Description

Book Synopsis

Many singers today perform Elizabethan and Jacobean lute-songs. Robert Toft offers the first help for singers in understanding the principles which governed song performance and composition in the early seventeenth century. He shows how these historical principles may be used to move and delight modern audiences.

The main purpose of early seventeenth-century singing was to persuade listeners using a style of utterance that had two principal parts – to sing eloquently and to act aptly. Toft discusses these two facets of singing within a broad cultural context, drawing upon music’s sister arts, poetry and oratory, to establish the nature of eloquence and action in relation to singing. He concentrates on these techniques which can be transferred easily from one medium to the other. Specifically, he draws on the two aspects of oratory which directly bear on singing: elocutio, the methods of amplifying and decorating poetry and music with figures, and pronunciatio, t

Tune Thy Musicke to Thy Hart

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    A Paperback / softback by Robert Toft

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      Book details

      Publisher University of Toronto Press
      Published 15 December 1993
      ISBN-13 9781487573546
      978-1487573546
      ISBN-10 1487573545
      Also in:
      Sacred and religious music

      Description

      Book Synopsis

      Many singers today perform Elizabethan and Jacobean lute-songs. Robert Toft offers the first help for singers in understanding the principles which governed song performance and composition in the early seventeenth century. He shows how these historical principles may be used to move and delight modern audiences.

      The main purpose of early seventeenth-century singing was to persuade listeners using a style of utterance that had two principal parts – to sing eloquently and to act aptly. Toft discusses these two facets of singing within a broad cultural context, drawing upon music’s sister arts, poetry and oratory, to establish the nature of eloquence and action in relation to singing. He concentrates on these techniques which can be transferred easily from one medium to the other. Specifically, he draws on the two aspects of oratory which directly bear on singing: elocutio, the methods of amplifying and decorating poetry and music with figures, and pronunciatio, t

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