From Language to Music

I consider this book a valuable contribution to the study of the lute repertory of the early sixteenth century and at the same time the first attempt at a repositioning of the lute repertory within the cultural milieu of Italian Renaissance. The lute repertoire played a major role in the Renaissance through mediating between the homegrown and the “imported” musical repertories, and in incorporating the most up-to-date artistic and linguistic trends. Lute intabulations, ricercars, and dances are the products of the mediation between language and music, and the development of the Italian language is very much reflected in the lute vocabulary.