The Secular Latin Motet in the Renaissance - Tapa blanda

This study of partsongs and soloistic music is concerned with the musical settings of classical verse. The work, the first of its kind, is a result of a collaboration between a classicist and a musicologist. This book studies, for the first time, the whole genre of the secular motet to Latin text in the Renaissance. Musicologists and classicists with medieval and Renaissance knowledge, as well as expertise in each other's disciplines, bring together ancient, early Christian, medieval and Renaissance materials in an interdisciplinary exploration of the texts, their settings and the social, political and cultural context of the genre. The book takes as its starting-point Renaissance settings of classical verse, most importantly Virgil's lines from the "Aeneid" that begin 'Dulces exuviae', the lament of Dido, Queen of Carthage, after being abandoned by Aeneas. This text examines metre and the relationship between the classical materials and the Renaissance works derived from them, and many other matters. The result is to open up of a corner of musical history that has previously been given little recognition, and a new understanding of a much-neglected genre.