The Italian Madrigal in Performance

This book offers a new account of madrigal culture at the intersection of sound, space, and society

The volume rethinks the Italian madrigal not as a self-contained score but as a socially situated performance ecology shaped by bodies, rooms, objects, images, institutions, and relations of power. Bringing together musicology, architectural history, art history, and performance studies, the volume investigates how madrigals sounded, circulated, and acquired meaning across courts, academies, domestic interiors, gardens, banqueting halls, and urban ceremonial settings in Renaissance and early Baroque Italy. Rather than treating space as a passive backdrop, the chapters show it to be an active agent in musical production: acoustic, symbolic, affective, and political. They explore how singers, instrumentalists, patrons, listeners, collectors, and students animated the madrigal through voice, gesture, ornament, pedagogy, devotion, sociability, ritual, and acts of translation and adaptation. From Rome and Ferrara to Naples and Brescia, the studies reveal the madrigal as a mobile medium that crossed boundaries between public and private, elite display and domestic practice, sacred observance and secular pleasure, textual artefact and embodied event. By foregrounding performance, sensory experience, material culture, and the social lives of music, this book offers a new account of madrigal culture at the intersection of sound, space, and society, recasting one of early modern Italy’s most influential genres as a dynamic practice of making meaning in and through place.