Reforming Music: Music and the Religious Reformations of the Sixteenth Century by Chiara Bertoglio (review)

This is a big book: nearly 700 pages of text, and another 170 of preliminaries, bibliographies, and indexes. The work is ostensibly an "introduction to the topic" (p. xxv), but at this size it is a very ample one. It is also in many ways a great book, more complete and up to date than earlier comparable works, such as Friedrich Blume's Geschichte der evangelischen Kirchenmusik (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1965; English translation as Protestant Church Music: A History [New York: W. W. Norton, 1974]) or Karl Gustav Fellerer's two-volume history of Roman Catholic church music, Geschichte der katholischen Kirchenmusik (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1972–76).

It is difficult to know where to begin in praising this book, so broad and yet full of fascinating detail. Chiara Bertoglio makes some excellent general points—for example, her plea for a broader and nonteleological view of music history that does not privilege art music or ignore apparently insignificant genres (p. 50). Her coverage of the medieval debates over church music provides valuable background to the sixteenth-century disputes. Furthermore, Bertoglio asks pertinent questions about the way in which the unrepresentative nature of the extant sources influences our perceptions:

Moreover, all complaints and speculations discussed below come from religious men, and none emanates from either women or people coming from lower social classes (i.e. people who were neither clergy nor educated laity). What if the "secular" and "lascivious" elements or tunes were actually the expression of the genuine piety of women and uneducated laypeople?

(p. 103).

Accordingly, the final chapter deals in detail with music and women's experience. Bertoglio thus works from a more inclusive perspective, one that has become increasingly important in Reformation studies in general (one might mention Elsie McKee's work on Katharina Zell or Peter Matheson's studies of Argula von Grumbach) and in the study of Reformation music in particular (as witnessed by fine studies by Linda Phyllis Austern, Linda Maria Koldau, and others).

Although much of the work is based on secondary literature, some sections, such as the consideration of a well-known letter by Bernardino Cirillo (pp. 155–63), submit familiar texts to a careful rereading. I do not mean this as a criticism: just such a synthetic, encyclopedic digest of the burgeoning secondary literature on the music of the Reformations is very welcome.

The work is divided into numbered chapters, subchapters, and subsubchapters. This careful articulation helps readers find their way around a big book. It also reveals, however, how the material could have been rearranged in other—perhaps more economical and convenient—ways. For example, topics are frequently introduced briefly in one chapter and then expanded in those that follow. This recursive approach assists the narrative, but it also means that a reader who wants to know about, say, Lutheran music, must search in several chapters to gain an overview.

The structure of the work is as follows: chapter 1 sketches the theological and ecclesiological issues that defined the Reformations of the sixteenth century, humanism and issues of textuality, "humanistic" musical forms such as madrigal and opera, and social issues such as mobility. Chapter 2 describes the back-and-forth between humanists and musicians, both those who were positive about music and those who were critical of the religious music of their day, such as Desiderius Erasmus. It also deals with the constant conflict between ethical and aesthetic justifications for music. Chapter 3 covers the various styles of sacred music in the sixteenth century (plainchant and polyphony) and the complaints of those who criticized musical "vices" such as an excessively melismatic style of singing. Chapter 4 deals with the attitudes of various individuals towards the need to reform music. Bertoglio sees both differences and similarities across confessional divides. Theologians of various confessional identities agreed that music aids...