This study addresses the printed collections produced by the solo vocalist Giulio Caccini at the turn of the seventeenth century, a repertoire for which problems of musical performance, notation, and analysis have proven particularly difficult. Its troubled record of critical evaluation and its notational problem as a 'performerly' repertoire have fostered a historiographical image of these works as stylistically chaotic, transitional, or 'prototypical,' as musical symbols, in other words, of a European culture making an uneasy transition into modernity.;My approach to these works is by way of a reconstruction of the private, secretive, day-to-day musical entertainments of Italian courtiers. I trace the relationship between solo musical performance, as an evocation of traditional princely privilege, and other performative events like the commedia dell'arte, the recitation of epic narrative poetry, and the conversational debates in which courtiers competed within their private chambers. I contradict a standard historical teleology that depicts high culture moving away from 'traditional' oral practices and towards literate, published cultural products in the sixteenth century. In its place, I find a secret, patrician culture heavily invested in the proprietary exclusivity that comes from a musical style based not on the composer's score, but on the performer's body. Given this, the most important historical narrative remaining to be written about the late renaissance, and one to which soloistic music actually offers us the greatest access, is the tension that arose between the increasing desire to notate or transcribe instances of elite cultural behavior and the fact that the very value of those behaviors still remained tied to their inherent unnotatability.;Viewing Caccini's songs as the residue of an elite oral culture, they come to bear a strong conceptual resemblance to the fragmentary scenarii published by the commedia dell'arte actor Flaminio Scala. This suggests that the singer/songwriter of the late Renaissance may be better understood by relocating such stock terms as stile, maniera, and aria away from the compositional process, art history's textual "heritage of Apelles," and turning instead to the physical presence of the performer and to the topical resonance of performance space, what I refer to as "the heritage of Campaspe.".
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