Music and Musicians in Renaissance Cities and Towns (review)

Music and Musicians in Renaissance Cities and Towns. Edited by Fiona Kisby. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. [xiii, 188 p. ISBN 0-521-66171-4. $59.95.]

Perhaps it should not be too surprising that in an age marked by a profound sense of global dislocation scholars have returned to consider the deep connection between place and culture. Music has proved an ideal medium for this sort of investigation, blessed as it is with a kind of transience and transcendence that allows it to move among parts of the social fabric with a fluidity afforded few other arts. In recent years we have read with interest work on this topic by scholars such as James Johnson (Listening in Paris: A Cultural History [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995]) and Mark Slobin (Subcultural Sounds: Micromusics of the West [Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan University Press, 1993]). Martha Feldman's elegant book, City Culture and the Madrigal at Venice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995) transposed these concerns to Renaissance settings. Now, thanks to Fiona Kisby and thirteen contributors, those of us interested in early modern Europe can put this sort of work on a much wider foundation. This new collection of essays, each devoted to the conditions and character of musicmaking in a particular time and place, will enrich considerably our sense of the complex interaction between society and civic culture. In the words of general editor Fiona Kisby, these studies aim to discover "how music shaped space and time within the urban environment and how the various institutions, organizations, associations and social structures which developed in towns and cities . . . had an impact on musical activity of various kinds" (p. 6). Readers of this book, no matter whether their main interest is musical or historical, will come away from it with a new appreciation of the profound liveliness of Renaissance urban life, and of the many ways in which music figured in it. They will also develop a new and healthy awareness of how assumptions and interpretive methods shape our understanding of the past.

Viewed from the perspective of enduring historical narratives about Renaissance music as the product of a few wealthy and highly centralized courts and cathedrals, Music and Musicians in Renaissance Cities and Towns is as notable for what it does not consider as for what it does. Few of these essays dwell upon any of the large urban centers of patronage and performance of which we typically read in studies of Renaissance musical history—places such as Antwerp, Paris, Rome, or Ferrara, to name but a few. Instead, Kisby's authors focus on places, and kinds of places, largely ignored in other musicological writings. Here, for instance, we find studies of secular music in a small city outside Edinburgh (John McGavin), of religious guilds and polyphony in a Lincolnshire market town (Beat Kümin), and of the musical implications of the Reformation in Renaissance Dublin (Barra Boydell). Given the strong representation of British and American scholars in this collection, it should not be surprising that many of these essays (six out of thirteen) dwell upon localities in the British Isles. But others nevertheless embrace a very wide geographical field, ranging from Hanseatic towns of the Baltic (Joachim Kremer), to cities like Montpellier in the south of France (Gretchen Peters), and even to Santa Fe de Bogotá in Spain's colonies of the New World (Egberto Bermúdez).

No less important than this geographical diversity, however, is the impressive range of institutions and contexts considered by these studies. Earlier musicological work on Renaissance centers has tended to focus on the most wealthy and most powerful segments of society—no doubt because it was in leading court and cathedral choirs that the most important composers of polyphonic music worked and here that their music was first performed and copied. Courts and cathedrals, simply on account of their superior resources and prestige, could not help but exert an almost overwhelming influence over a local urban [End Page 855...