City, Chant, and the Topography of Early Music: In Honor of Thomas Forrest Kelly ed. by Michael Scott Cuthbert, Sean Gallagher, and Christoph Wolff (review)

As isolating as it may sometimes seem, scholarship is a social pursuit. We scholars belong to professional societies and subscribe to journals where we share our work. We publish reviews assessing the work of members of our field. We refer to the work of our colleagues, and we build on the arguments and evidence amassed by others. Indeed, even those ideas we hold to be most particular to ourselves are shot through with the writings of others. Perhaps this is why the festschrift, as a scholarly genre, holds such a special place within the panoply of writings in a scholar’s discipline. The festschrift offers writers the opportunity to honor publicly the debts we all owe our colleagues.

It is, however, this act of homage that gives rise to some of the dilemmas intrinsic to the genre. In paying tribute, are the contributors meant to highlight the influence the honoree has had on the arguments they set forth? Are they somehow to attempt to enact the honoree’s approach to a given topic? What precisely ought essays in a festschrift accomplish that would justify their inclusion in this genre as opposed to a collection of essays without an honoree? This conundrum appears to be a stumbling block for many festschriften and the book that serves as the subject of this review exemplifies some of the issues surrounding the festschrift rather well.

City, Chant, and the Topography of Early Music presents thirteen essays by fifteen authors in honor of Thomas Forrest Kelly, the renowned Harvard professor, revered scholar of medieval chant traditions, and the celebrated author of the successful First Nights (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), a popular text that examines the cultural history of five landmark premieres in the history of music. The essays were culled from talks delivered at a 2009 conference at Harvard honoring Kelly, and some of the contributions may have worked better when delivered on that festive occasion than they do in printed form. The book is divided into five parts that endeavor to pay homage to Kelly’s work in the realm of highly specialized research and to his First Nights writings and their appeal to a more general readership.

Part I, “First Nights: Early Music in Paris and Rome,” is the weakest section of the festschrift overall, while containing one of the book’s finest essays. Craig Wright’s opening essay, “Quantification in Medieval Paris and How It Changed Western Music,” is a revised version of the keynote address he delivered at the 2009 conference. For my taste, it is an exemplary work in this genre. The keynote is a strange animal. On the one hand, it is meant to commemorate the occasion, and in that sense it should be accessible, entertaining, and refer directly to the honoree. On the other hand, since the occasion is scholarly and the honoree a scholar, the keynote ought to have some intellectual heft to it. The balance is not easily struck, but Wright does it exceptionally well. He begins by reminiscing about his time with Kelly as a graduate student, together slaving through transcribing the facsimiles in Willi Apel’s The Notation of Polyphonic Music, 900–1600 in a course taught by Nino Pirrotta, without ever asking about the cultural history of such sources. The insight into their personal history is amusing (apparently Pirrotta had a habit of inadvertently lighting the wrong end of his cigarettes during class) but Wright uses it as a launching pad into a discussion of the cultural significance of the developments in musical notation (a discussion that resonates well with Kelly’s work without necessarily being directly indebted to it). Specifically, Wright ties the shift from “contextual neumes” to “sign...