Cover -- Acknowledgments -- Note on Quotations, Translations, and Musical Examples -- Introduction -- Chapter 1. Music and Texts: An Overview of the Sources -- A General Description of the Air -- The Publications -- The Composers -- Publications by Lambert, Bacilly, La Barre, and Le Camus: A Description -- The Song Texts -- Poetic Structure -- Style or Elocution: Figurative Language and Poetic Syntax -- Poetry and Rhetoric -- Chapter 2. Rhetoric and Meaning in the Seventeenth-Century French Air -- Seventeenth-Century French Sources onRhetoric and Music -- Persuading the Passions -- Chapter 3. Musical Representations of the Primary Passions -- The Primary Passions -- The Agitated Passions -- The Modest Passions -- The Neutral Passion: Le Contentement -- Summary -- Chapter 4. Setting the Texts -- Painful Love -- Bittersweet Love -- Enticing Love -- Joyous Love -- Summary -- Chapter 5. Form and Style -- Form (Disposition) -- The Organization of Expressions in Short Airs -- The Organization of Expressions in Long Airs -- Form in Single-Strophe Airs -- The Rhetorical Sections of a Piece: Their Function and Expression -- Style (Elocution): Poetic Structure, Punctuation, and Rhetorical Figures -- Chapter 6. L'Art du Chant: Performing French Airs -- À Haute Voix: The Importance of Orality -- The Art of Proper Singing: Tone and Style -- Ornamentation -- The Pronunciation of Seventeenth-Century French -- Syllabic Quantity -- Tempo -- Le Mouvement -- Repeats -- Basso Continuo Accompaniment -- Chapter 7. Salon Culture and the Mid-Seventeenth-Century French Air -- The French Air and Conversation -- Musical Seductions -- Galanterie and the Air: Undercurrents of Eroticism and Lessons of Morality -- Women Singing Airs as Men -- Chapter 8. The Late-Seventeenth-Century Air and the Rhetoric of Distraction -- The Air after 1670.

Songs and the Rhetoric of Distraction -- Pleasure, Airs, and the New Rhetoric -- The Legacy of Lambert, Bacilly, Le Camus, and La Barre -- Appendix: Translations for Musical Examples and Emblems -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index.