- Music and Riddle Culture in the Renaissance by Katelijne Schiltz
This book is about musical riddles, the verbal and visual brainteasers scattered through Renaissance musical sources and collected by such music theorists as Pietro Cerone, Heinrich Glarean, and Ludovico Zacconi, that need to be solved to arrive at an adequate performance (or edition) of a musical composition. Spread over four long chapters, bookended by an introduction and brief conclusion, Schiltz’s second monograph moves from a historical and critical overview of European riddle culture (ch. 1) to an examination of different types of musical riddles (ch. 2), and the reception of musical riddles by music theorists from the fifteenth to early seventeenth centuries (ch. 3), concluding with case studies of musical riddles that rely heavily upon visual images (ch. 4). While this reader sometimes felt that the author circles around a small number of representative compositions such as Obrecht’s Missa Fortuna desperata, an index of over two hundred incipits towards the back of this book indicates otherwise. The first of two appendices usefully provides the unaccustomed or rusty reader with an overview of the principles of mensural notation. Bonnie J. Blackburn’s indexed catalogue of enigmatic canonic inscriptions appears in the second appendix (accounting for a fifth of the book’s pages), not merely to complete this book’s near comprehensive treatment of this topic, but as a nod to the effective collaboration between Schiltz and Blackburn that has produced other gems including the proceedings from the canon and canonic techniques conference at Leuven (Peeters, 2007).
As might be expected in a monograph that sets out to situate a phenomenon of music notation (since most musical riddles rely on some aspect of music notation) within a broader cultural perspective, Schiltz devotes much of chapter 1 to elaborating her critical framework based upon an older definition and appreciation of obscurity (obscuritas). Schiltz advocates a ‘neutral’, or perhaps approbative, understanding of obscurity, which depends in large part on Augustine’s allegorical biblical exegesis, which fused Pauline ‘through a glass darkly’ theology with Neoplatonic immanence. In support of the pervasiveness of what might be termed a cult of obscurity from Graeco-Roman antiquity to the early seventeenth century, Schiltz cites authors ranging from Cicero to Henry Peacham, who value obscurity for adorning speech and invigorating the mind. For the most part, Schiltz successfully transfers this hermeneutic framework from the textual/rhetorical domain to that of musical notation in the following chapters.
While it is true that the Renaissance left an abundance of musical riddles (especially between the period c.1475 and c.1530), this reader nevertheless has some doubts about the degree to which professional performers might have participated in this culture of obscurity on a day-to-day basis. In chapter 3, Schiltz shows that certain Renaissance composers, scribes, and music theorists, especially the latter with a strong interest in schooling youths in music, repeatedly enthuse over musical riddles and the intellectual challenge of solving them, a passion shared with several musicologists in more recent times. Yet, she concedes that musical riddles were despised in many quarters, especially among writers from a humanist tradition who saw their lack of clarity and excess as a vice, just as rhetoricians had in Antiquity.
Although Schiltz provides a fascinating and unprecedented discussion (pp. 160–74) of how riddles were addressed to performers and may have encouraged certain performance practices—such as the singing of canonic parts facing each other—her argument continually runs the risk of succumbing to the conundrum that, as she repeatedly observes, a musical riddle solved is no longer one to the performer, and can never be to those listening to the performed composition. As soon as a riddle is solved, its obscurity disappears in the face of the performer’s clear understanding (and memory) of the musical composition as performed.
Doubts over just how central a musical riddle was to a musical composition’s effective performance might arise for situations in which the [End Page 327...
