Networks of Music and Culture in the Late Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries: A Collection of Essays in Celebration of Peter Philips’s 450th Anniversary ed. by David J. Smith and Rachelle Taylor (review)

This collection of essays has its origins in two conferences held in 2011 celebrating the 450th anniversary of the birth of Peter Philips (d. 1628). A stubborn Catholic born in England, he spent much of his career in the Spanish Netherlands. Philips was a distinguished and able composer, steeped in the English tradition but also fully conversant with Italian style. His music was disseminated widely in manuscript and print and his Continental career makes him an obvious figure through which to investigate networks of culture in early modern Europe.

The book comprises fourteen essays by emerging and established scholars. The first is an introductory overview by David J. Smith. In chapter 2, Smith uses Philips’s keyboard music to foreground the ways in which early modern music (and musicians) operated in an often complex network of patronage. He begins by reassessing the evidence for Philips’s 1593 journey to Amsterdam, during which he was accused of planning to sail from Middelburg to England to make an assault on Queen Elizabeth, which led to an interrogation in The Hague. Smith goes on to discuss the various stylistic and personal interconnections between Philips and Sweelinck, Byrd, Morley, and Thomas Tomkins. The interconnections are part of ‘a continuum from “real” networks … to “virtual ones”’ (p. 30): the former involves direct contact between the characters; the latter indirect contact, even across generations. Smith convincingly suggests that Byrd was the figure at the centre of this ‘web of networks’. In the following chapter Émilie Corswarem focuses on musical relations between Liège and Brussels through the prism of the so-called Liber fratrum cruciferorum Leodiensium, an organ manuscript compiled in the early seventeenth century. The manuscript is interesting in its inclusion of (to us) lesser-known composers alongside works by Merulo, Gabrieli, and Sweelinck. As Corswarem points out, the works are indicative of an essentially forward-looking repertory that also takes into account the way in which the approach to organ-building and playing was changing at the turn of the century. While Philips himself does not appear to have visited Liège, there were evidently a good number of musicians from there who were active in Brussels. The chapter demonstrates how interconnections and networks of musicians, sources, and organ-builders in Liège ‘gave rise to a distinctive and progressive organ repertoire’ in the city (p. 47).

Next, Anne Lyman re-examines Philips’s three collections of few-voiced motets (1613, 1616, 1628) in the light of newly discovered archival evidence relating to the Confraternity of Our Lady of the Assumption at the Church of Sint-Goedele in Brussels. The confraternity was founded by Archduchess Isabella in 1623, and Philips was a member. The evidence is thin on the identity of the music heard at the confraternity, but Lynan convincingly suggests that Philips’s few-voice motets were among the repertory. In chapter 5 Naomi J. Barker examines ‘The Musical Legacy of the Accademia dei Lincei’. Her objective is stated clearly in the opening sentence: the chapter seeks to ‘argue that references to distant Greek and Roman antiquity provided an anchor of authority through seismic cultural shifts in early seventeenth-century Rome’ (p. 59). The musical examples are taken from Frescobaldi’s printed keyboard works, and one recurring idea in particular—the gapped chromatic fourth (e.g. a, f#, f, e). Barker argues that this motive, which recurs in various guises in a number of his works, is ‘described by Vicentino, Giovanni Battista Doni and others as indicative of the chromatic genus of ancient Greek music’ (p. 62). Thus she situates it not within an emerging sense of tonality but within this locus of authority rooted in...