European Music 1520–1640 (review)

It must have been perplexing how to title this volume: Music in the Renaissance would have fit perfectly if the book had covered only English music, but for Italian the boundaries would need to be shifted back perhaps forty years earlier at either end. The volume of the New Oxford History of Music it had originally been designed to replace was called The Age of Humanism, 1540–1630, which may have seemed unproblematic in 1968 but is woefully inadequate now, as Gary Tomlinson illustrates in his contribution to the present volume, "Renaissance Humanism and Music," tracing five paradigms offered by historians and their interpretation by music historians: Whig, rhetorical, civic, Christian, and ordinary-language humanism. James Haar, the editor, next tackles an equally problematic topic, "The Concept of the Renaissance," singling out four aspects: the revival of ancient musical thought, the new connection of music and rhetoric, religious renewal, and the quest for personal fame. Tim Carter's chapter on "The Concept of the Baroque" — essentially the stylistic changes that began in the late sixteenth century; music historians generally extend the Baroque period to 1750 — concludes this opening trilogy of essays, which sets the tone for the chapters to come.

The contributions — twenty-six in all, by twenty-five authors — mix conceptual and narrative strategies, a welcome change from the usual chronological treatment of textbooks. As the editor stresses in the preface, this is not a textbook, and "uniformity is of no particular value here" (viii). Who, then, are envisioned as its readers? Not specialists, but more likely scholars and students who wish to have a reliable overview of music in this period, though at an average of twenty pages per chapter it is quite condensed. Some chapters have a few music examples, and some a bibliography or suggestions for further reading.

Countries are considered in the narrative chapters, some being allocated more than one — Italy gets three; France, three; The Netherlands, one; Germany and Central Europe, two; Spain, two; and England, two — and genres: "Music for the Mass," "The Motet," "Chanson and Air," "Madrigal," "Early Opera," and "Instrumental Music." "European" is not quite comprehensive: the fringes, apart from Central Europe (actually barely mentioned, except for Prague), remain on the periphery. (Gustave Reese, in his still valuable Music in the Renaissance [rev. ed. 1959], included Portugal, Hungary, Bohemia, Poland, and the Adriatic coastal areas of the Southern Slavs.) Naturally, there is some overlap between chapters, since genres are discussed within the essays on countries.

The chapters of most interest to readers of Renaissance Quarterly will be, besides the three conceptual essays and the chapter on "Early Opera" (especially the section on "The Initial Phase," by Giuseppe Gerbino), Iain Fenlon's "Music, Print, and Society in Sixteenth-Century Europe," focusing on what the change to print culture meant for music; and Karol Berger's "Concepts and Developments in Music Theory," which discusses an issue considered problematic at the time: the aims of music, conceived as universal harmony or the reflection of human emotions, and the contested means of achieving the latter. Two especially admirable chapters, on "The Reformation and Music" (Robin A. Leaver) and "Renewal, Reform, and Reaction in Catholic Music" (Craig Monson), bring new insights to bear on the religious upheaval's far-reaching consequences for the history of music.

The book has been elegantly typeset and knowledgeably copyedited by Jeffrey Dean, himself an expert in the field. Somewhat surprisingly, there are no illustrations. The index, unfortunately, is disappointing. There are no subentries, and long strings of page numbers on major topics — on one page, polyphony, printing, Protestantism, and psalm — are not helpful. Such important terms as harmony and counterpoint, though amply discussed in the book, have not been indexed. Dance is certainly considered on more than one page. The odd alphabetization "Maria dal Cornetto, Zuan" is amusing. But the index did turn up an intriguing item, musica flexanima ("soul-moving music"), a term used by...