Music and the Language of Love

Download or read book Music and the Language of Love written by Catherine Gordon-Seifert and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2011-04-07 with total page 409 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Simple songs or airs, in which a male poetic voice either seduces or excoriates a female object, were an influential vocal genre of the French Baroque era. In this comprehensive and interdisciplinary study, Catherine Gordon-Seifert analyzes the style of airs, which was based on rhetorical devices of lyric poetry, and explores the function and meaning of airs in French society, particularly the salons. She shows how airs deployed in both text and music an encoded language that was in sensuous contrast to polite society's cultivation of chaste love, strict gender roles, and restrained discourse.