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  • Music, Discipline, and Arms in Early Modern France
  • Margaret M. McGowan
Music, Discipline, and Arms in Early Modern France. By Kate van Orden. pp. xiv + 322. (University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 2005, £28. ISBN 0-226-84976-7.)

This is a book of unusual combinations. It is profoundly scholarly, yet written with verve and enthusiasm, almost—one might say—with passion since Kate van Orden's quest is both personal and ambitious. She seeks to answer a question that has puzzled her since she first began her research: why, in the early modern period (in France, as distinct from e.g. Italy), was primacy given in music to rhythm, metre, and dance? Her search leads her to expose the unique quality that music had at this time, able to traverse and connect individual action to social and political orders.

The enquiry also forces her to consider civility in a broader perspective, unexpectedly framed by military discipline, and where there is a distinct shift in attitudes towards the role and purpose of music. From the concerns that had absorbed members of the Académie de Poésie et de Musique, founded by the poet Jean-Antoine de Baïf and the composer Thibault de Courville under the authority of Charles IX in 1570, and which worked to reinvent the powerful effects they believed belonged to ancient modes of music, writers and composers had increasingly transferred their interest to the pulses of rhythm [End Page 630] that could direct reflexes and empower action. Even the legacy of members of the Académie, such as Claude Le Jeune, underlined the rhythmic ethos that had dominated their inventions (see Pierre Bonniffet, Un Ballet démasqué: L'union de la musique au verbe dans 'Le Printans' de Jean-Antoine de Baïf et de Claude Le Jeune (Paris, 1988)).

In this context, it is obviously necessary to bring together musical composition and action—at first glance, unlikely companions. But there are other strange couplings too: duelling and the dance (reminding us that fencing masters often taught their noble pupils how to dance); infantry manoeuvres and equestrian ballets; music and politics; and violence and ballets de cour.

In order to substantiate these apparently divergent elements, van Orden shows how the training of a gentleman at this period linked them all in a varied and evolving moral and social curriculum. Discipline, order, and control came from the study of martial arts, music, dancing, and mathematics. Likewise, good manners and breeding, grace, elegance, and control of the body and mind were instilled from learning the skills of dance and music. From the time of Domenico and Guglielmo in the early fifteenth century, dancing masters had argued that to dance well meant to understand rhythm and, at the same time, to acquire goodness (see Jennifer Nevile's The Eloquent Body: Dance and Humanist Culture in Fifteenth-Century Italy (Bloomington and Indianapolis, 2004)). Although rhetoric was undoubtedly a key factor in the ordering of mind and gesture, discussions of its significance have perhaps overbalanced our view of culture at this period (see Mark Franko in The Dancing Body in Renaissance Choreography (Birmingham, Ala. 1986)).

Renaissance captains, such as the maréchal de Strozzi, were superb dancers and performers on the lute. Strozzi's additional reputation for success in war and his great learning was unsurpassed and made him the kind of fully rounded figure that social educators strove to produce. He was by no means an isolated figure; and from this book we learn that that military genius, the duc de Guise, who had routed the Spanish so many times, played the lute beautifully; that François de la Noue, staunch defender of the Protestant cause, famous military strategist, and moralist, was not only a lover of music but also an advocate of its use by all aspirant soldiers; and that the belligerent king Louis XIII, while overcoming opposition to his crown in a series of successful military campaigns, found time to compose motets and airs de cour. These noble gentlemen had doubtless benefited from the advice of the innumerable social handbooks that had proliferated since Castiglione had issued Il cortegiano in 1528; but they had...

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