Pure Gold: Golden Age Sacred Music in the Iberian World: A Homage to Bruno Turner ed. by Knighton and Bernadette Nelson (review)

All the gold on earth originated in supernova explosions untold billions of years ago. Most terrestrial gold resides in the earth’s core, where it descended along with molten iron during the planet’s formation. The gold we have mined over the millennia was probably deposited by asteroids and meteors on or near the earth’s surface. Gold’s atomic characteristics prevent it from oxidizing and thus maintain its attractive yellow lustre. The quest for gold has motivated some of the largest and culturally most transformative migrations in human history. Its untarnished appearance also makes it a potent metaphor for things of enduring quality and significance, and for the people and cultural epochs that produce, preserve, and promote works of great beauty. One such epoch was the Iberian golden age of the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries, and one such promoter is Bruno Turner.

Indeed, as interesting as the story is of gold’s journey from meteor to metaphor, it is musical gold that propelled Turner’s career, and his personal journey is the subject of a fascinating interview with Luis Gago at the conclusion of this remarkable book. Turner is renowned for his achievements as an editor and publisher of early music. For many years he was a radio personality on BBC’s Third Programme, researching, performing, and talking about Spanish music in particular. Using personal wealth acquired through a successful wall-covering business, in 1977 he founded Mapa Mundi, a company devoted to the publication of Renaissance music in performing editions. Not content merely to publish music, he also founded and conducted the group Pro Cantione Antiqua in London, which recorded its landmark performances of Renaissance masterpieces on the Deutsche Grammophon label. Among Turner’s seminal recordings with this ensemble and on that label are the complete motets of Francisco de Peñalosa.

Yet, what emerges from this exchange is the fact that, despite the considerable intellectual rigour required in rescuing, restoring, and reviving music of Iberia’s golden age, emotion is the driving force behind everything. As Turner avers, ‘If you don’t cry at one moment or another listening to this music, then everything is pointless’ (p. 386). Musicologists do not usually talk this way, and maybe that is why Turner does not consider himself a musicologist, though his editorial efforts alone would certainly confer that distinction on him, if he wanted it. Instead, ‘I don’t want to produce scholarly works’, he says, focusing instead on ‘revealing things for performance’ (p. 389). Thus, he laconically notes that performers regard him as more of a musicologist, and musicologists consider him as more of a performer.

Although he claims never to have had ‘a formal musical lesson in my life’ (p. 387), Turner learned his notes to perfection in a north London Catholic choir and later became a choirmaster at the Vatican; however, he is a lapsed Catholic who could not get himself to believe what the Pope said he should. Still, like so many non-believers before him, he found and finds aesthetic Catholicism compelling, especially its visual arts and music. As he aptly notes, ‘You don’t have to believe that the Blessed Virgin Mary went bodily into Heaven . . . to believe that Palestrina’s “Assumpta est Maria” is wonderful music’ (p. 392). Despite his admiration for Palestrina, however, it is Victoria who wins top honours from Turner, and that predilection has given rise to the volume under consideration.

To be sure, it is not his professional accomplishments alone that have led to this tribute, the fact that, as Gago writes, everything Turner does ‘is the perfect blend of hard work and enthusiasm’ (p. 386). Rather, it is that all the people who know [him] ‘never cease to be amazed by [his] generosity to people, showing scores, giving advice, giving all the things...