Early Music Pedagogy Then and Now
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Book Series
Musica Incarnata, vol. 4
The Italian Madrigal in Performance
Architectural Settings, Materiality, and Social Spaces
Stefano Lorenzetti, Elisa Sala, Livio Ticli (eds)
- Pages: approx. 450 p.
- Size:210 x 270 mm
- Illustrations:70 b/w
- Language(s):English, Italian
- Publication Year:2027
- € 150,00 EXCL. VAT RETAIL PRICE
- ISBN: 978-2-503-62733-5
- Hardback
- Forthcoming (Jan/27)
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This book offers a new account of madrigal culture at the intersection of sound, space, and society
Subject(s)
BIO
Stefano Lorenzetti is Director of the Vicenza Conservatory and a distinguished musician-musicologist. Trained in organ and harpsichord with K. Gilbert, he earned his Ph.D. at the European University Institute (Florence). His research and recordings explore early modern musical practices, memory, and noble identity, including major monographs with Olschki and LIM. A former fellow at the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America (Columbia University), he has lectured and performed widely across Europe, USA, and major academic institutions.
Elisa Sala is History of Architecture Associate Professor at the University of Brescia. Her research focuses on historic built heritage in Lombardy and on architectural culture between the late sixteenth and early twentieth centuries. She has investigated the relationship between music and architecture. She participates in national and international research projects, and serves on the doctoral board of the Ph.D. programme Musical Heritage and Soundscapes at the Conservatory of Brescia, and has authored scholarly publications.
Livio Ticli is a musicologist, singer and player (keyboards and harp). He teaches Basso Continuo, Historical Singing and Ornamentation at the Istituto Italiano di Musica Antica (co-chairing Brescia Early Music Department); Musicology at the Conservatories of Trapani and Brescia, and improvisation at Vicenza Conservatory. He collaborates with editorial boards such as the Tasso-in-Music Project (Massachusetts and Stanford University), and he is general editor of the book series ‘Antichi Maestri’ (LeMus) and ‘Musica Incarnata’ (Brepols).
Summary
The volume rethinks the Italian madrigal not as a self-contained score but as a socially situated performance ecology shaped by bodies, rooms, objects, images, institutions, and relations of power. Bringing together musicology, architectural history, art history, and performance studies, the volume investigates how madrigals sounded, circulated, and acquired meaning across courts, academies, domestic interiors, gardens, banqueting halls, and urban ceremonial settings in Renaissance and early Baroque Italy. Rather than treating space as a passive backdrop, the chapters show it to be an active agent in musical production: acoustic, symbolic, affective, and political. They explore how singers, instrumentalists, patrons, listeners, collectors, and students animated the madrigal through voice, gesture, ornament, pedagogy, devotion, sociability, ritual, and acts of translation and adaptation. From Rome and Ferrara to Naples and Brescia, the studies reveal the madrigal as a mobile medium that crossed boundaries between public and private, elite display and domestic practice, sacred observance and secular pleasure, textual artefact and embodied event. By foregrounding performance, sensory experience, material culture, and the social lives of music, this book offers a new account of madrigal culture at the intersection of sound, space, and society, recasting one of early modern Italy’s most influential genres as a dynamic practice of making meaning in and through place.
