Mauro Calcagno received his Ph.D. in Music from Yale University, taught at Harvard from 2000 to 2008, at the State University of New York at Stony Brook from 2008 to 2013, and is now an Associate Professor of Music History at the University of Pennsylvania, where he directed the Center for Italian Studies from 2017 to 2021. His work focuses on opera studies, 20th- and 21st-century theories and practices of dramaturgy and theatricality, performance studies, digital humanities, Italian Baroque musical theatre, and the madrigal.
See https://sites.google.com/view/frommadrigaltoopera/home for resources.
"This pathbreaking st... more See https://sites.google.com/view/frommadrigaltoopera/home for resources.
"This pathbreaking study links two traditionally separate genres as their stars crossed to explore the emergence of multiple selves in early modern Italian culture and society. Calcagno focuses on the works of Claudio Monteverdi, a master of both genres, to investigate how they reflect changing ideas about performance and role-playing by singers. The author traces the roots of dialogic subjectivity to Petrarch's love poetry, arguing that Petrarchism exerted a powerful influence not only on late Renaissance literature and art, but also on music. Covering more than a century of music and cultural history, the book demonstrates that the birth of opera relied on an important feature of the madrigalian tradition: the role of the composer as a narrative agent enabling performers to become characters and hold a specific point of view."
Claudio Monteverdi’s Venetian Operas: Sources, Performance, Interpretation, edited by Ellen Rosand and Stefano La Via, London and New York: Routledge, 2022, May 16, 2022
Operas written in Venice in the 1640s feature surprisingly long melismas often setting seemingly ... more Operas written in Venice in the 1640s feature surprisingly long melismas often setting seemingly insignificant words, in opposition to (although concurrently with) traditional madrigalisms. This magnification of pure voice over word meaning is consistent with the aesthetics presented by members of the Venetian Accademia degli Incogniti, known for its pro-opera stance. In previously unexplored works the academicians advocate the controversial concept of Nothing as an all-embracing phenomenon. This includes language, in which the Incogniti emphasize sound as independent from meaning-a claim with significant consequences for music aesthetics. The academy's emblem articulates a parallel discourse on voice through visual means. By musical means, passages from works by Barbara Strozzi, Claudio Monteverdi (an oft-discussed melisma in Poppea, I, 6), and Francesco Cavalli also articulate Incogniti aesthetics. In elaborating their ideas the academicians relied upon a work that indeed pres...
Mauro Calcagno is Associate Professor of Music, Harvard University. He is the author of Signifyi... more Mauro Calcagno is Associate Professor of Music, Harvard University. He is the author of Signifying Nothing: On the Aesthetics of Pure Voice in Early Venetian Opera, Journal of Musicology, XX (2003), 461497; 'Imitar col canto chi parla': Monteverdi and the Creation of a Language ...
Journal of the American Musicological Society, 2002
Conventional views of text/music relationships in early Italian opera focus on the imitation of a... more Conventional views of text/music relationships in early Italian opera focus on the imitation of affections. But by dealing exclusively with the referential meanings of texts (e.g., emotions, images, and concepts) these views overlook an important aspect of music's interaction with language. In opera, music also imitates language's contextual and communicative functions—i.e., discourse, as studied today by the subfield of linguistics called pragmatics. In his operas Monteverdi fully realized Peri's ideal of “imitating in song a person speaking” (“imitar col canto chi parla”) by musically emphasizing those context-dependent meanings that emerge especially in ordinary language and that are prominent in dramatic texts, as opposed to poetry and prose. Such meanings are manifest whenever words such as “I,” “here,” and “now” appear— words called “deictics”—with the function of situating the speaker/singer's utterances in a specific time and place. Monteverdi highlights deic...
Journal of the American Musicological Society, 2006
... While in plays written by nuns walls often appear as monolithic structures that imprison thos... more ... While in plays written by nuns walls often appear as monolithic structures that imprison those they surround, the walls in Benvenuto Flori's L ... Robert Kendrick has explored the feasibility of several possibilities, including (1) octave transposition of the bass part, so that the tenor is ...
See https://sites.google.com/view/frommadrigaltoopera/home for resources.
"This pathbreaking st... more See https://sites.google.com/view/frommadrigaltoopera/home for resources.
"This pathbreaking study links two traditionally separate genres as their stars crossed to explore the emergence of multiple selves in early modern Italian culture and society. Calcagno focuses on the works of Claudio Monteverdi, a master of both genres, to investigate how they reflect changing ideas about performance and role-playing by singers. The author traces the roots of dialogic subjectivity to Petrarch's love poetry, arguing that Petrarchism exerted a powerful influence not only on late Renaissance literature and art, but also on music. Covering more than a century of music and cultural history, the book demonstrates that the birth of opera relied on an important feature of the madrigalian tradition: the role of the composer as a narrative agent enabling performers to become characters and hold a specific point of view."
Claudio Monteverdi’s Venetian Operas: Sources, Performance, Interpretation, edited by Ellen Rosand and Stefano La Via, London and New York: Routledge, 2022, May 16, 2022
Operas written in Venice in the 1640s feature surprisingly long melismas often setting seemingly ... more Operas written in Venice in the 1640s feature surprisingly long melismas often setting seemingly insignificant words, in opposition to (although concurrently with) traditional madrigalisms. This magnification of pure voice over word meaning is consistent with the aesthetics presented by members of the Venetian Accademia degli Incogniti, known for its pro-opera stance. In previously unexplored works the academicians advocate the controversial concept of Nothing as an all-embracing phenomenon. This includes language, in which the Incogniti emphasize sound as independent from meaning-a claim with significant consequences for music aesthetics. The academy's emblem articulates a parallel discourse on voice through visual means. By musical means, passages from works by Barbara Strozzi, Claudio Monteverdi (an oft-discussed melisma in Poppea, I, 6), and Francesco Cavalli also articulate Incogniti aesthetics. In elaborating their ideas the academicians relied upon a work that indeed pres...
Mauro Calcagno is Associate Professor of Music, Harvard University. He is the author of Signifyi... more Mauro Calcagno is Associate Professor of Music, Harvard University. He is the author of Signifying Nothing: On the Aesthetics of Pure Voice in Early Venetian Opera, Journal of Musicology, XX (2003), 461497; 'Imitar col canto chi parla': Monteverdi and the Creation of a Language ...
Journal of the American Musicological Society, 2002
Conventional views of text/music relationships in early Italian opera focus on the imitation of a... more Conventional views of text/music relationships in early Italian opera focus on the imitation of affections. But by dealing exclusively with the referential meanings of texts (e.g., emotions, images, and concepts) these views overlook an important aspect of music's interaction with language. In opera, music also imitates language's contextual and communicative functions—i.e., discourse, as studied today by the subfield of linguistics called pragmatics. In his operas Monteverdi fully realized Peri's ideal of “imitating in song a person speaking” (“imitar col canto chi parla”) by musically emphasizing those context-dependent meanings that emerge especially in ordinary language and that are prominent in dramatic texts, as opposed to poetry and prose. Such meanings are manifest whenever words such as “I,” “here,” and “now” appear— words called “deictics”—with the function of situating the speaker/singer's utterances in a specific time and place. Monteverdi highlights deic...
Journal of the American Musicological Society, 2006
... While in plays written by nuns walls often appear as monolithic structures that imprison thos... more ... While in plays written by nuns walls often appear as monolithic structures that imprison those they surround, the walls in Benvenuto Flori's L ... Robert Kendrick has explored the feasibility of several possibilities, including (1) octave transposition of the bass part, so that the tenor is ...
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Books by Mauro Calcagno
"This pathbreaking study links two traditionally separate genres as their stars crossed to explore the emergence of multiple selves in early modern Italian culture and society. Calcagno focuses on the works of Claudio Monteverdi, a master of both genres, to investigate how they reflect changing ideas about performance and role-playing by singers. The author traces the roots of dialogic subjectivity to Petrarch's love poetry, arguing that Petrarchism exerted a powerful influence not only on late Renaissance literature and art, but also on music. Covering more than a century of music and cultural history, the book demonstrates that the birth of opera relied on an important feature of the madrigalian tradition: the role of the composer as a narrative agent enabling performers to become characters and hold a specific point of view."
Papers by Mauro Calcagno
"This pathbreaking study links two traditionally separate genres as their stars crossed to explore the emergence of multiple selves in early modern Italian culture and society. Calcagno focuses on the works of Claudio Monteverdi, a master of both genres, to investigate how they reflect changing ideas about performance and role-playing by singers. The author traces the roots of dialogic subjectivity to Petrarch's love poetry, arguing that Petrarchism exerted a powerful influence not only on late Renaissance literature and art, but also on music. Covering more than a century of music and cultural history, the book demonstrates that the birth of opera relied on an important feature of the madrigalian tradition: the role of the composer as a narrative agent enabling performers to become characters and hold a specific point of view."