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  • Music and Society in Early Modern England
  • Bruce R. Smith
Music and Society in Early Modern England. By Christopher Marsh. pp. xiii+609; CD. (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2010, £65. ISBN 978-0-521-89832-4.)

Billed on the dust jacket as ‘the first comprehensive survey of English popular music during the early modern period to be published in over 150 years’, Christopher Marsh’s Music and Society in Early Modern England takes its place in a tradition that includes not only William Chappell’s Popular Music of the Olden Time (1859) but Charles Burney’s A General History of Music (1776–89) and, ultimately, Aristotle’s Poetics (c. 335 bce). Diction (lexis) and music (melos) are among the six constituent elements of tragedy that Aristotle enumerates. The fundamental problem confronted by all these writers is how to account, in words, for acoustic phenomena that include but also exceed language. Songs and chanting heighten elements of rhythm, pitch, and pace that are part of language, but music doesn’t always require lungs and larynx; feet and hands can make music, too. As performed and as perceived, music is a whole-body experience.

It is also a social experience. You can hum a tune to yourself, but that tune connects you to the culture in which you live. Since the early nineteenth century, it has consoled us to think that music is an intensely personal, deeply subjective experience for composers, performers, and listeners alike. And so it is. Sound penetrates the body in a way light rays do not: it becomes you, and you become it. But music is [End Page 225] no less intensely social. Indeed, it is the interpenetration of the personal and the social that makes music so promising a subject for a history that is not only material but psychological. It is also what makes music so challenging a subject to write about.

In Music and Society in Early Modern England, Marsh meets those challenges with resourcefulness and imagination. The book’s nine substantial chapters (averaging 25,000 words each) are framed by an Introduction and a Conclusion that show Marsh’s method in concentrated form. In the Introduction an illustration of a lute from William Barley’s A New Booke of Tabliture (1595) provides a visual model for Marsh’s complex and nuanced understanding of how music functioned in the culture of early modern England. The lute’s six strings become in Marsh’s analysis emblems of six polarities that people used in understanding the social world and their place within it: gentle/common, male/female, old/young, clerical/lay, urban/rural, and native/foreign.

With respect to these polarities, music performed a double role. On the one hand, it could accentuate differences. Ballads, for example, might be ridiculed by people with pretensions to gentility and be regarded as trash that appealed to the likes of Shakespeare’s Mopsa in The Winter’s Tale, that is to say as wares that were proverbially fit for folk who were female, young, lay, rural, culturally provincial. ‘On the other hand’, Marsh points out, ‘musical culture also mitigated commonplace divisions by allowing the continual interplay of conflicting tendencies and even drawing them, however temporarily, towards unity’ (p. 17). Performances of The Winter’s Tale at the Globe were a socially inclusive affair, and Autolychus’s ballads were insinuated into a sophisticated milieu out of ancient Greek romances. Marsh takes special pains to displace the binary view of ‘the great tradition’ and ‘the little tradition’ promulgated in Peter Burke’s Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (London, 1978).

Marsh’s Conclusion grounds Music and Society in Early Modern England with equal economy, in multiple senses of the word. Remarks on music from the diaries of Henry Machyn (1496/98–1563) and Samuel Pepys (1633–1703) serve to demarcate the 150-year distance the book has traversed and to enact, one final time, Marsh’s insistence that the site of music history is in individuals, albeit in individuals who are implicated in the social order in complicated and shifting ways.

Between those bookends Marsh provides chapters on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century attempts to explain music’s power, on music...

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