Music and love: 2012 just like the Renaissance?

While investigating Renaissance marriages and wedding pieces, I came across studies on the connection between music, love and the erotic. This intersection, which can take various forms, has been widely explored by art historians and musicologists. Analyses have mainly taken into consideration the XVI rather than the XV century: while in the Quattrocento very few households had musical instruments listed among their possessions, by the mid sixteenth century the material presence of music in the home increased (Dennis 2010). Instruments were adorned with elaborate carved or inlaid decoration and kept in painted cases. Usual motifs involved naked bodies or mythological scenes with clear love-related references (Figure 1).  Explorations on secular vocal music has also revealed that explicit allusions to sexual practises where concealed in sung texts especially in genres such as the frottola or madrigal (Macy 1996).

In some works of the XV and XVI century, texts play on the syllables of the music scale: do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, si. By pulling these sounds together authors created erotic subtexts, embedded in the musical setting: “I should like you to sing a song/while you’re playing the viol for me/and that you would say fa ma la mi so la”. The text “hides” the sentence “fammel’a mi sola” which means “do it only to me” (Dennis 2010). Also Aretino, in his Ragionamenti, linked the musical scale to the erotic. Describing the culmination of an orgy he said “[..] listening to them you would have thought they were running the scales sol fa me re do” (Dennis 2010; Prizer 1991).

I happened to be in lovely Ferrara a couple of weeks ago.  While browsing through the open market in the main square (restaurant reservation at 1 pm, had a few minutes to kill!) I stopped in front a stall that sold T-shirts. They all featured quirky prints and some had this sentence written on the front: “Mi piacciono le ragazze che cantano si la do” (Figure 2). A literal translation would sound something like “I like girls that sing yes I give it”. I laughed. Now … The musical puns used by Aretino and others in the XVI century are still used today. Have things changed much between then and now??

PS. If you are in Edinburgh area don’t miss out the Edinburgh University Collection of Historic Musical Instruments. The Renaissance pieces of the museum can be browsed online (some Italian examples too!)

REF

Dennis, Flora. 2010. “Unlocking the gates of chastity. Music and the erotic in the domestic sphere in fifteenth and sixteenth century Italy”, Erotic Cultures of Renaissance Italy (Ashgate)

Macy, Laura. 1996. “Speaking of sex: metaphor and performance in the Italian madrigal”, The Journal of Musicology, 14: 1-34

Prizer, William. 1991. “Games of Venus: secular vocal music in the late Quattrocento and early Cinquecento”, The Journal of Musicology, 9: 3-56.