CFP: The Sound of Poetry: A Comparative Approach to Rhetoric, Poetics, and Music, session at Renaissance Society of America, Boston, Mar-Apr 2016

The Sound of Poetry: A Comparative Approach to Rhetoric, Poetics, and Music

Organizer: Eugenio Refini (Johns Hopkins University)

Although naturally and historically intertwined, music and poetry tended to be described in the Renaissance as competing rather than interacting. Indeed, from Dante’s seminal discussion of poetry as “a verbal invention composed according to the rules of rhetoric and music” in the De vulgari eloquentia to Torquato Tasso’s La Cavaletta and Discorsi del poema eroico, from Nicola Vicentino to Giulio Caccini, Claudio Monteverdi, and Giovan Battista Doni, the relation between music and poetry has been addressed in different ways. If poets progressively privileged the role of verbal discourse over musical language, composers were usually more inclined to acknowledge the mutually informing relation of words and music. In spite of invaluable contributions in the field (e.g. the many studies on the madrigal tradition and the birth of opera), what remains largely unexplored is the interplay of poetics, rhetoric, and music theory that informed such a controversial relation. This panel (or series of panels) aims to combine literary and music studies in order to explore the ways in which the interaction between poetry and music was approached and conceptualized in the Renaissance.

Possible topics include:
•       Discussion/interpretation of classical sources
•       References to music in treatises of poetics/rhetoric
•       References to poetics/rhetoric in music treatises
•       Paratexts of music editions (e.g. prefaces, dedication letters, etc.) addressing the relation between music and poetry
•       Discourses on music and poetry in poetical and literary sources
•       The relevance of similar discourses to the contemporary development of musical genres (e.g. madrigals, opera)
•       The relation between prosody, meters, and musical settings

Proposals, to be submitted to erefini1 -at- jhu.edu by June 1st 2015, must include: paper title (15-word); abstract (150-word); Keywords; CV (300-word; NB prose bios not accepted).