Essays on Renaissance Music in Honour of David Fallows: Bon jour, bon mois, et bonne estrenne (review)

This Festschrift is dedicated to a scholar who has been at the forefront of his discipline for nearly forty years. David Fallows’s accumulated work over that time constitutes a formidable contribution to music history. Framed by the towering figures of Dufay and Josquin, it has covered just about every aspect of fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century music. The thirty-eight essays in this volume are a response to this achievement. For a Festschrift it is unusually focused: with few exceptions the essays deal with the period between c.1450 and c.1520, reflecting Fallows’s own published academic work, which is almost entirely in this period.

Like a Baroque suite, the book is divided into a Prelude and six movements, each of the latter comprising a set of essays in a specific area of Fallows’s interest. There are also three Intermedi: in one Peter Gülke deals with Brahms’s late piano music, while the others present short specially written compositions: editor Fabrice Fitch’s ‘Agricola VIII/Obrecht Canon III’ for four stringed instruments and Jaap van Benthem’s ‘Yes, we were young’ for piano. In the Preludio one of early music’s major practitioners, Christopher Page, reviews Fallows’s involvement with the performance of medieval music, initially as performer, and then as adviser to groups such as the Studio der frühen Musik, Musica Reservata, the Medieval Ensemble of London, and Gothic Voices. Fallows’s influence on early music performance has, of course, ranged even wider, not least in organizing and encouraging concerts in Manchester and as a major reviewer for Gramophone. In that context, it is perhaps a pity not to have had more contributions on performance issues in this collection.

Though the book’s six sections make a sensible division of material, there are plenty of overlaps and points of cross-reference, developing leitmotifs arising from aspects of Fallows’s work. Unsurprisingly, one over-arching theme is the relationship of words and music. Another is concerned with establishing authenticity of attribution and the question of how to define a particular composer’s style. Certain key manuscripts such as Bologna, Museo Internazionale e Biblioteca della Musica, MS Q 15 inevitably feature in more than one essay, while Fallows’s own Catalogue of Polyphonic Songs (Oxford, 1999) is referred to many times. Reading the book can seem like eavesdropping on a conversation between cognoscenti: there is a commonality of language, reference points, and methodology that could seem to exclude those not in the know. Many of the contributions are densely packed and need to be read more than once to absorb their full meaning—and there are lots of footnotes. Perseverance is rewarded, however, and there is much to admire here.

Not unexpectedly, a number of contributors have chosen to extend research carried out by Fallows. Thus Jane Alden develops his discovery that the first letters of the first twelve songs in the Wolfenbüttel Chansonnier spell out the name ‘Estiene Petit’, by exploring who Petit was and how the compiler might have made his choice from the available chansons for each of the letters of the name. Focusing on Pour refraindre, the song chosen for ‘p’ at the start of Petit’s surname, she discovers various emblematic references, including the use of the word ‘petit’ in both Latin and French. In a closely argued piece, Lorenz Welker follows up the work of Fallows and others on the chanson ‘Portugaler’/Or me veult, arguing that its unusual features are not a reason to doubt its authenticity as a work by Dufay, but can be explained if it is assumed that it began life as an instrumental piece, later texted by various scribes. Warwick Edwards carries on a dialogue with Fallows in expanding...