Bridging Renaissance and Baroque

Recent years have seen a rebirth of the single-author survey of the major periods of music history. In this context Leeman Perkins's Music in the age of the Renaissance (New York, 1999) or John Walter Hill's Baroque music (New York, 2005) stand out, not to mention Taruskin's magisterial Oxford history of Western music (Oxford, 2005), the first two volumes of which span the medieval to Baroque eras. These books provide the student and professional with expert, updated and accessible surveys of these periods, yet they may also reinscribe period boundaries that appear more and more illusory upon closer examination. James Haar's European music, 1520-1640 represents one attempt to approach the transition between 'Renaissance' and 'Baroque' with a more sensitive ear for continuities across the traditional dividing year of 1600. Haar assures us in his preface that 'the dates chosen, 1520-1640, were not and are not arbitrary: 1520 marks the establishment of the ars perfecta represented (for Glareanus) by the completed work of Josquin; 1640 is an appropriate if approximate terminus for a late-Renaissance/early-Baroque period including the career of Claudio Monteverdi' (p.vii). If Josquin and Monteverdi appear here as bookends for a rather new kind of periodization, these essays by a stable of leading international scholars focus more on geography and genre than the biographies and achievements of a few great figures.

The time frame, of course, would seem to call into question the status of 'Renaissance' and 'Baroque' as guiding terms in the first place, and indeed the first three essays, by Gary Tomlinson ('Renaissance humanism and music'), Haar ('The concept of the Renaissance') and Tim Carter ('The concept of the Baroque'), address these problems directly. Some scholars have dispensed with these terms altogether, preferring the broader designation 'early modern' derived from historians of the 16th to 18th centuries. The periodization offered in this book might seem more consistent with that term, but Haar's essay amounts to a rescue operation for the 'Renaissance' in music, achieved by defining precisely what the term encompasses—the revival of ancient philosophies of music, the linkage of music and rhetoric, religious renewal, and the rise of musicians' personal fame—as well as what it does not: print culture and general changes in musical language, for example. Given that serious interest in music as rhetoric did not materialize until after 1520, this argument is sensible, although it relies on detaching the musical Renaissance from an earlier Italian cultural Renaissance that many agree was over by the mid-16th century (p.22).

As Carter acknowledges, the term 'Baroque' poses historiographical problems of its own, having originally been employed as a pejorative label and then filtered through the lens of art history; we must further contend with a political and economic 'crisis scenario' posited by some historians of late 16th- and early 17th-century Italy (pp.38-43). While he identifies characteristic trends emerging in the early 17th century—for example, a new interest in the classification of music according to style and function, greater historical awareness among composers, and the oft-discussed shift from notions of 'resemblance' to 'representation'—Carter's essay, like many in the volume, makes a strong case for continuity over the Renaissance-Baroque divide. He argues, for example, that the madrigal remained vital well into the 17th century (pp.93-4), while Iain Fenlon critiques the central position of Florentine court opera in the usual histories, granting greater significance to the intermedi on the occasion of the marriage of Ferdinando de' Medici and Christine of Lorraine in 1589 as a harbinger of theatrical music to come (p.483). Monody, furthermore, appears less as a revolutionary step than an extension of existing practices and genres such as the lute-accompanied solo song (as Victor Coelho and Keith Polk comment, pp.542-3).

The problematic status of the year 1600 forces us to reconsider the significance of the Monteverdi-Artusi controversy, long seen as a watershed moment on the path to the seconda prattica. In his essay on theoretical developments, Karol...