Instrumentalists and Renaissance Culture, 1420–1600: Players of Function and Fantasy by Victor Coelho and Keith Polk (review)

In this broad treatment of Renaissance instrumental culture, Victor Coelho and Keith Polk provide a rich and variegated picture of how instrumentalists created, functioned, and lived. Specific case studies of individual Renaissance instrumentalists and events serve to illustrate trends in instrumental practice during the long Renaissance. By focusing on the agency and lives of actual musicians and events, the authors provide an immediate context for interpreting the role instrumental music played in Renaissance musical life. This study considers discrete aspects of instrumental music making, including the impact of individual patrons and the protocols of patronage at large, instrumental music's role in courtly and civic festivities, normative pedagogical and notational practices, and, in the last chapter, a survey of diverse organological categories that furnishes data about a range of instruments, accompanied by a compendium of iconographical images. Throughout the work, socio-economic topics, such as the constitution of guilds, procedural practices with apprenticeships, general pedagogical norms, and theoretical training (pp. 199–204 passim) bolster the description of players' education, pedagogical methodologies, and general work behavior as collective institutionalized communities. These discussions even extend to offering some specific figures—numbers culled from an array of secondary sources—regarding wages, benefits, apprenticeship enrollment, instrument building, and courtly and private acquisition of these instruments. The authors synthesize archival and primary-source work from Howard Mayer Brown, David Fallows, Joshua Rifkin, Reinhard Strohm, and others, in order to plot out general stylistic, repertorial, and socio-economic paths and overall development for instrumental practice. Utilizing this disparate data, Coelho and Polk also track the role of the instrumentalist through the Renaissance, which evolved from the status of mere piffaro to the esteemed rank of "musician."

The first chapter opens with an examination of patronage networks, commissions, and sources of compensation as divided between courtly, ecclesiastical, civic, and private spheres. Within this frame, the authors foreground the Burgundian court of Philip the Good with its "imperative of 'image'" (p. 19) and prestige, the Ferrarese court of Ercole d'Este, the court of Henry VIII, and the Habsburg courts of Maximilian I and Charles V. Numbers citing overall instrumental forces and instrumental compositions as well as musicians documented in the orbit of a given court draft a picture of courtly musical life that collates the respective courts' predilections and compositional tastes and reveals a strategy of competitive courtly magnificence.

Beginning with fifteenth-century codices containing music composed or arranged for instruments per se, including the earliest survival of written keyboard music in Faenza, the Buxheimer Orgelbuch, and the Casanatense canzoniere (possibly owned by Isabella d'Este), the second chapter embarks on an exhaustive comparison of available sources for Renaissance instrumental music. The discussion also includes a range of printed sources such as the 1507 Ottaviano Petrucci print of Francesco Spinacino's lute tablature and Claudio Merulo's Ricercari d'intavolatura d'organo (1567).

The third chapter deals with professional and amateur players' lives, education, and work conditions. During the ensuing discussion of musical training through the apprenticeship ranks, Coelho and Polk point out the disjunction between master players with and without court appointments, and the resultant dilemma for aspiring students who wished to engage teachers who might offer lucrative placements for work but in addition would be sufficiently accessible (or even present).

The following chapter looks at music's function within festivals, ritual, and the theater. This treatment of instrumental music in the context of celebration and ceremony collates inscriptional accounts from events like the renowned Medici wedding festivities, Maximilian I of Habsburg's triumphal if compulsory entry ceremony into Bruges, and various other seasonal civic and ecclesiastical processions. This frame serves as an opportunity for assessing how instrumental and repertorial choices reflected status and purpose and how these events constructed the politics and tone of civic and courtly life...