Item Detail
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Ricciardi, Emiliano
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Sapp, Craig Stuart
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Tasso in music project
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Torquato Tasso (1544-1595) was arguably the most prominent poet of late sixteenth-century Italy. His works, most notably the epic poem Gerusalemme liberata (Jerusalem Delivered), achieved tremendous fame in literary circles, shaping the poetic culture of the time. Tasso’s influence extended also well beyond the literary realm. Indeed, his poems became a source of inspiration for visual artists and, most importantly, for composers, among whom they became true hits. From the 1570s through the 1630s, virtually all composers of secular vocal music in Italy and Europe, including notable ones like Luca Marenzio and Claudio Monteverdi, set one or more of his poems, producing a total of over 650 settings. Composers were especially drawn to Tasso’s lyric poems, collectively known as Rime, whose conciseness and wit reflected the taste for concettismo typical of the time and offered opportunities for equally clever musical renditions, but also proved fond of Tasso’s Gerusalemme and the pastoral drama Aminta, whose dramatic features resonated with a growing tendency toward quasi-operatic styles in secular vocal music around 1600. As with most of the repertoire from this time period, however, the majority of the settings, over three quarters, are unavailable in modern editions. As a result, this significant corpus of works has remained largely unexplored in both scholarship and performance, which has in turn hindered a serious assessment of Tasso’s influence on early modern musical culture. Carried out by a team of scholars from the US and Europe, with the technical support of the Stanford University’s Center for Computer Assisted Research in the Humanities (CCARH) and the University of Massachusetts Amherst, the Tasso in Music Project aims to fill this lacuna by creating a complete digital edition of the extant late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century settings of Tasso’s poetry. (from the website)
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Website
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English
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Internet
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11268