Biography

Russell O’Rourke is a music historian who studies early modern music psychology as it intersects with the histories of music theory and the Italian madrigal. He received a PhD in Historical Musicology from Columbia University, where he is a Lecturer in Music since 2021. From 2021 to 2025, he was a member of the Histories of Music, Mind, and Body research group at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics. He is published in the Journal of the American Musicological Society and Thinking Music: Global Sources for the History of Music Theory (forthcoming, University of Chicago OPS).
 

Project Summary

This project reexamines the musicological truism that Italian madrigalists sought to “move the emotions” (muovere gli affetti) of their audiences, a motto that appears in musical discourse with increasing frequency during the later decades of the sixteenth century. It does so by situating the affetti within intellectual history, particularly histories of rhetoric, poetics, and music theory. Contrary to accepted scholarly narratives that posit a continuous bond between music and the emotions stretching from ancient times to our present, the Renaissance understanding of emotions as cognitive and discursive precludes the straightforward relation between musical stimuli (e.g., dissonance) and emotional arousal often presumed. By zeroing in on the writings of the music theorist Gioseffo Zarlino (1517–90) and his acolytes, alongside a variety of nonmusical sources, I demonstrate the almost parasitic reliance of sixteenth-century music psychology on rhetorical models for the affective power of language. Signification, fictional representation, persuasion, and the projection of style—these foundationally linguistic activities became the blueprint in the sixteenth century for a new understanding of music’s capacity to move the soul. Reconstructing this understanding, the project goes on to show, invites reconsideration of staple style features of the madrigal repertory that arose alongside it, above all the genre’s eponymous, yet much maligned text-setting device, the madrigalism.