Articulating Language in Early Modern Music

In the third volume section – PERFORMING – trained musicians and musicologists reflect on the stakes of musical performance, putting a particular emphasis on the complex relationships between improvisation and notation as well as between musical and lingual sound. Lutenist Alejandro Galiano Zurbriggen draws on three experimental concerts of seventeenth-century lute music to explore the complex generative relationship between language and music. Starting out from questions of historical pronunciation and zooming in on John Dowland’s song “In Darknesse Let Mee Dwell,” Zurbriggen shows how meaning comes to be created and remade in the interplay of lingual and musical sound or lyric and musical poetry.