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Uribe Bracho, Lorena.

“Orphans of Orpheus: Music Lost and Regained in Spanish Golden Age Poetry.” Hispanic Review 89.2 (2021): 193-216.

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Publication type Year ISBN/ISSN Bibliog code
Article: journal 2021 doi:10.1353/hir.2021.0013
Summary

Early modern Spanish lyric's connections with music are manifold, and imagery of instruments and singing voices is virtually everywhere in the texts, often playing a part in the articulation of affect and providing a vocabulary for poets to reflect about their own verbal powers. And yet, as I argue in this article, the story of Golden Age lyric begins with tension and conflict at the center of the music–poetry relation. There is, I contend, a discrepancy between the Orphean tropes that equate writing verse with playing music, and the relative autonomy that poetry and music were developing in Renaissance Spain. In this context, I draw attention to a nostalgia that cuts across the texts: the sense that poets have only inherited one half of Orpheus's torrential and effective mixture of media, poetry, and song. To make these points, I draw from a collection of printed and manuscript sources from 1500 to 1700, by poets canonical and obscure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]


Keywords

Composer

Instrument VIHUELA

Century 16CENT

Region SPAIN

Medium

Music genre SONGS

Research field