Available From UC Press

In this book, Susan McClary examines the mechanisms through which seventeenth-century musicians simulated extreme affective states—desire, divine rapture, and ecstatic pleasure. She demonstrates how every major genre of the period, from opera to religious music to instrumental pieces based on dances, was part of this striving for heightened passions by performers and listeners. While she analyzes the social and historical reasons for the high value placed on expressive intensity in both secular and sacred music, and she also links desire and pleasure to the many technical innovations of the period. McClary shows how musicians—whether working within the contexts of the Reformation or Counter-Reformation, Absolutists courts or commercial enterprises in Venice—were able to manipulate known procedures to produce radically new ways of experiencing time and the Self.

Susan McClary is Professor of Music at Case Western Reserve University. She is the author of many book including Conventional Wisdom: The Content of Musical Form and Modal Subjectivities: Self-Fashioning in the Italian Madrigal, both from UC Press.

“In this book brimming with great music and great ideas, Susan McClary takes us into the sensual, even bawdy world of the seventeenth century. Its musicians developed ways to express, through tones, the longings and pleasures that the nobility hoped to experience on earth and in heaven. With McClary as our guide, we can tour this sacred and profane landscape of desire and, in our own fashion, luxuriate in its musical beauties.”

—Robert O. Gjerdingen, author of Music in the Galant Style



“In this ambitious study, Susan McClary boldly argues that the seventeenth century was far more than the period in which an emerging tonal practice can be charted in Western music, for it was precisely in this nascent tonality, she claims, that composers discovered affective sonic expression of modern notions of self, temporality, and bodily desire. Enriched by compelling analytic examples and enlivened by McClary’s characteristically vivid prose, it is a book sure to arouse the interest of music historians and theorists alike."

—Thomas Christensen, general editor of Cambridge History of Western Music Theory