation of their version of Florentine ideals. If the recording industry has developed a small but avid audience for the transgressive expressivity of the Mannerist repertory, it does not seem ready to nurture in this same audience a taste for the dense web of Willaert's rule-abiding polyphony. This chapter deals with Willaert's settings of three very different Petrarch sonnets. Each sonnet-based madrigal comprises two parts: the first presents the two quatrains, the second the two terzets. Both halves operate within the same mode.

Cipriano de Rore proved a restless tenant of Adrian Willaert's and Gioseffo Zarlino's neomodality. We know very little of his life, save for his early years in the Netherlands, his move to Italy, and his string of professional appointments and publications. This chapter examines Cipriano's work in order to understand both why he resisted the procedures he and his mentor had brought to a kind of perfection and also how to make sense of the compositional choices he made. It starts with a madrigal that establishes itself complacently within an orthodox modal framework before it begins to act out against it. A late work, “Da le belle contrade d'oriente,” appeared in the Fifth Book of Madrigals of 1566. Cipriano's compositional choices reveal much about his notions of modality and its relationship to avant-garde experimentation. Yet although he sets two discursive options in opposition to each other in this madrigal, he does so not only for the sake of pushing the boundaries of accepted musical practice, but also as the means of configuring particular models of human subjectivity.

In 1995, German cinematic auteur Werner Herzog released Gesualdo: Death in Five Voices, a documentary of sorts on the composer's life and music. Carlo Gesualdo, Prince of Venosa, ought never to have put himself in the subject position of composer. He answered to no one but wrote increasingly for himself, thus justifying to some extent those who would view him as anticipating a Romantic vision of “self-expression.” Gesualdo published his first four books of madrigals in Ferrara, and set lyrics of Ferrarese poets, as did the other musicians at court. This chapter treats the Gesualdo of the first four books as a Ferrarese composer;one who shared with Luzzasco Luzzaschi an enthusiasm for their predecessor Nicola Vicentino's arcicembalo and theories of chromatic and enharmonic genres, along with a penchant for lyrics that mined a rich vein of feelings located at the intersection of pleasure and pain.

In Giovanni Battista Guarini's poem Il pastor fido, the pastoral lover Mirtillo attempts to put into words the contradictory impulses he experiences in but a single moment. Multiple passions—longing, abjection, disbelief, anguish, resignation—assail him from within, finally to condense into the oxymoron of “un vivace morire.” Banished from Amarilli's presence, Mirtillo hangs suspended between an agony so violent that it ought to bring about his immediate demise, but which, because of its very intensity, prevents the release from suffering promised by death. Claudio Monteverdi happened to choose the principal moments in the quarrel between Mirtillo and Amarilli as texts for some of his most famous madrigals—madrigals that owe much of their notoriety to the attacks they provoked from Giovanni Maria Artusi, whose challenge sparked a response from Monteverdi. Neither Mirtillo nor Amarilli can be reduced to a particular stereotype of gender construction. In his settings of the Mirtillo/Amarilli controversy, Monteverdi offers insights into the interiorities of two fictional personae whose anguish pushes the capabilities of his musical language to their extreme.