Dear all,
The colloquium this week (Wednesday 16 November, 5pm, Recital Room) will be
given by Professor Giuseppe Gerbino, whose paper will be entitled
'Metaphors of Cognition: Visual Imagination in Sixteenth-Century Music'.
Giuseppe Gerbino is Professor of Music at Columbia University, New York.
His research interests include the Italian madrigal, the relationship
between music and language in the early modern period, early opera, and
Renaissance theories of cognition and sense perception. He is the author of
Canoni ad Enigmi: Pier Francesco Valentini e l’artificio canonico nella
prima metà del Seicento (Rome, 1995), and Music and the Myth of Arcadia in
Renaissance Italy (Cambridge, 2009), which won the 2010 Lewis Lockwood
Award of the American Musicological Society. His currently working on a
book on “Music, Mind, and Soul in the Renaissance,” which explores the role
that music played in the sixteenth-century understanding of the mind/body
relationship.
Abstract: This paper explores the early modern debate on the relationship
between mental images and emotional states. The concept of mental
visualization lies at the core of Renaissance theories of cognition and
sense perception because most operations of the mind were understood as a
process of image formation. The same process of image formation was also
associated with the arousal of emotion. Using examples from Cipriano de
Rore’s music and Zarlino’s writings, I will argue that this aspect of
Renaissance philosophy of mind can help us deepen our insight into the
sixteenth-century preoccupation with the affective congruence between
language and music. The problem of maintaining intact the intelligibility
of the text may be reformulated as the problem of setting a text to music
without interfering with the formation of the mental images stimulated by
the linguistic representation of thought.
As usual, the colloquium will be followed by a drinks reception in the
Faculty foyer. We hope to see many of you on Wednesday(16 November) at 5pm
in the Recital Room, Faculty of Music, West Road.
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