📜 Schleuse, Paul. 2015. Singing Games in Early Modern Italy: The Music Books of Orazzio Vecchi. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press
Titular singing games are not the ones we'd have in the library — there is no improvisation, the compositions are fixed and tonal. However, interestingly, in the book author's interpretation, a lot of playful features are to be found in music books of Orazio Vecchi, so that's why the topic is of at least peripheral interest to our wiki.
Vecci, the late-Renaissance composer, appears in general scholarship mainly due to his L'Amfiparnaso book, a collection of pieces regarded as a proto-opera. Schleuse tries to modify this framing (especially in chapter 4), with a game-like, recreational use proposed as a replacement to stage-focused opera discourse.
As a serious musicological book, "Singing Games…" will not waste space for the basics. Technical, historical terms, often in Italian, are used freely, only sometimes explained on their first usage. Academic prose is regularly paused for music notation and poems, usually provided with an English translation, unless two Italian versions are being compared. Still, non-specialists should be able to follow the thought easily, additional research elsewhere will be necessary only if you need to grasp each and every detail.
Contents
The music analyzed by the book is diverse, there's an important place for canzonettas, a genre between a madrigal and a simpler villanella. Pieces that appear in the analyses are for between three and nine voices, but mostly four. Close readings of specific songs are mostly done in the first two chapters.
Chapter 3 "Forest and Feast" turns to collections themselves, because two of Orazzio Vecchi's music books use mentioned metaphors in titles and introductions, "inviting" readers to a stroll in the woods or to a culinary event, with music as plant species or dishes. This chapter contains also a bit more of biographical information about the (sub)titular composer. Chapter 4's L'Amfiparnaso, mentioned earlier, is a book that uses a stage play also as a metaphor, to gather diverse musical material in one collection, while more closely following a single overarching story.
Chapter 5 is closing in on games, but, as its subtitle states, it's "Game as Music" — this part presents many instances when a game is illustrated in a composition of the period. Many composers other than Vecci make an appearance here, and there's an older book featured, Girolamo Bargagli's Dialogo de’ giuochi che vegghie sanesi si usano di fare (1572), which shows a few activities of music/game kind (a promising path to explore later on the wiki). A lot of drinking songs are covered also here (mainly, artistic reworkings of these).
Chapter 6 is about identity of presumed books' readers-singers, as it is represented in the text. This part also discusses the topic of social class and playing with social conventions.
The games
From all gathered material, the playfulness aspect in the genre is clear, even if the game comparison is not discussed in a systematic way, and there's no reference to game studies. Reader may see that pieces by Vecci and his contemporaries employ:
- role-playing, not only an overall poetic narration, but e.g. voices appearing as separate characters,
- skill challenges, including tongue-twisters and rhythm shifts,
- puzzles, not only in the lyrics, but e.g. an intentionally wrong pitch in notation (p. 176, referring to Antonfrancesco Doni, Dialogo della musica),
- comedy, etc.
In overall, the social recreational function of this type of music is quite similar to children's singing games. Fixed, yet, on some level, interactive. It's not all ring-a-ring-a-roses though, because there is also a great deal of eroticism involved, obscenity even (examined in unsafe detail in chapter 6).
All in all, Singing Games in Early Modern Italy is a book that crosses from musicology to the topic of games in unique and interesting way. And might be a worthy bibliography entry if you are writing about this intersection in an academic context.
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