Adam Michna of Otradovice, Composer: Perspectives on Seventeenth-Century Sacred Music in Czech Lands by Jiří Sehnal, and: Cantantibus organis: Hudební kultura raného novověku ve středovropských souvislostech [Musical culture of the early modern era in Central-European context]: ad honorem Jiří Sehnal ed. by Vladimír Maňas and Pavel Žůrek (review)

On the eve of 2017, a welcome volume by Jiří Sehnal appeared: an English translation of a work that had been published in Czech a few years before (Adam Michna z Otradovic, skladatel [Olomouc: Univerzita Palackého, 2013]). Perhaps not unexpectedly, readers discover upon wading in that it is really more than one book, or rather a book with more than one narrative arch. On its face it is a determined biographical study of a seventeenth-century figure about whose life little can be stated incontrovertibly. At the same time it is an interrogation of both musically and ideologically complex worlds that, by mechanisms unlikely to be characterized as clear, permitted its subject's rise to local prominence. Adam Michna of Otradovice, Composer is also, it must be acknowledged, a record of Sehnal's own encounter with Michna's music over the course of decades, indeed nearly a half-century, ever since his edition in the late 1960s of a seminal work, the Missa Sancti Wenceslai (a late concerted mass extant only in a manuscript copy at Kroměříž), in the series Musica antiqua Bohemica. (The early publication history of this edition, including the editorial attribution itself, is somewhat clouded owing to policies and name changes of the state publishing house and to the backdating of imprints; perhaps it is most helpful now to acknowledge the corrected [opravené a doplnené] edition issued by Univerzita Palackého in Olomouc in 2010.)

Although the expression is too teleological, Sehnal has been sowing the seeds for an investigation of this sort over the course of a distinguished career as an excavator of early modern institutional archives great and small—from parish churches and monastic foundations to ecclesiastical courts and the colleges of clerks regular. It is not his first such attempt to view history through the prism of biography: readers of Notes may recall a monograph on music at the palace of the prince-bishop at Olomouc, which is anchored by a similarly systematic survey of the music of a composer for whom evidence of the life is also scant (Pavel Vejvanovský and the Kroměříž Music Collection [Olomouc: Univerzita Palackého, 2008], reviewed by me in Notes 66, no. 4 [June 2010]: 780–84). Both endeavors rest on a prodigious industriousness, to be sure, without which the authenticating testimony lurking in source documents cannot be wrung; but evident, too, is an intimate acquaintance with instrumental, ensemble, and liturgical practices as they are reflected in the material record (archival, organological, and even architectural, as when we learn that a specific organ loft could not have accommodated the forces alleged to have been assembled there). But alongside the analyses of inventories and other documents from institutional archives, for which Sehnal is justly admired, has persisted his evident absorption with the determinants of musical style. It is an approach that some today deem quaint or perhaps exclusively the domain of theorists, but for Sehnal it is an avenue in which to seek perspective: how do composers choose to fix themselves in time and place, how do they assimilate or reject rule and precedent, and to what extent does isolation predetermine posterity's verdicts? The preoccupation is especially in evidence with regard to the music of Michna—for instance, in an often...