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Notes 57.2 (2000) 364-366



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Book Review

Music and the Cultures of Print


Music and the Cultures of Print. Edited by Kate van Orden. New York: Garland Publishing, 2000. [xxi, 354 p. ISBN 0-8153-2574-6. $70.]

Music librarians by nature will feel good about musicology that studies music printing and publishing. To be sure, the goal of this book may seem confusing, at least if it is (to quote the series foreword) "the study of race, sexuality, jazz, and rock" (p. vii). Its essays seem beholden less to the new areas of "deconstruction, narrativity, postcolonial analysis, phenomenology, and performance studies" than to the great no-nos of "textual criticism, formal analysis, paleography, narrative history, and archival studies" (ibid.). Most of them, in fact, reflect the conventional wisdom of the experience of music libraries. A few conclusions even hint at a dismantling of the classic and cumbersome ways librarians work: our classic response is that we know we have problems. But we are then left saying either "so what?" (which makes us look stupid) or "we can't afford to do that" (which makes us mad). However we react to the agenda, it is still nice to see a fuss made over "our stuff." Let me comment on the essays by reorganizing the topical plan chronologically (and if this amounts to deconstructing it, I am truly sorry).

Martha Feldman explores the assignment of composers' names by the first music printers. Attribution began in the world of the ethnomusicologists' tired joke: "Folk music is music written by nobody." Feldman suggests how the concept of musical authorship entered the world of commerce through the printing press, producing a momentum that would lead to the havoc [End Page 364] created by hungry modern publishers. (Haydn's opus 3, Beethoven's "Jena" Symphony, and Charles Cudworth's "Spuriosity Shoppe" come to mind.) Promotion may have been a goal of publishers, but credibility is also at stake, and evidence of authoritative habits is the key to establishing this. Publishers thus have much in common with music catalogers, who make it their business to pursue authority work (and demand that their supervisors give them time to do it). Early publishers very quickly learned the need to "establish" sources; where scholarship ends and promotion begins is irrelevant when users care. One prays that the point will someday sink in with academic administrators.

Next in time, James Haar suggests some of the dimensions of Orlando di Lasso as a sixteenth-century media event. The event is well known, but Haar can still add useful observations based on his lifelong work. In contrast, I don't know quite what to make of Kate van Orden's discussion of the printing of Benoist Rigaud in Lyons at the end of the century. To argue that Rigaud's books were "cheap but good" (p. 283) begs a definition of goodness. Problems of foliation in his books suggest that he had trouble finding experienced compositors, and his output suggests that he may have been short of copy and had to hustle it in the communities he knew: Renaissance contrafacta thus led to Enlightenment political parody. So Rigaud must indeed have been out of favor with the authorities. His English cousin is Thomas Deloney's Strange Histories (1602), in which an agenda is as hard to describe convincingly as it is fascinating to imagine.

Two essays deal with the seventeenth century. Tim Carter, discussing early monody, proposes that its printed music, for better or worse, serves "as much to distance us from the sound . . . as to bring it closer to our ears" (p. 28). His evidence is well cited, and he raises good points in questioning the printed text in a repertory that depended on virtuoso stylists as performers. (The piano music of Franz Liszt, in this respect, is a kindred repertory.) Lisa Perella discusses the Recveil des plvs beaux vers, qvi ont esté mis en chant (1661), issued not by Robert Ballard but by Charles de Sercy. It has no printed music and hence is not in RISM; in libraries its likes are...

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