A comprehensive book on Monteverdi’s madrigals and his other secular chamber vocal works is long overdue. There has not been an accessible yet expert single volume on the subject since Denis Arnold’s short and outdated BBC Music Guide (1967). Rather than formulaic chapters on each book of madrigals in turn, Tim Carter’s holistic investigation integrates the diverse works and associated themes together under a dual-lens microscope of contextual acumen and analytical insight. The scholarly result is not the accessible A-Z handbook that some might yearn for, but goes far beyond that. It is not hubris that Carter’s extensive bibliography includes, among much else, over 20 of his own previous academic publications on all sorts of aspects of musical culture in late Renaissance and early 17th-century Italy. The forensic study of Monteverdi’s madrigals bears ripe fruit from four decades of philological research and critical thinking.

Ten chapters are immersed in the Italian poetry and literature that provided the raw matter for Monteverdi’s madrigalian universe. Plentiful quotations from contemporary Italian documents and polemical treatises include a fresh reassessment of Giovanni Maria Artusi’s infamous attack on the ‘imperfections of modern music’ prompted by the Bolognese theorist hearing several of Monteverdi’s alarmingly rule-breaking unpublished madrigals at a house concert in Ferrara in 1598; pieces lambasted by Artusi were accorded prominent pride of place by the defiant Monteverdi in Books 4 (1603) and 5 (1605) as examples of seconda prattica. Carter explains Monteverdi’s choices of poets (Tasso, Guarini, Rinuccini, Petrarch and so on), musical styles, expressive techniques and personnel requirements; his observations are informed by settings of the same poems by north Italian contemporaries close to Monteverdi’s cultural orbit in his native Cremona, at the Gonzaga court in Mantua and after his relocation in 1613 to Venice.

Light is shone upon the business and printing processes of Venetian firms that published Monteverdi’s eight books of madrigals across the span of his long career. Carter also takes into account the posthumous ninth book (1651), the composer’s early collection of three-voice Canzonette (1584), two books of Scherzi musicali (1607 and 1632), and individual one-offs that appeared in miscellaneous ways: the solo monodic version of the lament from Arianna (printed in 1623 with two other pieces in the new genere rapresentativo) and strophic songs circulated in Milanuzzi’s anthology Quarto scherzo delle ariose vaghezze (1624). Towards the end, Carter deals perceptively with the five ‘moral’ madrigals and canzonettas that begin Monteverdi’s last monumental publication of otherwise liturgical music, Selva morale e spirituale (1641).

Carter describes the trajectory from Monteverdi’s first four books of entirely unaccompanied five-voice polyphonic madrigals to the modern Concerto and other genres of song for one or more solo voices with additional string instruments in Book 7 (1619). Along the way, attention is drawn to Monteverdi introducing mandatory basso continuo halfway through Book 5 (1605) and throughout Book 6 (1614). Carter explodes tempting notions that the five-voice madrigal adaptation of Lamento d’Arianna reflects the string parts of the lost operatic original, or that settings of Guarini’s verses in Books 4 and 5 somehow related to a Mantuan staged production of Il pastor fido in 1598. The astonishing variety and peculiarity of the epic contents of Book 8 (1638) are integrated into these discussions: poetic and musical dimensions of Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda are scrutinised, as are practical considerations of ‘Altri canti d’Amor, tenero arciero’ (two violins and four violas da braccio can more easily adjust their tuning to six voices than fretted viols); the quasi-theatrical Lamento della ninfa is one of many case studies used to analyse the fundamental issue of poetic diegesis and mimesis: who is singing, to whom, in which tense, and why?

The environments of where and how these pieces may have been brought to life is summarised. Implications of the term ‘Songbirds’ is considered, not least the manifold ways Monteverdi treated nature imagery, references to birds and song, and to music and harmony itself. Monteverdi’s exploitation of chromaticism, dissonances, surprising harmonic resolutions or deliberate thwarting of expected cadences is analysed in a chapter titled cleverly ‘Musical (im)pertinence’ (here and elsewhere, helpful arrows, boxes or annotations could have helped music examples to be more readily appreciable). Carter appraises how seeming mistakes in the alteration of poetic texts or puzzling musical features might have been deliberate artistic choices, whereas other evidence hints at carelessness when Monteverdi prepared materials for publication – such as an accidental omission of necessary poetic lines from the SSA trio ‘Su, su, su, pastorelli vezzosi’ in Book 8 that are present and correct in the TTB version in Book 9. Carter treads a careful line between revealing Monteverdi’s extraordinary imagination and fallibilities. The closing sentence reminds us that ‘it is music as music that matters most in the end’.