“This book smartly inserts the commedia dell’arte into scholarly conversations about drama, opera, and early modern musical practice. Wilbourne makes important claims for commedia dell’arte that bring the genre into the center of late Renaissance and early Baroque creative practices. Ultimately, her work represents the best of what musicology has come to be in recent years.”
— Bonnie Gordon, University of Virginia
“With extraordinary historical imagination and meticulous attention to the lived sonic experience of theater that is recorded in musical and literary sources, Wilbourne finally confirms a long-lived scholarly intuition that opera’s aesthetic roots lay in the improvised theatrical genre commonly known as commedia dell’arte. This brilliant book is a landmark contribution to opera studies, theater studies, and those who hope for dialogue between music scholarship and sound studies.”
— Suzanne G. Cusick, New York University
“In this marvelous book, Wilbourne traces a new ‘sonic epistemology’ of opera, showing how performers of commedia dell’arte taught its practitioners and audiences how to decode sound, interpreting aurality in volume, gestures, vowels, voices, articulations, and accents. Opera emerges here in an improvisatory, polyglottal riot of sounds and meanings. Rethinking opera’s beginnings, Wilbourne dispenses once and for all with a pre-Foucauldian musicology wedded to origins, principles, causes, lineages, genres, texts, and authors, replacing it with exciting new epistemologies of the body and ear.”
— Martha Feldman, University of Chicago
“The affinities that existed in the course of the seventeenth century between the spoken theater of the commedia dell’arte and the sung theater of opera have hitherto been studied primarily with an eye to the overlapping story lines, character types, and working models employed by the acting or singing companies. Here, Wilbourne explores such affinities at a level that is both more intimate and more elusive, that of the multifarious auditory dimension of the theatrical experience, where spectators were first and foremost listeners. As a result, this book is simultaneously a brilliant exercise in sound archaeology and one in cultural anthropology.”
— Lorenzo Bianconi, University of Bologna