Thesis (Ph. D.)--Harvard University, 1975. / Typescript (v. 1) and ms. score (v. 2-3). eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (v. 1, leaves 230-236).

Luca Marenzio has long been acknowledged as one of the greatest masters of the Italian madrigal, yet no collected edition of his works exists: in particular relatively few of the six-voiced madrigals are available in published form, and criticism has tended to concentrate on the five-voiced works. This thesis presents an Edition with Commentary of the six-voiced madrigals published in six books between 1581 and 1595. Two polychoral madrigals and a madrigal by Antonio Bicci also found in those books are included in an Appendix, together with two furtner madrigals included by Phalèse in his 1594 edition of Books I-V, which proved a valuable collative source. The Commentary presents a stylistic study of the madrigals in the Edition and a critical survey of their place in Marenzio's output, together with an editorial commentary and extensive bibliographical material. Following an outline of the madrigal's chief characteristics, Chapter One presents a biographical and critical account of Marenzio's work. Each book of madrigals is considered individually and in relation to his stylistic development. Finally the chapter treats briefly of his influence, with contemporary and historical comment. A stylistic analysis of the music in this Edition follows, considering particularly the relationship between music and text, texture, form, tonality and chromaticism. The poets, forms and principal sources of the texts are then considered. Chapter Four discusses the Edition - sources, notation, tempo, pitch and musica ficta - and concludes with a note on performance. Two Critical Commentaries deal respectively with music and text, the latter providing a comparison between musical and literary versions and listing poets (some newly discovered) and literary sources. The Bibliography lists all published appearances of the six-voiced madrigals and provides a complete reference for the literary sources consulted. The complete texts of the madrigals are given in an Appendix.

Thesis (M.A.)--Eastern Illinois University, 1969. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 191-195).

Thesis--Harvard University. / Photocopy of typescript. Ann Arbor, Mich. : University Microfilms International, 1979. -- 21 cm. Bibliography: v.1, leaves 230-236.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Boston University, 1961. / Includes complete transcriptions. Includes abstracts and vita. Bibliography: leaves 212-216.

Thesis--Indiana University, 2007. / Computer printout. Adviser: Massimo Ossi. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 298-308), abstract, and vita.

Often the Italian Madrigal is associated with print and the public marketplace. Yet it originated in handwritten anthologies restrictively circulated by Florentine patricians. In recent years, print scholarship broadened Renaissance musical studies from composer and institutional analyses to those focusing on material form, usage, and meaning. Manuscript studies of the Italian Madrigal, however, are yet to receive similar methodological expansions. This dissertation explores the social world of four manuscript anthologies of madrigals crafted in 1530s Florence. I argue that they participated in a culture whose practices aligned with and projected the elite identities of their owners, remaining in use despite the advent of printed collections intended for the broad consumption and general tastes that dominated the genre’s dissemination from the 1540s onward. Through the four manuscript anthologies, I present a needed cultural history of manuscript usage and meaning in an understudied era of the genre, examining processes of self-fashioning, communal and diplomatic circulation, notational difference, and political identity. I uncover this information through paleographic, primary-source analysis of musical and epistolary documents as well as historical survey. This dissertation reveals, firstly, patrician use of manuscripts as markers of hierarchical distinction in Florentine society. Second, it concludes that manuscript madrigals should be understood alongside other Florentine manuscript practices of epistolary exchange and personal record keeping, as documents intended to accumulate new works and preserve family history and legacy. Third, this dissertation provides a comparative analysis of the music-notational and paleographic differences between contemporaneous print and manuscript versions of Florentine madrigals in the 1530s. This dissertation then concludes with an analysis of the political decorations within one of the manuscript partbook sets that offers insight into Florence’s governmental transition from a longstanding republic to Medici rule in 1530. Altogether, my project reveals particular ways in which the manuscript madrigal projected the individual and communal identity of patrician Florentines to garner distinction among other social classes, to solidify diplomatic bonds and preserve family history, to encode performance through subtle notation, and to engage with cataclysmic governmental shifts as reflected through the political views of individuals and the scribal hand.

This dissertation questions the dominant role that analogies to painting have played in the critical reception of the Italian madrigal—especially its flagship technique, the madrigalism—and argues for a more historically sensitive approach to sixteenth-century discussions of music–text relations in that genre. This approach centers rhetoric, understood broadly to encompass theories of style and subject matter, emotional response, and fictional representation, as the primary field of study to which musicians turned in their efforts to theorize musical expression. In its final chapter, the dissertation suggests that this rhetorical saturation of discourse around madrigals also to some degree influenced the composing of madrigals. Chapter 1 traces the outlines of what I call the “Galileian critical tradition” between the publication of Vincenzo Galilei’s 1581 "Dialogo della musica antica, et ella moderna" and the present. This tradition is characterized by a tendency among writers to dismiss the madrigalism on expressive grounds and, as time passes, increasingly in visual terms. Returning to the sixteenth century, chapter 2 argues that the phrase “imitating the words” (imitare le parole), which was adopted by Galilei, Gioseffo Zarlino, and others in the mid- to late Cinquecento to describe those novel techniques for the musical representation of text commonly seen in madrigals, acquires an affective connotation, in addition to its descriptive meaning, when placed in the context of contemporaneous literary studies of imitation (mimesis), especially those stemming from the recovery of Aristotle’s "Poetics." This affective dimension of the imitation principle, first theorized by Aristotle but creatively elaborated by his Renaissance commentators, highlights the cognitive pleasure that humans, because of a natural affinity for imitation, take from fiction—a species of pleasure, I suggest, relevant to the musical practice that “imitating the words” names. Turning from pleasure to passion, chapter 3 makes a case for the presence of a “two-stage model for emotional arousal” (as I call it) in sixteenth-century Italian music theory. Surveying this model’s foundation in physiological, rhetorical, and natural-philosophical texts, I show how Zarlino adapted its principles to musical purposes in his 1558 "Istitutioni harmoniche" and then trace the afterlife of Zarlino’s theory across a number of texts, including both music theory treatises and an epic poem. Chapter 4, finally, analyzes a late Cinquecento madrigal cycle—the three settings in Giaches de Wert’s "Ottavo libro de madrigali a cinque voci" (1586) from the “Armida” episode of Torquato Tasso’s "Gerusalemme liberata" (1581)—as a series of musical “stimuli” for listener responses patterned on the theoretical discussions studied in chapters 2 and 3. In its attention to the close-knit relationship between the expressive qualities of Wert’s music and the emotions they invite, this chapter follows the example of the ancient rhetorical tradition and its sixteenth-century inheritance, which emphasize the role of human psychology in determining the orator’s art.