Sound and Silence in Ariosto’s Narrative

Ever attentive to the Renaissance ideals of balance and harmony, the poet of the Orlando Furioso, in justifying an abrupt transition from one episode of his work to another, compares his method to that of the player of an instrument, who constantly changes chord and varies tone, striving now for the flat, now for the sharp. ^Certainly this and other similar analogies of author to musician^well characterize much of the artistry of Ludovico Ariosto, who, like Tasso, even among major poets possesses an unusually keen ear, and who continually enhances his narrative by means of imaginative and often complex plays upon sound. The same keenness of ear, however, also enables Ariosto to enrich numerous scenes and episodes of his poem through the creation of the deepest of silences. The purpose of the present study is to examine and to illustrate the wide range of his literary techniques in each regard

Acoustics · Aesthetics · Art · Literature · Narrative · Physics · Silence · Sound (geography · Byzantine Studies and History · History · Renaissance and Early Modern Studies