Materialities: Books, Readers, and the Chanson in Sixteenth-Century Europe by Kate van Orden (review)

Materialities—a title drawn from a phrase by Fernand Braudel—combines book-history and the history of learning to take a fresh look at the sixteenth-century French chanson. The book consists of seven chapters, divided between two parts on, respectively, 'a material history of the chanson' (chapters 1–3) and 'Learning to read' (chapters 4–7).

Kate van Orden centres the first part of the book around the chanson, perhaps the central musical genre in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century France, and beloved in much of the rest of Europe as well. Rather than focusing on a specific composer or printer (approaches that would have been the obvious choices until not so long ago), she takes a more 'fuzzy' but eventually more fruitful approach, in an effort to write 'a cultural history geared to the consumption end of the producer-consumer equation' (p. 28). The first two chapters explore the format, circulation, and preservation of chanson and motet publications. The very nature of the partbook format of publication already sets it apart from almost all other types of print and has implications about their use, and although we habitually speak of 'reading music', the literacy that musical partbooks require(d) is of a particular kind, 'as close to numbers, calendars, horoscopes, and maps as it is to letters' (p. 7). As material that, just like modern sheet music, is meant to be used, its survival rates are particularly poor. Van Orden shows how the commercial underpinnings and profitability, or lack thereof, of certain genres influenced publications and their survival, including how the form and format of the editions inform us about their purpose and audience. Copies that do survive often do so bound as part of tract-volumes together with other editions. By analysing surviving sales records and prices, different kinds of early bindings (and what they imply about the status and use of its contents for that particular owner), this part of the book provides an overview of what is nonetheless knowable.

The third chapter, on 'early collectors and modern libraries', goes into the issue of the survival of chanson editions in more detail. Owning books was still more the exception than the rule, as Van Orden points out: even wealthy or educated men (merchants and priests) 'often did not own any books at all' (p. 70). She draws attention to the fact that 'most of the printed music books we work with today survive thanks to a very limited number of collectors' (p. 68). The direct lines that connect Renaissance bibliophiles to major European libraries were known before, but Van Orden lays out the evidence more systematically and in more detail than has been done so far for this repertoire, and, what is more important, she underlines the important consequences of this skewed survival for our view of the music, its use, and any 'averages' and generalisations we may be tempted to construct. She rightly points out, for example, how arguments about whether the printed partbooks themselves rather than manuscript copies from them were used in performance, are shaped by the surviving 'clean' copies of those partbooks, which are precisely the ones that are not representative of how the lost ninety-nine percent was probably used: 'messy, visibly used music books stand to tell us most about music-making in the sixteenth century, but they are few in number' (p. 103). She ends chapter 3 with examples of exchange across a border that nowadays still often separates printed music (i.e., printed notes) from printed poetry (that could be sung to familiar tunes and chansons), an exchange, as she underlines, that went in both directions: music prints were at times pillaged for the verse they contained.

This sets up the argument for the second part of the book on 'learning to read'. This second part, of which...