Musical Meaning and Human Values

Chapter 1

c h a p t e r 1 Due Rose, Due Volte A Study of Early Modern Subjectivities Susan McClary Modernism comes in many guises. In the early twenty-first century, we are most likely to associate the word with the recent postmodernist turn, with cultural upheavals a hundred years ago, or with the radical questioning of Enlightenment values entailed in the emergence of Romanticism. Pushing the term even further back, many humanities disciplines now refer to the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries as the ‘‘early modern’’ period. In musicology, however, the widespread use of period terms such as ‘‘Renaissance’’ and ‘‘Baroque’’ (themselves problematically borrowed from other disciplines and applied somewhat arbitrarily to music) has made it difficult to perceive the ‘‘modernity’’ in earlier repertories . The fact that we have no agreed-upon way of analyzing music from before the eighteenth century causes anything prior to Bach still to appear primitive—anything other than ‘‘modern.’’ The other chapters in this volume quite appropriately focus on later modernist crises, for these are the periods for which Lawrence Kramer has established himself as a leading authority. In his pathbreaking series of books and articles, Kramer has taken the standard classical repertories of the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries—long since elevated to the untouchable sphere of ‘‘absolute’’ music—and demonstrated the ways those privileged compositions produce meaning. Allegations to the con10 11 Susan McClary trary, he has never sought to undermine the aesthetic worth of classic masterpieces;1 he simply has wanted to add cultural theory and interpretation to the mix. Rather than the smooth, polished, ineffable entities celebrated by generations of connoisseurs, Kramer offers us documents testifying to ever-changing cultural values, including reactions to the traumas of modernity. Because of his work, the music of Schubert, Schumann, Ives, and many others has acquired renewed meanings—controversial meanings, to be sure, but far more precious for being seen to engage with the messy enterprise of human experience at various moments in history. Much of my work has addressed the same repertories on which Kramer concentrates his efforts, though I arrived at nineteenth-century studies from the opposite direction. I began my musicological career as a specialist of seventeenth-century music but quickly found that attempts at publishing my analyses and interpretations ran up against the commonly held belief that early music ‘‘does not work.’’ Frustrated by this bizarre but apparently nonnegotiable barrier, I decided that I needed to demonstrate the historical and ideological contingency of ‘‘absolute’’ music in order to deal seriously with the cultural values registered by earlier repertories, which in my view ought not to have required such elaborate special pleading . Thirty years after I started, I find it possible at last to address sixteenth -and seventeenth-century musics with the kind of analytical depth and the sorts of questions that Kramer brings to Mozart or Strauss. My essay concerns two sixteenth-century settings of Francesco Petrarch’s Sonnet No. 245, ‘‘Due rose fresche.’’ Several sixteenth-century composers set this sonnet to music, most notably Andrea Gabrieli in 1566 and Luca Marenzio in 1585. Musicologists and performers regard both these settings as central to the madrigal repertory. As it turns out, Marenzio alludes throughout his version to Gabrieli’s in a gesture of homage and intertextual one-upmanship typical of court-based culture of the time. Marenzio could count on his performers’ and listeners’ familiarity with the former setting and thereby produce his own reading of both Petrarch’s sonnet and Gabrieli’s earlier reading of the same sonnet. The mere nineteen years that separate Gabrieli’s setting from Marenzio ’s proves crucial to their understandings not only of this poem but also of inherited traditions of music composition. Put simply, Marenzio resided on the modernist side of a cultural cataclysm that still resonates even today. Thus, although both composers ostensibly faced only the task of setting a given text, their very divergent assumptions and ideological pri- 12 Early Modern Subjectivities orities mark their responses, resulting in two significantly different interpretations of Petrarch’s sonnet. Due rose fresche et colte in paradiso l’altr’ier, nascendo il dı̀ primo di maggio, bel dono et d’un amante antiquo et saggio tra duo minori egualmente diviso, con sı̀ dolce parlar et con un riso da far innamorare un uom selvaggio, di sfavillante et amoroso raggio et l’un’ et l’altro fe’ cangiare il...