Voice, Slavery, and Race in Seventeenth-Century Florence

Emily Wilbourne is Associate Professor of Musicology at Queens College and the Graduate Center in the City University of New York. She has previously published Seventeenth-Century Opera and the Sound of the Commedia dell'Arte (2016) and Lesbian/Opera: Elena Kats-Chernin's Iphis and Matricide: The Musical (2022); a collection of essays, co-edited with Suzanne G. Cusick, Acoustemologies in Contact: Sounding Subjects and Modes of Listening in Early Modernity (2021) is available via open access.

• PrologoIntroductionACT ONEScene 1: Songs to Entertain Foreign RoyaltyScene 2: Comic Songs Imitating Foreign VoicesScene 3: Music all'usanza loro (or Performed in a Foreign Way)Scene 4: "Turkish Music" in ItalyScene 5: Trumpets and Drums Played by Enslaved MusiciansScene 6: Scholarly Transcriptions of Foreign Musical SoundsScene 7: Music Proper to Enslaved SingersIntermezzo: Thinking from Enslaved LivesACT TWOScene 8: Introducing Giovannino BuonaccorsiScene 9: Buonaccorsi Sings on the Florentine StageScene 10: Buonaccorsi as Court JesterScene 11: Buonaccorsi as a Black GypsyScene 12: Buonaccorsi as a SopranoScene 13: Buonaccorsi Sings on the Venetian StageIntermezzo II: Thinking from Giovannino Buonaccorsi's LifeEpilogo (Axiomatic)Index

Wilbourne offers an extensive and trail-brazing account of racialized voices in seventeenth-century Florence. Interdisciplinary in scope and meticulously researched, Wilbourne's incomparable work takes us on a tantalizing journey into the musical and performative worlds of early modern Italy's "unsung voices." This book will enthrall non-specialists and specialists alike, transforming our approaches to and understandings of enslavement, race, and the power of sound across the Mediterranean world.