A Briefe Introduction to the Skill of Song, by William Bathe (review)

William Bathe's short theory books, A Briefe Introductione to the True Arte of Musicke (London, 1584) and A Briefe Introduction to the Skill of Song (London, n.d.), comprise two of the earliest extant English-language treatises on music. While the eighteenth-century historian John Hawkins was largely disparaging about them, they have long been regarded as important sources by modern scholars of English theory. The print of the former book is lost, but much of the text survives in a transcription made by one Andrew Melville, a teacher at the Song School in Aberdeen in the early seventeenth century, in his commonplace book now preserved as MS 28 in the University of Aberdeen Library. This transcription was published in a modern critical edition in 1979 by Cecil Hill, while the surviving undated print of the Briefe Introduction to the Skill of Song was produced in facsimile by Bernarr Rainbow for Boethius Press in 1982. Since neither of these books has been available for some time, Kevin C. Karnes's new critical edition of Bathe's two treatises provides a welcome addition to Ashgate's new series 'Music Theory in Britain, 1500–1700: Critical Editions'.

The aim of this series is not only to produce high-quality modern editions, in which original spelling, capitalization, and punctuation are retained—features that will be particularly valuable in other promised volumes, such as Thomas Morley's Plaine and Easie Introduction to Practicall Musicke, for which Harman's 1952 edition falls somewhat short of today's editing standards—but also to include detailed commentary on the texts, and introductory material in which the books are placed in context; in this respect the editions are considerably more informative than a facsimile would have been. Karnes's volume in fact includes separate introductions for the two treatises, each with endnotes, as well as endnotes for both editions, which at times makes navigation within the book rather complex. Much of the background material covered in the first Introduction (Part I, on Bathe's Briefe Introduction to the Skill of Song) has been considered by previous scholars, but Karnes is able usefully to bring together this disparate evidence, and to extrapolate upon it further. In particular, he reconsiders current theories on the book's date of publication in the light of Jeremy L. Smith's recent work on Thomas East, the book's publisher, in which a convincing argument was made for East having produced the book in 1596; and he examines several pieces of circumstantial evidence that suggest that Bathe probably compiled the book some time before it was printed. Following observations made by Jessie Ann Owens in her essay 'Concepts of Pitch in English Music Theory, c. 1560–1640' (in Cristle Collins Judd (ed.), Tonal Structures in Early Music (New York and London, 1998)), he also explores the possibility that a small portion of the treatise was inserted by East himself.

The main body of Part I is given over to reassessing the contents of the Briefe Introduction to the Skill of Song. Here, Karnes is considerably more generous to Bathe than many previous commentators on his treatise have been, and he is particularly keen to defend the book against the accusation that it is contradictory, confused, and misleading—opinions that he attributes to the unfamiliarity of the modern reader with the rhetorical strategy of eloquence, in which the writer states an opinion, identifies an anticipated objection to it, and then formulates a 'solution' or answer to that objection designed to justify the original opinion (p. 18). Karnes illustrates at some length how this structure was used by Bathe and his contemporaries, but he does not attempt to demonstrate any specific examples in which negative interpretations of Bathe can be explained as simple misreadings of this strategy. In fact (writing as one author whose criticism of Bathe is highlighted by Karne...