Inaug.-Diss. - Mainz. / Vita. Bibliography: p. 141-150.

The Italian madrigal comedy experienced a relatively short, but exceedingly popular life during the late Renaissance. The works that may be called madrigal comedies, numbering less than two dozen in total, represent a type of musical entertainment that delighted audiences at courts and within the cultural academies of Renaissance Italy. The small subset of works within the genre, designated in this research project as "theatrical" madrigal comedies, showed an increasing focus on dramatic representation of text with music. These works, the plots of which derive from the commedia dell'arte tradition, may be seen as early forms of musical comedy and musical theater. Arguments concerning the manner in which the works were performed have centered on a debate for and against the staging of them.Because madrigal comedies have been largely neglected as concert and theatrical literature, there is little published to assist a director in finding the repertoire or to offer a guide to performance. The research project on which this document is based, along with the associated lecture-recital, resulted in the compilation of means to a successful madrigal comedy production. This was done by advocating historically informed performance decisions that are given a practical spin. In this manner, a director may put together a madrigal comedy production that is accessible to professionals and non-professionals, as well as secondary- and higher-education communities.

Why write music theory and publish it? In the thesis I investigate the reasons for a seeming over-abundance of practically oriented music treatises in early seventeenth-century Italy. Throughout I challenge our conventional assessment of the study of music theory: I suggest that we can define a music-theoretical text in terms of its material form in addition to its content. Adriano Banchieri (1568-1634) was the most prolific theorist in early seventeenth-century Italy. His music-theory books exemplify contemporary printing patterns, an overt practical focus, and a synthesis of contemporary theoretical innovations. In Chapter 1, after considering the meaning of 'music theory' and how it is typically classified, I discuss the process of and purposes for writing and publishing music theory. In Chapter 2 I explore Banchieri's practical and philosophical motives for writing music theory, and thus introduce the reader to his music-theoretical corpus. The focus of the thesis then broadens: in Chapter 3 I survey the typical authors, publishing houses, content, material form, function and readers of the various kinds of theoretical texts printed in Italy between 1600 and 1630. In Chapter 4 I examine the widespread practice of publishing second and revised editions of music-theory books in order to establish the extent to which a new edition corresponds to a seeming demand for a particular text. The case study of the paratext of Banchieri's Conclusiones de musica (Bologna, 1627) in Chapter 5 demonstrates the great extent to which the preliminary matter of an early Seicento music-theory book is embedded in its socio-cultural context and how a paratext projects ideas contained in the text proper. Lastly, in Chapter 6 I explore to whom and in which particular forums theoretical writings circulated. Here I focus principally on Banchieri's printed letters, which provide evidence of how an author circulated his music books.