Composing Community in Late Medieval Music: Self-Reference, Pedagogy, and Practice by Jane D. Hatter (review)

In her first monograph, Composing Community in Late Medieval Music: Self-Reference, Pedagogy, and Practice, Jane Hatter seeks to answer a question about the decades on either side of 1500: Why did so many composers write music about music? Or, perhaps more precisely, Why did they write works that mention music, musicians, and themselves? The composers of the works that Hatter explores incorporate their own names, as Guillaume Dufay does in his Ave regina celorum; the names of other musicians, as in Loyset Compère's Omnium bonorum plena; and even overt references to theoretical elements, such as solmization syllables and the hexachord, into these works, leading Hatter to call them "self-referential." Hatter discusses how such works reflect the various musical communities in existence during the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.

Of particular interest is Hatter's connection of these musical communities to broader cultural trends. She homes in on paintings commissioned by regional guilds, which often depicted Saint Mary, Blessed Virgin, being painted by Saint Luke, the latter frequently a self-portrait of the painter. Hatter asserts that such paintings, in which both the painter and the tools of the art itself are shown, are analogous to the musical works studied here, representing an artistic milieu in which both composers and painters began to portray themselves as individual creators of distinct artistic objects within which the very act of creation is captured. To that end, a chapter on paintings begins each of the two main sections of the book.

In the first section, Hatter focuses her efforts on what she terms "music about musicians" (p. 5): works that mention the composer or other musicians by name, and laments written on the death of musicians. She begins with Dufay's motet Ave regina celorum III, which he wrote in advance of his own demise, and Fulgens iubar, which contains an acrostic referring to Peeter vande Casteele, the magister puerorum of the Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Grâce in Cambrai, France. These works are carefully situated in their potential devotional contexts at the cathedral. Using Dufay's works as a starting point, Hatter next treats seven more "musicians' motets" written between 1450 and 1505 before concluding part 1 with a study of twenty laments for deceased composers.

In part 2, Hatter turns to "music about music"—those works that overtly signal theoretical concepts such as solmization syllables (Josquin des Prez's use of la–mi–la as an ostinato ostensibly symbolizing the name "Maria" in Illibata dei virgo nutrix) or the hexachord (Antoine Brumel's setting of all seven hexachords of the gamut, from lowest to highest, in his Missa Ut re mi fa sol la). She concludes the book with a close reading of Josquin's Illibata dei virgo nutrix, which references both Josquin himself in an acrostic, the kind of self-reference discussed in part 1, and musical elements such as the aforementioned solmization syllables, the focus of part 2.

While recent musicological inquiry into music of this era is certainly not devoid of multidisciplinary contextual approaches, Hatter's attention to developments in art, keenly assessing depictions of authorship and artistic creation, is valuable, and so too is her use of this material as a foundation and framing device for the remainder of the book. Specifically, her focus on regional artistic guilds and their potential musical counterparts is a useful way to investigate the growth and development of creative communities, and I would imagine that these types of guilds by themselves would make for a fruitful further study. As such, the volume would be of interest to anyone working on art history and context in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, especially in the Low Countries, which predominate part 1. As she focuses the most on musical...