How did "voice" become a metaphor for selfhood in the Western imagination? The Lyric Myth of Voice situates the emergence of an ideological connection between voice and subjectivity in late eighteenth-century Italy, where long-standing political anxieties and new notions of cultural enlightenment collided in the mythical figure of the lyric poet-singer. Ultimately, music and literature together shaped the singing voice into a tool for civilizing modern Italian subjects. Drawing on a range of approaches and frameworks from historical musicology to gender studies, disability studies, anthropology, and literary theory, Jessica Gabriel Peritz shows how this ancient yet modern myth of voice attained interpretable form, flesh, and sound.
The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the AMS 75 PAYS Fund of the American Musicological Society, supported in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Jessica Gabriel Peritz is Assistant Professor of Music and Affiliated Faculty in Italian Studies and Early Modern Studies at Yale University.
"With wide-ranging and precise interdisciplinary scholarship and impressive insight into the many interconnections of emotion, voice, and political development, Jessica Peritz makes a major contribution to our understanding of not just eighteenth-century Italian music but also European cultural and political history. A real delight."—Martha C. Nussbaum, Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics, University of Chicago
"Written elegantly and with flair,
The Lyric Myth of Voice does much to argue for the value of Peritz's sources and the importance of long-neglected Italian cultural practices of the late Enlightenment. Her close readings of material are lovely, excellent, stimulating, illuminating—everything wonderful."—Ellen Lockhart, author of
Animation, Plasticity, and Music in Italy, 1770–1830 "This imaginative book begins with the arresting idea of voices as sites where bodies are buried. By carefully listening to the timbres of the archive, Peritz excavates the sounds of eighteenth-century singers of Italian opera to tell an important story about the emergence of modern conceptions of song and personhood. Reaching backward to Homeric myths and forward to contemporary scholarly discourses,
The Lyric Myth of Voice simultaneously reveals new details of individual singers and reimagines theoretical understandings of the voice. Like Carolyn Abbate's work on nineteenth-century opera, this book will breathe new life into opera studies, voice studies, and musicology all told."—Bonnie Susan Gordon, author of
Monteverdi's Unruly Women 300 pp.6 x 9Illus: 24 music examples, 9 b/w illustrations, 5 tables
9780520380790$65.00|£55.00Hardcover
Nov 2022