THE SOCIAL CONNOTATIONS OF SINGING VERSE IN CINQUECENTO ITALY
Brian Richardson
The singing of verse in late fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italy could be associated with social classes to varying degrees. Private performances among the upper centred on lyric verse. In Quattrocento courtly poetry performers such as Serafino Aquilano found an audience outside elite, but early Cinquecento Bembo promoted a separation written from that might popular culture. Musical settings madrigals remained characteristic fashionable elite performance throughout century. However, Tuscan tradition improvising continued bring together singers different classes, narrative performed piazza by drew audiences across society, judge references within poems eyewitness accounts.
The Italianist