O Let Us Howle Some Heavy Note: Music for Witches, the Melancholic, and the Mad on the Seventeenth-Century English Stage (review)

The seventeenth century in England was a time of unprecedented political and social upheaval, accompanied by major paradigm shifts in scientific thinking and in the performing arts. The nation went through seven monarchs, whose sometimes convoluted patterns of succession were interrupted at the midpoint by regicide and a Commonwealth government. By the end of the century, vital musical genres and instruments from the beginning were obsolete, and Renaissance modality had been completely supplanted in art-music composition by modern tonality and its hierarchical order. The physical conditions of the theater had changed with architectural fashion and technological advances. Onstage, professional actresses had replaced young female impersonators in women's roles even as understanding of human sexuality and the social regulation of gender propriety had changed. These events, along with an impressive range of carefully-chosen eyewitness accounts and other primary documents, serve as a background for Winkler's study of disorder and its ritual containment in some of the most enduring and popular dramatic works of this tumultuous century and beyond. Her book is an outstanding contribution to the social and political history of musical theater in London from the age of Shakespeare to the rage for Italian opera in the first decade of the eighteenth century.

The central focus of O Let us Howle Some Heavy Note, whose title is taken from the opening line of a song from John Webster's enduringly popular Duchess of Malfi, is the conventions that playwrights and composers used to depict characters who threatened the normative social order, and who were given strikingly similar treatment in music decade by decade. By working across the century's distinct artistic and political eras instead of focusing on any one of them, Winkler shows a continuity not only of aesthetic practice, but also of cultural attitudes toward the most potentially dangerous of marginalized groups: witches, individuals afflicted even temporarily with madness, and those suffering from any of the psychophysical disorders loosely considered melancholic.

These characters, presented from many ethical perspectives, ultimately incorporated or at least referenced the rural poor, religious nonconformists, she-men and he-women, foreign threats to English unity, those who put personal desires ahead of duty to family and state, and other deliberate and unwitting transgressors of patriarchal order. Previous scholars have frequently commented that these unruly sorts were given some of the most spectacular and memorable music in the theatrical repertoire, especially when accused witches were still executed for maleficia in the early part of the century and their dramatic counterparts later held to represent the Catholic threat to England. Winkler emphasizes the ambiguity of such staged agents of disorder, whose carefully-orchestrated trespasses appealed to audiences even when they were reigned in by the end of the play —and whose music was both written and presented in ways that were meant to affect the audience at least as much as the more normative characters in the same works. She connects the musical actor's performing body, especially of song, to shifting discourses of sexuality and social order to reinforce cultural expectations about public propriety and, at the same time, to titillate male spectators.

The book is organized not historically or by musical genre, but by character type as understood in the era's vernacular medical manuals and treatises on government and philosophy. The author therefore foregrounds the century's changing beliefs about the physical and metaphysical effects of music on listeners, performers, universal order or chaos, and the body politic. She deftly deals with shifts in attitudes toward what is now considered mental illness, and toward notions of male and female sexuality and erotic attraction. It is worth noting that what most of her disorderly characters have in common is the ability to infect their audiences with an admixture...