These essays illuminate the changing nature of text-music relationships from the time of Petrarch to Guarini and, in music, from the madrigals of Giovanni da Cascia to those of Gesualdo da Venosa. Haar traces a line of development from the stylized rhetoric of Trecento song through the popularizing trends of Quattrocento music and on to the union of verbal and musical cadence that marked the high Renaissance in sixteenth-century Italian music.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1986.