Music and Meaning: Studies in Music History and the Neighbouring Disciplines (review)

This hefty book consists of twenty previously published essays. They are arranged in quasi-circular motion from six by Warren Kirkendale (W.K.) to seven by his wife Ursula (U.K.) to another seven by W.K., as if to illustrate the notion of circulatio discussed in the first of them. The topics range from sixteenth-century motets and instrumental music to the madrigal, the beginnings of opera, French opera at the court of Louis XIV, and various works or periods of the composers Caldara, Bach, Handel, Mozart, Beethoven, and Paganini; hence, as “studies in music history” the essays spread over four centuries. No less inclusive are they in representing five decades of the authors’ research, from the 1960s up to 2006.

Of the twenty essays, several are major contributions in their innovative research and forceful presentation. No. 1 (by W.K.), for example, treats the circulus (alias circulatio) as a rhetorical figure that sundry composers, from Josquin down to Bach and Haydn, simulated by a wavy motive for words referring to the circle or its analogues (wreath, sun, ring, wave, world, wheel, circumference). Substantiated by evidence from “the neighboring disciplines” (rhetoric, emblematics, philosophy, theology, etc.), it focuses, in particular, on Josquin’s motet Ave Maria . . . benedicta tu, with its circular depiction of the Virgin’s breasts on “beata ubera tua, quae lactaverunt regem regum” (your blessed breasts that weaned the King of Kings).

Other staples of music historical research are (W.K., no. 2) the conception of the ricercar as an exordium that, in its two primary species (one free, the other strict, as defined respectively in rhetorical writings by Aristotle and Cicero), correlate—it is argued—with the improvisatory ricercars of Joan Ambrosio Dalza (1507–1511) and the imitative ones of Marco Antonio Cavazzoni (1523). The findings sparked a novel interpretation (by U.K., no. 12) of Bach’s Musical Offering as an application of Quintilian’s Institutio oratoria: since publication, this second rhetorical study has become a conversation piece among musicologists, fueling a still unsettled controversy over its conclusions. There followed, as a third piece, a review (no. 13, by U.K.) that took issue with the order of movements in the facsimile edition of the Musical Offering, and yet another piece (no. 3, by W.K.), an extended response (thirty-seven pages!) to the arguments of the critics, among them Paul Walker and Christoph Wolff: both make for lively reading. (Behind all four, one suspects, lies the dissertation by W.K., Fuge und Fugato in der Kammermusik des Rokoko und der Klassik [Tutzing: Hans Schneider, 1966] as an exemplar for the “strict ricercar.”)

A madrigal “a diversi linguaggi” (for five voices by Luca Marenzio, plus another four by Orazio Vecchi) is the subject of a lengthy study (by W.K., no. 4) that traces its individual characters (drawn mainly from the commedia dell’arte), makes sense of their “diverse languages” (Bergamasque, Venetian, Tuscan, etc.), identifies the more than 150 musical and literary sources for the two folksongs behind the music (La franceschina and La girometta), and concludes with a discursus on the situation of the “pedantic” teacher and his student—two of the characters—in contemporary literature.

Three writings (by U.K.) concern Handel in his formative “Italian period” (1706–10): new documents (mainly bills, payments, examined in detail in nos. 9 and 11) shed light on his relations with his patron Alessandro Ruspoli, allowing a description not only of “the time limits, the amount, and the character” of his work for him (p. 317) but also a preliminary chronology of his Italian cantatas (three unnumbered pages following p. 346). In no. 10 an unexpected travelogue from 1736 to 1743 contains a definitive answer to the long-disputed question whether the unnamed “Saxon” praised for his marvelous organ playing in the church of San Giovanni in Rome, 1707, was Handel, showing that Handel...