Overview

"Grounded in new archival research documenting a significant presence of foreign and racially-marked individuals in Medici Florence, this book argues for the relevance of such individuals to the history of Western music and for the importance of sound-particularly musical and vocal sounds-to systems of racial and ethnic difference. Many of the individuals discussed in these pages were subject to enslavement or conditions of unfree labor; some labored at tasks that were explicitly musical or theatrical, while all intersected with sound and with practices of listening that afforded full personhood only to particular categories of people. Integrating historical detail alongside contemporary performances and musical conventions, this book makes the forceful claim that operatic musical techniques were-from their very inception-imbricated with racialized differences. Author Emily Wilbourne offers both a macro and micro approach to the content of this book. The first half of the volume draws upon a wide range of archival, theatrical and historical sources to articulate the theoretical interdependence of razza (lit. ""race""), voice, and music in early modern Italy; the second half focuses on the life and work of a specific, racially-marked individual: the enslaved, Black, male soprano singer, Giovannino Buonaccorsi (fl.1651-1674). Voice, Slavery, and Race in Seventeenth-Century Florence reframes the place of racial difference in Western art music and provides a compelling pre-history to later racial formulations of the sonic."

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9780197646915

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Reviews

"Wilbourne offers an extensive and trail-brazing account of racialized voices in seventeenth-century Florence. Interdisciplinary in scope and meticulously researched, Wilbourne's incomparable work takes us on a tantalizing journey into the musical and performative worlds of early modern Italy's ""unsung voices."" This book will enthrall non-specialists and specialists alike, transforming our approaches to and understandings of enslavement, race, and the power of sound across the Mediterranean world. * Nicholas R. Jones, author of Staging Habla de Negros: Radical Performance of the African Diaspora in Early Modern Spain * From one of the leading opera historians of her generation, Wilbourne's Voice, Slavery, and Race is a nuanced account of the reverberations between voice and race on the seventeenth-century stage. ""Act I"" reads the evidence of paintings, commedia dell'arte scenarios, libretti, and musical scores against a wealth of new documentation from Florentine archives, while ""Act II"" turns the spotlight on Giovannino Buonaccorsi, an enslaved Black soprano in the service of the Medici. In brilliant analyses that never skip a beat, Wilbourne pieces together a new and original history of racialized performances during the first century of Italian opera. * Kate van Orden, editor of Seachanges: Music in the Mediterranean and Atlantic Worlds, 1550-1800, I Tatti Research Series 2 *"

Wilbourne offers an extensive and trail-brazing account of racialized voices in seventeenth-century Florence. Interdisciplinary in scope and meticulously researched, Wilbourne's incomparable work takes us on a tantalizing journey into the musical and performative worlds of early modern Italy's unsung voices. This book will enthrall non-specialists and specialists alike, transforming our approaches to and understandings of enslavement, race, and the power of sound across the Mediterranean world. * Nicholas R. Jones, author of Staging Habla de Negros: Radical Performance of the African Diaspora in Early Modern Spain * From one of the leading opera historians of her generation, Wilbourne's Voice, Slavery, and Race is a nuanced account of the reverberations between voice and race on the seventeenth-century stage. Act I reads the evidence of paintings, commedia dell'arte scenarios, libretti, and musical scores against a wealth of new documentation from Florentine archives, while Act II turns the spotlight on Giovannino Buonaccorsi, an enslaved Black soprano in the service of the Medici. In brilliant analyses that never skip a beat, Wilbourne pieces together a new and original history of racialized performances during the first century of Italian opera. * Kate van Orden, editor of Seachanges: Music in the Mediterranean and Atlantic Worlds, 1550-1800, I Tatti Research Series 2 *

Author Information

Emily Wilbourne is Associate Professor of Musicology at Queens College and the Graduate Center in the City University of New York. She has previously published Seventeenth-Century Opera and the Sound of the Commedia dell'Arte (2016) and Lesbian/Opera: Elena Kats-Chernin's Iphis and Matricide: The Musical (2022); a collection of essays, co-edited with Suzanne G. Cusick, Acoustemologies in Contact: Sounding Subjects and Modes of Listening in Early Modernity (2021) is available via open access.

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