EUROPEAN MUSIC 1520-1640

Ed. James Haar

The Boydell Press, 2006

576 pp.

[ISBN 1 84383 200 3]

£75 UK.

This expansive volume has its genesis in a book originally intended as a part of an aborted OUP series devoted to the history of music. It’s revival, completion and eventual appearance under the Boydell imprint is welcome, for if not without flaws there is much of value to both scholar and general reader.

The title raises an issue that has much exercised music historians in recent times – how exactly do we divide musical history into appropriate segments? Editor James Haar goes straight to the point, noting in his Preface that the choice of dates is not arbitrary, but covers a period whose parameters are the recognition of a recently established ars perfecta as represented by the works of Josquin, and a cut-off date approximating with the end of the late-Renaissance/early Baroque era, a clear statement of intent that is refreshingly direct and avoids the excessive hand wringing on the topic indulged in by another recently published anthology of essays, The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Music. Haar might have added that the period straddles one of the crossroads in European music: the challenge to the age of polyphony from the emergent seconda prattica, a relatively rare case of theory and philosophical considerations working in tandem. To what degree we are able to relate the rise of humanist thought to developments in music is one of the debatable topics discussed in somewhat deconstructionist terms by Gary Tomlinson in the opening chapter, but what is clear is that the drive to create a new intelligibility of text and concurrently a closer alignment between words and music runs like a thread throughout the book. Motivated by either the secular quest to recreate the spirit of antiquity, or by the new found desire for religion to give greater clarity to its message (whether Protestant or Catholic), this is the dominant topic of the period under discussion.    

That discussion is carried out by a team of scholars, most of who on the evidence of the spelling appear to be American. It would have been helpful to have been provided with brief biographies of the 26 contributors; not all are familiar names.  The scheme is a division of chapters between those devoted to the major European countries, specific forms such as the Mass, motet, madrigal and so forth and more general chapters covering such matters as aesthetics, printing and music theory. It is a plan that I’m not convinced works entirely satisfactorily. Some chapters appear to be oddly placed, “Early Opera: The Initial Phase” (Giuseppe Gerbino and Iain Fenlon), for example, coming long after the three chapters devoted to Italy, being sandwiched near the end of the book between the sections devoted to Spain and England. More importantly, national divisions are problematical given the extraordinary amount of cross-border activity between musicians that took place during the period in question. The number of Franco-Flemish musicians who worked in Italy until at least the latter part of the 16th century is a typical case in point, while Lassus is of course the paradigmatic example of a pan-European composer who can be (and is) legitimately discussed under chapters devoted to the Netherlands, France and Germany, in addition to those covering the Mass, the motet and the chanson. This inevitably leads to a certain amount of duplication of effort, always a danger in anthologies, and leaving one feeling rather sorry for Kristine K. Forney, whose rather prosaic account of music in the Netherlands is further undermined by the number of “her” composers also dealt with elsewhere.

In his Preface, Haar notes with a certain wry humour that while he imposed few limitations on his contributors, most of them failed to observe what guidelines he did lay down. This is readily apparent. Not only does there seem to have been no consensus as to whether to include chapter-end bibliographies or simply bibliographical references in footnotes (which, thankfully, are footnotes and not endnotes), and music examples, but there is no uniformity on such vexed questions as to whether it is ‘mass’ or ‘Mass’. Nevertheless, the overall standard of writing is pretty high and there is a merciful lack of the kind of academic jargon that sends normal people screaming for the nearest Dan Brown, although one or two essays tend to dryness.

Some of the chapters devoted to individual countries don’t always avoid the ever-lurking temptation to turn into a catalogue of names and dates, but in general each provides a useful overview of the development of music in the specified region. Some, such as those devoted to “England 1485-1600” (Roger Bray) and “Spain 1530-1600” (Todd M. Borgending and Louise K. Stein), go beyond that, although Stein’s consideration of the subsequent period in Spanish musical history is rather an anti-climax, while the total lack of attention to Victoria’s motets is mystifying. Most outstanding of all the national surveys is Bray’s on the earlier English period, an absorbing account that is an object lesson not only in avoiding the “catalogue” syndrome, but also how to wear profound scholarship lightly. Particularly valuable are Bray’s observations on the inter-relationship between the “massive” early-Tudor style of sacred music and church architecture, which contrary to common belief was seemingly influenced by music, not vice-versa. Associations between music and building are also taken up by the excellent essay “The Reformation and Music”, where Robin A. Leaver notes Luther’s opposition to large, high cathedrals on the grounds that their acoustic obscured the Word. Bray is also especially illuminating in his articulate explanation of how the adoption of the vernacular in the English Protestant liturgy dictated changes of musical style that go beyond the desire for textural clarity.

Another outstanding contribution comes from Karol Berger, whose weighty-sounding title “Concepts and Developments in Music Theory ” conceals an essay that includes the most succinct and even-handed discussion of the famous Monteverdi/Artusi controversy I have yet read, in addition to a wonderfully clear and riveting exposition of the gradual move from modality to tonality, a process started during the period under discussion, but one not completed and codified until Rameau did so more than 150 years later. Equally valuable and thought provoking is the distinction Berger draws between theory leading music (i.e. in the case of the so-called “Florentine Camerata”), and musicians showing the way to the theorists (as in the case of early 17th-century recognition that it was the triad and not any single interval that was the fundamental unit of harmonic hearing).

Haar himself contributes two essays, reserving for himself one of the plums, a lucid, well-written survey of the madrigal, which he believes achieved a level of general compositional expertise “rarely, if ever exceeded in the history of Western music”, one of the books rare excursions into hyperbole, but in this instance surely justified. More attention to the frottola in this chapter would have been welcome, and the major role of Marenzio is rather underplayed, while the absence of bibliographical reference to Marco Bizzarini’s important study of the composer (see Goldberg 27) suggests that the article was written some time ago and was in need of revision. The reference to “Arioso” for “Ariosto” (p. 235) is one of a number of small typographical errors that might have been eliminated with more careful proofreading, while the numbering of tables has gone awry in the chapter on the Mass. Nevertheless, imperfections and unevenness aside, this is an extremely useful addition to music historiography that will both aid students and provide many insights to the more general reader who feels in need of an over-arching survey of the period.

This review is to be published in Goldberg Early Music Magazine