Description
Book SynopsisWith new information on four generations of women musicians, this book expands and alters the narratives that scholars and musicians have told about music in sixteenth-century Ferrara. A radical perspective on a familiar repertoire, it proposes a new way of thinking with consequences for music history and performance practice.
Trade Review'In Women and Music in Sixteenth-Century Ferrara, Laurie Stras has produced a highly accessible and important volume - thoroughly researched and elegantly written - that throws open the clouded window that has, until now, obscured our understanding of this chapter in music history … Stras offers a second life to the musical women of sixteenth-century Ferrara.' Rebecca Cypess, Music and Letters
Table of ContentsIntroduction: Musica secreta; 1. Ferrarese convents and the Este in the first half of the sixteenth century; 2. Courtly women and secular music in Ferrara in the first half of the sixteenth century; 3. Princesses and politics: the Este women and music in the 1550s; 4. Actresses and Ariosto: spectacle and song in the 1560s; 5. 'Un modo di cantare molto diverso': Ferrara and the new singing of the 1570s; 6. Margherita's arrival and the convents in the first half of the 1580s; 7. Musical practices of the 1580s concerto; 8. Ferrara's final chapter: court and convents in the 1590s; 9. Afterlife in Mantua.
