Syrene soundes : false relations in the English Renaissance /
"False relations remain one of the great enigmas of English Renaissance musical culture. Contemporary theoretical treatises explicitly discouraged their use, and yet these deliberate dissonances are hallmarks of English Renaissance music. Over the centuries they have accumulated a surfeit of su...
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| Format: | eBook |
| Language: | English |
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New York, NY :
Oxford University Press,
[2024]
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| Online Access: | Connect to the full text of this electronic book |
| Summary: | "False relations remain one of the great enigmas of English Renaissance musical culture. Contemporary theoretical treatises explicitly discouraged their use, and yet these deliberate dissonances are hallmarks of English Renaissance music. Over the centuries they have accumulated a surfeit of subsequent connotations that have obscured how they once functioned, yet they have never been fully critically explored or elucidated in an English context. Syrene Soundes excavates beneath strata of accumulated meanings to uncover the way that false relations delighted and confounded their original listeners and performers. It presents a holistic investigation of the phenomenon, examining the cultural, literary, visual and material understanding of such dissonances in relation to the broader culture of incongruity, surprise and error and metaphors of harmony that captured the imagination of the English in the sixteenth- and seventeenth centuries. Eleanor Chan argues that interdisciplinary angles can galvanise understanding of technical musical theoretical tropes like the false relation. She demonstrates that the false relation and its graphic ephemerality can productively be explored through the lens of English Renaissance visual culture and its idiosyncratic representational strategies, and as matters of textuality and reading. By anchoring it within the milieu of the English Reformation, burgeoning aspirations towards empire, and the increasing need for a self-fashioned collective English identity, she reveals that the false relation was key to the mythology of an inherited English tradition of music-making"-- |
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| Physical Description: | 1 online resource (xvii, 407 pages) : illustrations (some color). |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
| ISBN: | 9780197748190 0197748198 9780197748206 0197748201 019774818X 9780197748183 |