Martha Feldman is Professor of Music and the Humanities at The
University of Chicago. She is author of City Culture and the
Madrigal at Venice (1995), Opera and Sovereignty: Sentiment, Myth,
and Modernity in Eighteenth-Century Italy (forthcoming, 2006), and
is currently at work on The Castrato as Myth: Symbolic Economy and
Life Writing in Early Modern Italy. She was also a volume editor in
the series Sixteenth-century
Madrigal (1989-91) and general editor of the series Critical and
Cultural Musicology (2000-2002). In 1998-99 she was appointed a
Getty Scholar and in 2001, the Dent Medal was conferred on her by
the Royal Musical Association, in collaboration with
the International Musicological Society.
Bonnie Gordon is Assistant Professor of Music at the State
University of New York at Stony Brook. She has published on the
female voice in early modern Italy and on contemporary female
singer/songwriters and her book Monteverdi's Unruly Women: The
Power of Song in Early Modern Europe was published in 2004. She has
received awards from the American Association of University Women,
the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and the Mellon
Foundation.
"The Courtesan's Arts: Cross-cultural Perspectives presents a
remarkably rich and wide-ranging view of the social significance
and cultural resonance of that most ambivalent yet seductive of
women, the courtesan. Without forcing parallels among the various
cultures and periods they consider, the essays in this volume
illuminate one another in fascinating ways. Moving from the more
familiar realm of sixteenth-century Italy back to the world of
ancient
Greece and forward to modern India and Japan, they reveal both
universal and culturally specific aspects of courtesanship."--Ellen
Rosand, Professor of Music, Yale University, author of Opera in
Seventeenth-Century Venice: The Creation of a Genre, Monteverdi's
Last Operas: A Venetian Trilogy (forthcoming), and authority on the
seventeenth-century Venetian singer and composer Barbara
Strozzi
"Feldman and Gordon take a daring leap to consider the courtesan
less for her sexuality than for her creativity. In this sumptuous
collection of essays, illustrations, and musical examples on CD,
the courtesan's beauty is no longer dangerous but expressive. Like
the courtier, she crafted herself as 'many things to many men' and
integrated multiple arts in her craft. From ancient Greece to Italy
and India, this book features fascinating discussions not only
of
music, but also of dance, costume, and verse."--James Grantham
Turner, author of Schooling Sex (OUP, 2003)
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