Gendering Modern Music: Thoughts on the Monteverdi-Artusi Controversy

Abstract

This essay examines the presence of gender metaphors in the documents of the Monteverdi-Artusi controversy. Such metaphors include literal and figurative representations of sexuality and gender in the theoretical arguments on both sides; representations of gender, sexuality, and power in the oratione asserted to have governed the composition of the two most discussed works, the madrigals "Cruda Amarilli" and "O Mirtillo"; and representations of resistance to patriarchal authority in the armonia of both madrigals. Such examination shows (1) that the focus on these two madrigals by both parties to the controversy irresistibly sexualized "modern music" and feminized its sonorous traits by associating them with images of the sensual and disobedient body rather than the rational and controlling anima; (2) that the Monteverdi brothers' defense of the seconda prattica was a rhetorical effort to legitimate modern music as an alternative patriarchy; and (3) that these gender messages became inextricable from the style they were used to defend, with consequences for both seventeenth-century practitioners and twentieth-century scholars of early "modern music."