“In this comprehensive and interdisciplinary study, Catherine Gordon-Seifert analyzes the simple songs or airs that were popular during the French Baroque Era. Exploring the function and meaning of airs in French society, she shows how, in both text and music, airs deployed an encoded language that was in sensuous contrast to polite society’s voiced ideals.”

“This book will be a model for how to tease the expressive implications out of every contour, rhythm, and ornament. . . . Gordon-Seifert's approach to musical expressive meaning will prove very valuable for students of other Baroque repertories.”
 — Robert Hatten, Indiana University

“[Gordon-Seifert] has provided an insightful and long overdue study of an important repertory that for many years has suffered from relative neglect. 2012”
 — Early Music

“Catherine Gordon-Seifert does a masterful job at conveying how rhetoric, text, and music interplay in French serious airs from the 1640s–1660s. Her analyses of text and music dig deep into the fabric of the repertoire. . . . By and large, Music and the Language of Love is a worthy contribution to the field that should find its way to any academic library with a serious music collection.”
 — Music Reference Services Quarterly

“[T]his book is a major contribution to our understanding of the rhetorical elements of the song texts and the way in which composers expressed them in their musical settings. ”
 — Rhetorica

“[Gordon-Seifert] has presented readers with an elegant, insightful study on a critical turning point in French baroque composition just before the premiere of Lully’s groundbreaking Cadmus et Hermione in 1673. Scholars of seventeenth-century music, as well as singers interested in integrating these airs into their repertory, will find in it an approachable, valuable resource, as well as an engaging account of the social and cultural mores of the time.”
 — Notes

“This book should, I feel, be on the shelves of everyone with a serious interest in the music of the French baroque. It is an extremely well-researched and thorough study of that most seminal of 17th-century French musical genres, the air sérieux.”
 — The Consort

“A hard but rewarding read, and a must for would-be performers of 'airs.' . . . Highly recommended. ”
 — Choice