THE SOCIAL CONNOTATIONS OF SINGING VERSE IN CINQUECENTO ITALY

Abstract

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 classes centred on lyric verse. In the late Quattrocento the courtly poetry of performers such as Serafino Aquilano found an audience outside the social elite, but in the early Cinquecento Bembo promoted a separation of written lyric verse from poetry that might be associated with popular culture. Musical settings of madrigals remained characteristic of fashionable elite performance throughout the century. However, the Tuscan tradition of improvising lyric verse continued to bring together singers from different classes, and narrative verse performed in the piazza by singers from outside the elite drew audiences from across society, to judge from references within the poems and from eyewitness accounts.

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