Music in Renaissance Italy

Music, and matters connected with music, are still regarded as issues of subsidiary importance within general cultural history. It is not rare to find, in a book dealing with a period's cultural history, a sophisticated account of the visual arts, and then only some perfunctory references to music, usually cribbed from a fairly generalizing source. Of course, it is not easy to integrate musicology into general cultural history, though musicologists themselves shoulder a part of the blame: it is they who helped to perpetuate an isolationist approach, and often tried to formulate seemingly self-contained theories. One of those was the account of the 'origin of the opera', an allegedly miraculous 'rise' of a new genre resulting from feverish activity of a group of Florentine late-16th-century musical amateurs and reformist composers. This view is, happily, discredited, at least in its simplified form, and in its place we are likely to find a mode of arguing which tries to connect the Florentine theatrical experiments much more firmly with a long history of the use of music in Italian Renaissance theatre and entertainment, and with the role of music in the Florentine, Ferrarese, Mantuan and Venetian statecraft.

Florence Alazard's book about the art of singing and its role in the art of governance is subtitled 'La musique, le prince et la cité en Italie à la fin du XVI^e siècle'. Her account, which owes something to Jacques Attali, is intriguingly developmental—not in some deterministic Hegelian sense, but in the way in which she tries to start from ordinary manifestations of sound: the bells, the guns, the street cries—and then trace the contexts in which more organized sound, music indeed, becomes a part of the very life of a city or a princely court. Thus the reader is guided convincingly and with authority from peripheral manifestations to the musical documents (prints and scores) which exist as results of princely patronage and munificence. In the next stage she leads the reader towards her investigations of the nexus between vocal music and political message, and then, eventually, to the activity of the Florentine 'camerata'. All this is achieved through a narrative that is scrupulously grounded in contemporary sources, even at the peril of the numerous quotations (in the original Italian and in French translation) interrupting the narrative, and threatening to reduce the long flow of argument into a series of vignettes.

The overall impression, though, is that the gamble has paid off: we are aware of Florence Alazard's interpretation as well as of the rhetorical and linguistic flavour of the documents she explores. It seems that she is most comfortably at home when dealing with social and political matters. The position of music and writings about music in the intricate mesh of Italian 16th-century literary theory and criticism, though not neglected, is somewhat skimmed, and the complexity of this material is not quite captured. It is not clear whether this is the result of the author's own perception of the whole period, or whether she decided that this element had been extensively dealt with by other scholars. This is but a minor criticism, and it does not detract from this ambitious and sophisticated account of music as a cultural factor in 16th-century Italy.

Iain Fenlon has long been perceived as a cultural historian of music, a breed in a minority among British Renaissance specialists who have, on the whole, felt more at home in archival and textual studies. Fenlon prefers to see musical activities in Italy in their full civic and institutional context, but at the back of his narrative there is his reassuring familiarity with the sources. Though critical accounts of the artistic substance of the music are not in the forefront of Fenlon's writing, the richness and diversity of his field of vision become that much more obvious and valuable when some of his...