Music and the Language of Love in 17th-Century French Airs, 1650-1700

FAIN: FB-53041-07

Catherine Elizabeth Gordon
Providence College (Providence, RI 02918-7000)

This interdisciplinary study of seventeenth-century French songs explores their function and meaning in private and public spheres of society by focusing on airs as representations of love. In Parisian salons, airs were composed as imitations of impassioned recitation, filled with an encoded erotic language, and linked to intrigue and games of wit. By contrast, airs were used outside elite salons for seduction, to foster gender roles or promote religious devotion. This study demonstrates that the power of song was thought to control states of mind, behavior, and social order, and shows that over time, airs reflect changes in attitudes towards gender stereotypes, relationships, and a woman’s place in late seventeenth-century France.

Associated Products

Music and the Language of Love: Seventeenth-Century French Airs (Book)
Title: Music and the Language of Love: Seventeenth-Century French Airs
Author: Catherine Gordon-Seifert
Abstract: 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.
Year: 2011
Primary URL: http://www.worldcat.org/title/music-and-the-language-of-love-seventeenth-century-french-airs/oclc/639940416&referer=brief_results
Primary URL Description: WorldCat
Secondary URL: http://www.iupress.indiana.edu/product_info.php?products_id=191368
Secondary URL Description: Indiana University Press
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9780253354617

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