Rachael Durkin – författare

Modern literature has always been obsessed by music. It cannot seem to think about itself without obsessing about music. And music has returned the favour. The Routledge Companion to Music and Modern Literature addresses this relationship as a significant contribution to the burgeoning field of word and music studies. The 37 chapters within consider the partnership through four lenses—the universal, opera and literature, musical and literary forms, and popular music and literature—and touch upon diverse and pertinent themes for our modern times, ranging from misogyny to queerness, racial inequality to the claimed universality of whiteness. This Companion therefore offers an essential resource for all who try to decode the musico-literary exchange.

This book provides the first scholarly history of the viola d’amore, a popular bowed string instrument of the Baroque era, with a unique tone produced by a set of metal sympathetic strings. Composers like Bach made use of the viola d’amore for its particular sound, but the instrument subsequently fell out of fashion amid orchestral standardisation, only to see a revival as interest in early music and historical performance grew. Drawing on literary accounts, iconography, and surviving instruments, this study examines the origins and development of this eye-catching string instrument in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It explores the rich variation of designs displayed in extant viola d’amore specimens, both as originally constructed and as a result of conversion and repair. The viola d’amore is then set into the wider context of Elizabethan England’s development of instruments with wire strings, and its legacy in the form of the baryton which emerged in the early seventeenth century, followed by a look at the viola d’amore’s own nomenclatorial and organological influence. The book closes with a discussion of the viola d’amore’s revival, and its use and manufacture today. Offering insights for organological research and historical performance practice, this study enhances our knowledge of both the viola d’amore and its wider family of instruments.

Modern literature has always been obsessed by music. It cannot seem to think about itself without obsessing about music. And music has returned the favour. The Routledge Companion to Music and Modern Literature addresses this relationship as a significant contribution to the burgeoning field of word and music studies. The 37 chapters within consider the partnership through four lenses—the universal, opera and literature, musical and literary forms, and popular music and literature—and touch upon diverse and pertinent themes for our modern times, ranging from misogyny to queerness, racial inequality to the claimed universality of whiteness. This Companion therefore offers an essential resource for all who try to decode the musico-literary exchange.

The entanglement of music and literature of the early modern period is rich with exchanges, dialogues, and disputes. These entanglements present a fascinating counterpoint to early modernity, and in many ways serve as complicit witnesses to their times and places. The Routledge Companion to Early Modern Music and Literature considers musico-literary production from the period 1500–1800, as well as its contemporary resonances, and seeks to unpick these often knotty intersections.Following in the footsteps of The Routledge Companion to Music and Modern Literature (edited by Rachael Durkin, Peter Dayan, Axel Englund, and Katharina Clausius), the 28 chapters within consider this transformative time through four thematic groupings—music and early modern writings, political voices, staging the early modern, and afterlives—and invite readers to marvel at the miscellany of interactions between early modern musics and literatures from the sixteenth to the twenty-first centuries. This Companion is therefore a valuable addition to the bookshelves of those looking to grapple with the early modern musico-literary relationship.