A Catalogue of Polyphonic Songs, 1415-1480 (review)

A Catalogue of Polyphonic Songs, 1415-1480. By David Fallows. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. [vi, 777 p. ISBN 0-19-816291-X. $175.]

From the very beginnings of his scholarly career, David Fallows has carried on what can only be described as a love affair with fifteenth-century song. The first of his works to attract attention was a seminar paper on the English song Luf will [I] with variance, the winner of the Ingolf Dahl award given by the Northern and Southern California chapters of the American Musicological Society in 1977, the first year the award was given. His dissertation, Robert Morton's Songs: A Study of Styles in the Mid-Fifteenth Century (Ph.D. diss., University of California at Berkeley, 1977), set the tone for much of what was to come with a painstakingly detailed and at the same time extraordinarily musical examination of the relatively small repertory of songs by Morton, an examination that goes beyond the establishment of the texts and becomes a model of how to deal with a song repertory both in terms of its transmission history and in terms of its musical and literary styles.

In the last two decades Fallows has been a prodigiously productive scholar. His output has covered almost every aspect of fifteenth-century music, including biography, institutional history, reception history, music editing, and recording. Everything that he has produced has been useful and insightful. Much recent musicological writing reads either as turf-staking or as an exercise in an "original" interpretation of historical data or musical style that seems designed to incite admiration for the author's cleverness but seldom to provide the reader with insights or material useful for further research or thought on the matter. This is not the case with what Fallows has written, and his work as a whole has proven a gold mine of facts and ideas for the work of other scholars. Further, much of his writing is infused with a palpable liking for the music and a sense of enormous curiosity for what the historical record of that music can tell us. Withal, his writing is laced with an undercurrent of skepticism and caution about how much we can understand cultural phenomena removed by more than a half-millennium from our own time, an undercurrent that serves as a salutary brake upon his own unabashed liking for fifteenth-century music and probably provides the necessary distance for careful critical thought. Curiously enough, the only small missteps that I find in his work come from this caution and skepticism, particularly when allied with what appears to be Fallows's allergy towards archival research or liturgical matters. When I read his exemplary study of Guillaume Du Fay, published relatively early in his career (Dufay [London: Dent, 1982; rev. ed., 1987]), I am struck, in retrospect, with the extent to which that book was in some ways an opportunity for Fallows to come to grips with virtually every musical genre of the middle decades of the fifteenth century after early work devoted entirely to the song repertories. The biographical chapters are lucid, accurate, and gratefully written, but it is the chapters about the music that are the real heart of the book, and nowhere does Fallows's prose reveal his own intense love for the music as in the two chapters on the songs. Even though in every chapter one finds insightful aperçus and felicitous observations of the style, the greatest density of these appear in the chapter on the early songs--his liking for a piece such as Adieu ces bon vins fairly leaps off the page at the reader. If he is more reticent in his observations concerning the late songs, one should remember that these were, when he was writing, virtually unknown and are even now among the least well known pieces by Du Fay or his contemporaries. Even by the standards of the time, they are among the most hermetic works of the...