Theorising Pastoral Song in the Italian Madrigal, 1600-1640

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As modern civilisation adapts and responds to the precarious place of the natural environment in this century, humanity's relationship with nature has become subject to constant redefinition. In literary scholarship, this has been reflected in research on the nature of pastoral become increasingly frequent, resulting in derivative areas of study including post-pastoral and anti-pastoral (see Gifford, 2019; Entwistle, 2011). This has been paralleled with the recent rise of Ecomusicology as a discipline in which music's relationship with its natural environment may be interrogated (e.g. Allen & Dawe, 2016). These issues have importance resonances throughout history; in particular, the rise of humanism in the Renaissance had prompted a fundamental reconsideration of the relationship between man and nature, and the revival of pastoral from Antiquity was one mode through which this cultural identity was codified in literature, art, and music. Building on recent work which considers music's representational relationship with nature, including developments in Ecomusicology, this dissertation reconsiders the flourishing of pastoral literature in the late Renaissance through its representations in the Italian madrigal. Current scholarship in this area tends to centre on Battista Guarini's pastoral drama Il pastor fido (e.g. Coluzzi; 2023). Other scholarship which has examined pastoral and music has either emphasised notions of its simplicity, its idyllicism, and the conventionalisation of these characteristics in musical practice, particularly in composers' adoption of the style of the canzonetta (e.g. Einstein, 1948), or looked beyond these characterisations to identify a locus of pathos in musical responses to the genre (e.g. Gerbino, 2009). I attempt to examine musical responses to both dramatic and lyric pastoral poetry, looking beyond Il pastor fido and considering pastoral more broadly as an aestheticisation of nature, with a specific emphasis on pastoral's association with the development of monody in the early seventeenth century. Through an analysis of pastoral's place within lyric and dramatic musical texts of the late renaissance, I place the supposed naturalness of song in pastoral poetry within the approach of verisimilitude in music and the development of early opera. No single work has been studied more in this respect that Battista Guarini's pastoral drama Il pastor fido. And yet, despite the work's popularity, its space as a dramatic work - and therefore its interaction with the musical developments of the early seventeenth-century - still remains to be clarified. While James Chater (1997) has noted how composers transitioned from selecting texts from Il pastor fido which appeared ready formed as poesia per musica (poetry for music), towards those which required a conscious engagement with the representation of their dramatic implications, study of the work's implications outside the realm of the polyphonic madrigal is lacking. Through the critical study of literary and musical sources, I therefore aim to clarify the aesthetic relationship between pastoral texts - in which song was seen by contemporary theorists and authors as an existential condition (e.g. Giambattista Doni, 1635; and Battista Guarini, 1602) - and the musical development of monody, which placed the verisimilar delivery of speech as song as its primary aim. Somewhat paradoxically, despite its dramatic orientation Il pastor fido was not popular with early exponents of monody (Carter, 1997), and I aim to investigate this paradox through an analysis of pastoral's place between lyric and dramatic poetry in the early seventeenth century. In considering pastoral more broadly as an aestheticisation of nature beyond the limits of Il pastor fido, I aim to clarify issues of verisimilitude and of nature's representation in the madrigal. While helping clarify the development of early opera, this research will also provide a balance to the current focu