Includes bibliographical references (pages 345-367) and index.
Contents
Music and texts : an overview of the sources -- Rhetoric and meaning in the seventeenth-century French air -- Musical representations of the primary passions -- Setting the texts -- Form and style : the organization and function of expressions, syntax, and rhetorical figures -- L'art du chant : performing French airs -- Salon culture and the mid-seventeenth-century French air -- The late-seventeenth-century air and the rhetoric of distraction.