Barbara Russano Hanning is an American musicologist who specializes in 16th and 17th century Italian music. She has also written works on the music of 18th-century France and on musical iconography. She earned a PhD in musicology from Yale University

Yale University

Yale University is a private, Ivy League university located in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701 in the Colony of Connecticut, the university is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States...

. She is currently on the music faculty of the CUNY Graduate Center

CUNY Graduate Center

The Graduate Center of the City University of New York brings together graduate education, advanced research, and public programming to midtown Manhattan hosting 4,600 students, 33 doctoral programs, 7 master's programs, and 30 research centers and institutes...

 as Professor Emeritus and is the former chair of the City University of New York

City University of New York

The City University of New York is the public university system of New York City, with its administrative offices in Yorkville in Manhattan. It is the largest urban university in the United States, consisting of 23 institutions: 11 senior colleges, six community colleges, the William E...

's music department, a post she held from 1990–2005. From 1993–1997 she was president of the Society for Seventeenth-Century Music.

Many of Hanning's writings have focused on early opera

Opera

Opera is an art form in which singers and musicians perform a dramatic work combining text and musical score, usually in a theatrical setting. Opera incorporates many of the elements of spoken theatre, such as acting, scenery, and costumes and sometimes includes dance...

s. She is the author of three books and several journal articles. She has also contributed numerous entries to The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (1980) and its second edition of 2000; including biographical articles on Giulio Belli

Giulio Belli

Giulio Belli was an Italian composer of the late Renaissance and early Baroque eras. He was a prolific composer during the transitional time between the two musical eras, and worked in many cities in northern Italy.-Life:...

, Giulio Caccini

Giulio Caccini

Giulio Caccini , also known as Giulio Romano, was an Italian composer, teacher, singer, instrumentalist and writer of the very late Renaissance and early Baroque eras. He was one of the founders of the genre of opera, and one of the single most influential creators of the new Baroque style...

, Gabriello Chiabrera

Gabriello Chiabrera

Gabriello Chiabrera was an Italian poet, sometimes called the Italian Pindar.-Biography:He was of patrician descent, and was born at Savona, a little town in the domain of the Genoese republic, twenty-eight years after the...

, Marco da Gagliano

Marco da Gagliano

Marco da Gagliano was an Italian composer of the early Baroque era. He was important in the early history of opera and the development of the solo and concerted madrigal.-Life:...

, Giovanni Battista Guarini

Giovanni Battista Guarini

Giovanni Battista Guarini was an Italian poet, dramatist, and diplomat.- Life :He was born in Ferrara, and spent his early life both in Padua and Ferrara, entering the service of Alfonso II d'Este, Duke of Ferrara, in 1567...

, Ottavio Rinuccini

Ottavio Rinuccini

Ottavio Rinuccini was an Italian poet, courtier, and opera librettist at the end of the Renaissance and beginning of the Baroque eras...

, Alessandro Striggio

Alessandro Striggio

Alessandro Striggio was an Italian composer, instrumentalist and diplomat of the Renaissance. He composed numerous madrigals as well as dramatic music, and by combining the two, became the inventor of madrigal comedy...

, and Torquato Tasso

Torquato Tasso

Torquato Tasso was an Italian poet of the 16th century, best known for his poem La Gerusalemme liberata , in which he depicts a highly imaginative version of the combats between Christians and Muslims at the end of the First Crusade, during the siege of Jerusalem...

; and entries on the operas Dafne

Dafne

Dafne is the earliest known work that, by modern standards, could be considered an opera. It was composed by Jacopo Peri in 1597, with a libretto by Ottavio Rinuccini.-History:...

by Rinuccini, Dafne

Dafne (Gagliano)

Dafne is an opera by the Italian composer Marco da Gagliano. It is described as a favola in musica in one act and a prologue. The libretto, by Ottavio Rinuccini, is based on the myth of Daphne and Apollo as related by Ovid in the first book of the Metamorphoses. It is a reworking and expansion of...

by Gagliano, Euridice by Peri, and Il rapimento di Cefalo

Il rapimento di Cefalo

Il rapimento di Cefalo was one of the first Italian operas. Most of the music was written by Giulio Caccini but Stefano Venturi del Nibbio, Luca Bati and Piero Strozzi also contributed...

by Caccini.

Books

• Of Poetry and Music's Power: Humanism and the Creation of Opera. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1980. 371 pp.

• Musical Humanism and Its Legacy: Essays in Honor of Claude V. Palisca. Stuyvesant, NY: Pendragon, 1992. 543 pp.

• Concise History of Western Music. Based on Grout/Palisca, A History of Western Music. Norton, 1998. 585 pp. Second edition, 2002.

Articles

• "Apologia pro Ottavio Rinuccini," Journal of the American Musicological Society 26/2 (Summer 1973), 240–262.

• "Glorious Apollo: Poetic and Political Themes in the First Opera," Renaissance Quarterly 32/4 (Winter 1979), 485–513.

• "Music in Italy on the Brink of the Baroque," Renaissance Quarterly 37/1 (Spring 1984), 1–20.

• "The Iconography of a Salon Concert: A Reappraisal," in French Musical Thought, 1600-1800, ed. Georgia Cowart. Ann Arbor and London: UMI Research Press, 1989, pp. 129-48.

• "Reinventing Orpheus: New Music for a New Age," in The Waverly Concert Program Guide, Vol. 5, No. 3, pp. 7–17 (an essay commissioned by the Waverly Consort for their concerts in Alice Tully Hall on March 2 and 4, 1989).

• "Conversation and Musical Style in the Late Eighteenth-Century Parisian Salon," Eighteenth-Century Studies 22/4 (Summer, 1989), 512–28.

• "Monteverdi's Three Genera: A Study in Terminology," in Musical Humanism and Its Legacy: Essays in Honor of Claude Palisca, eds. Nancy K. Baker and Barbara R. Hanning. Stuyvesant, NY: Pendragon, 1992, pp. 145–70.

• "Images of Monody in the Age of Marino," in The Sense of Marino: Literature, Fine Arts and Music of the Italian Baroque, ed.Francesco Guardiani. New York, Ottawa, Toronto: Legas, 1994. pp. 465–86.

• "Some Images of Monody in the Early Baroque," in Con Che Soavità: Studies in Italian Opera, Song, and Dance 1580–1740, eds. Iain Fenlon and Tim Carter. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995, pp. 1–12.

• "The End of L'Orfeo: Padre, figlio, e Rinuccini," Journal of Seventeenth-Century Music 7/2, (cited) Vol. 9/1 (2003). .

• "From Saint to Muse: Representations of Saint Cecilia in Florence." Music in Art 29/1-2 (2004): 91-103