Singing the female body: Monteverdi, subjectivity, sensuality

My dissertation explores connections between music-making, constructions of gender difference, and subjectivity at the turn of the seventeenth century. I consider Monteverdi\u27s madrigals and music dramas in their original performance context in order to investigate the relationship between women\u27s bodies and song, suggesting that both forces occupy a conceptual space between harmless pleasure and threatening excess. This place resonates with dissonances between social mores that demanded women\u27s silence and musical conventions that displayed female voices. The dissertation presents case studies of selected works that articulate early modern conceptions of music and the body, conceptions that reflect influences such as Galenic medicine, Neoplatonic philosophy, Petrarchan ideals, ancient mythology, erotic expression, and conduct books, as well as writings on music theory, performance, and practice. The first two chapters discuss a series of festivities commissioned for the wedding of Francesco-Gonzaga and Margherita of Savoy in 1608. These productions, including Monteverdi and Rinuccini\u27s L\u27Arianna and Il ballo delle ingrate, Guarini\u27s L\u27Idropica with its intermedi by Chiabrera, and Gagliano\u27s La Dafne, arguably merge performance and reality in a ritual attempt to quell the excessive potential of female desire. At the same time, the performance of these pieces propels an endless struggle between the force of the female voice and powers that tried to constrain it. Chapter three juxtaposes Monteverdi\u27s Si ch\u27io vorei morire and Cor mio mentre vi miro in order to explore musical renditions of erotic and sensuous experiences. I suggest that madrigals coalesce corporeal pleasure and spiritual love, despite philosophical and social endeavors to keep them apart. In my final chapter, I read two sets of similar madrigals in order to investigate the relationship between Monteverdi\u27s stylistic innovations and larger cultural shifts occurring in the first part of the seventeenth century. With some speculations about the incipient Cartesianism of his later music, I explore different possibilities for the sonorous embodiment of subjectivity as the Renaissance merged into the modern