Zieg ⦁ Monteverdi’s Orfeo 42 canzona, the toccata, the variation, dance types, and the fantasia.16 That being said, instrumental music was still taken from vocal music, and adapted for instruments. Nonetheless, treatises were being written on how to properly compose for instruments and what their role in music should be. As Howard Brown, American musicologist explained, “By the end of the sixteenth century and the beginning of the seventeenth, composers like Giovanni Gabrieli and Claudio Monteverdi were beginning more regularly to offer advice about instrumentation.”17 In almost every opera, the orchestra plays preliminary music before the dialogue and singing begins.18 This instrumental music, or prelude, serves to give a clue about what the composer has written, and set the tone for the drama. Monteverdi used instrumental music exactly in this way as the call to action in Orfeo. The opening toccata in the opera is set to play three times before the curtain rises and is scored for brass.19 This piece sounds similar to a fanfare, and while it has no relation to the rest of the music in the opera, it could stand alone and function as a prelude to the opera (Example 2). Example 2: Toccata, mm. 1–2.20 Monteverdi skillfully used these Renaissance musical inventions to portray the ever-present philosophy of humanism, which focused on persuasion. Rhetoric is the art of persuasion and was a concept that humanists began to understand through the thoughts of ancient 16 Brown, 257. 17 Brown, 261. 18 Hamm, 159. 19 Hamm, 160. 20 Monteverdi, 1, https://imslp.org/wiki/Special:ReverseLookup/310353.
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