Music of the Renaissance: Imagination and Reality of a Cultural Practice
248
Music of the Renaissance: Imagination and Reality of a Cultural Practice
248Hardcover(First Edition)
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780520297906 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of California Press |
| Publication date: | 02/12/2019 |
| Edition description: | First Edition |
| Pages: | 248 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d) |
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CHAPTER 1
The Era and Its Terms
AN ERA WITHOUT MUSIC
The emergence of the concept of the musical work fundamentally changed the ways in which human beings form relationships and interact with music. This change was one of the most salient moments of the fifteenth century. To be sure, a great deal of artful music, much of it transmitted through written means, existed for many centuries prior to this period. But these earlier forms of music were of a different character, closely related to rites, ceremonies, or occasions that shaped their form, and were often preserved in records at considerable historical remove from the moment of their creation. Without a doubt, notable traces of these developments can be discerned in fourteenth-century music, whether in its new forms of notation (themselves dependent upon thirteenth-century innovations), distinct modes of written transmission, or a new and more sensitive system of genres in which secular multivoice songs were especially prominent. Nevertheless, the conceptualization of music as an unchanging and self-contained work was clearly a product of the fifteenth century. This concept did not arise through any distinct foundational act, however, but was rather the end result of lengthy and complex processes that played out across multiple spheres of cultural activity and production, sometimes in isolation but just as often in tandem, among them writing and literacy, authorship and professionalization, historicity and historical memory, the position of music in the nascent system of the arts, and more. These activities redefined and sometimes expanded the parameters of what music could be, even as they were not always concerned with music alone. This fundamental change took place within the era most commonly referred to — thanks in no small part to the writings of Jacob Burckhardt — as the "Renaissance." But Burkhardt's account almost completely excluded music from its inquiries, except to discuss it as a locus of sociological activity, and thereby introduced doubts and uncertainties about the relationship between this period and its music. Nietzsche subsequently seemed to validate this exclusion, ascribing to music a certain intractable chronological belatedness. In a similar manner, Heinrich Besseler, building upon the work of Martin Heidegger and aware of the atrocities of the twentieth century, could not resist using the philosopher's concept of negative ontology to ascribe an intense pathos to the fifteenth century, characterizing it as an era in which a "humanization" of music took place. At the same time, he was a harsh and unrelenting critic of the larger term "Renaissance" and regarded its use in music history as misguided.
As a result, ever since Burckhardt's 1860 Die Cultur der Renaissance in Italien (The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy) matters have become ever more muddled. An era called the "Renaissance" exists, however one wishes to define it, and without which even the intentionally destabilizing interventions of postmodern cultural historiography, often operating by negative definition, would be unthinkable. But music in this era finds itself consigned to the margins of history, and even its liminal presence remains quite precarious. In the twentieth century little changed on this front in spite of unprecedented growth in research into both the "Renaissance" and music. Amid the many inquiries that have questioned the underlying structural power of historical eras — often heralded with loud and gleefully deconstructive fanfare — the problematic position of music has yet to be taken up and questioned. In fact, the assumption that music brought little if nothing to bear on the wider history of the period remains a perversely consistent feature of "Renaissance" historiography. If music did exist in the "Renaissance," it figures in it as a mere accident of history, at best a diffuse efflorescence of the social order that is historiographically meaningful as it relates to a certain subset of creative elites (as it is treated in Peter Burke's 1972 Culture and Society in Renaissance Italy, for example). Indeed, the history of the "Renaissance" has remained oddly content to adopt the contradictory position of being if not a history entirely without music, then a history at a certain remove from music. As a result the history of music, whether belated or not, has existed as a history apart from the "Renaissance." In Gustave Reese's landmark 1954 Music of the Renaissance, Burckhardt's name is not mentioned once, and in several other surveys of the period (many conceived of as handbooks), this conceptual problem is solved by consigning it to an introductory paragraph and gesturing to a history that exists alongside the "Renaissance." Only a few authors, notably Ludwig Finscher in his 1989–90 Die Musik des 15. und 16. Jahrhundert (Music of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries), have explicitly brought Burckhardt's viewpoint to the foreground, and even then only to corroborate his misgivings.
In significant ways, these challenges that the Renaissance has presented for music history remain unexplored, especially where the musical work concept is concerned. The era has been the subject of innumerable studies from a diverse array of cultural-historical disciplines and methodologies, including history, literary studies, and art history. (I understand "cultural history" not in the sense of any specialized or innovative methodology, but rather grounded on the simple and perhaps quaint premise that the activities that people undertake together in any given time and place must somehow relate to one another.) Music history, by contrast, has for the most part seemed content to confine itself in recent years to artistic or stylistic studies that only tangentially gesture to relevant external sociohistorical factors. And the decisive change that the musical work concept brought about — the most significant development since the emergence of notation — and the expansion of musical consciousness that it ushered in remain strangely decoupled from its wider context. An inquiry into the role of the work concept as it applies to music by no means forecloses other related inquiries, whether into the quality and production of music, its presence in writing versus performance, its meaning as a cognitive, emotional, or scholarly practice, or the changing meaning of non-notated or "nonartistic" music in the social, mental, and emotional activities of humans. But the existence of the musical work concept suddenly gives these questions, with which music is intimately concerned, a new and meaningful perspective.
In recent research such a notion has been met with considerable skepticism, with interest in the work concept regarded as elite, elevated, and detached from reality. But in fact the work concept granted musical practices a new dimension in the broadest possible sense, including areas that might seem to exist at considerable remove from one another. It gave rise to more complex and meaningful relationships with music, providing a new reference point that affected the priorities of both contemporaries and later generations. The relationship of humans to music was defined according to new limits, and it attained, whether intentionally or not, a new and distinct quality. What we refer to as the Renaissance — and from this point forward the scare quotes will be omitted — was significantly and profoundly shaped by its music. And thus any meaningful inquiry into music in the Renaissance, while it should not be exclusively focused on the concept of the musical work, should take its genesis as an important point of departure.
At first glance this approach might seem to once again isolate music, insofar as, for example, the history of painting does not engage with such questions in a comparable manner (setting aside the question of under what conditions it is even possible to make a comparison between music and painting). But upon closer inspection many connections become apparent. Whether the new experience of reality revealed by Masaccio's techniques of perspective or the telescopic detail of Jan van Eyck's oil paintings, whether Leon Battista Alberti's new conceptualizations of space or the new relationship between language and the world revealed by Lorenzo Valla — none of these phenomena are the result of retrospective historiographical "construction." Taken as a whole they offer abundant evidence of something much more significant than Burckhardt's summary of the era as characterized by the "discovery of the world and of man." The inflection point that the musical work represented has been previously brought into discussions of other changes in a superficial manner, even though it bears directly upon questions of musical perception, the relationship between language and music, not to mention more localized compositional innovations. It is a question first and foremost of perspective. It goes without saying that the Communion from Guillaume Dufay's Missa Sancti Jacobi, with its much-discussed fauxbourdon structure, should not be regarded as merely a discursive exemplar of new forms of perception, and neither would such a viewpoint be ascribed to Masaccio's 1425 Trinity fresco for Santa Maria Novella in Florence. And yet both this painting and mass setting (created around the same time) present a new human-oriented relationship to reality for their viewers and listeners. Such connections have seldom been researched and explored even though they were brought to the fore as much in the practice of music as in the realm of painting.
This effort to understand the music of the Renaissance as a cultural history in its own right, rather than reintegrating it into a larger cultural history, does not mean to assert that music exists as a discrete representational form. Its methods are grounded in the conviction that such a historical delineation, even as it presents certain limitations and must be prefaced by a long string of caveats, also makes good sense, since this "era" needs to be given back its music. This decision also has consequences for how this study must proceed. Its goal is to take phenomenological stock of distinctive situations and describe complicated processes and sporadic events in a way that reveals relationships and draws connections without resorting to mere analogy. In light of the robust state of research such a goal seems promising and fruitful. Such connections concern not only the context of music, but in an important way the texts themselves. By this I mean a conception of text that is as capacious as possible, which the musical work elucidates in an especially sharp manner. Precisely because it is so difficult to determine what comprises the text of, for example, a Josquin chanson, one can draw such connections with a certain plausibility. For the activities of individuals in the past are revealed as much by the fact that trumpets were used in a royal ceremony as by the abundance of compositional decisions in a motet by Heinrich Isaac. Both presume upon on a textual character, albeit with different degrees of density and intentionality. Such norms and practices, premised upon complicated compositional decisions, cannot claim the supposed autonomy of an abstract or "ahistorical" material.
If one is to define the Renaissance as an era that was meaningfully defined by its music, the question arises as to what that might mean. While the musical work stands as the focus of inquiry, it cannot be the actual object of such a history, which would result in a kind of musical art history. A more fruitful approach is to attempt to circle in on the object by exploring significant areas of meaning. And in the interests of clarity one must set certain chronological and geographical boundaries and work within these limits to see what they yield. The chronological end of the period in question is easier to discern than its start, a somewhat unpredictable occurrence that nevertheless achieved a normative power within a remarkably short period of time: the invention of monody and figured bass around 1600. The changes that accompanied this occurrence are considerable. In the age of polyphony, three, four, or multipart settings were conceived of, at least in theory, as a network of equally significant voices, a rule that was somewhat conditionally suspended in the madrigal. In its place arose a completely new compositional idiom, in which the primary interaction was between the upper voice and bass lines and the unfolding of an underlying harmonic progression. The context and consequences of this shift will be considered later, but for now it is important to note the fundamental change in perspective that it fostered. Artful music was no longer sublimated into a polyphonic texture articulated by multiple people, but was instead the affective vehicle of an individual. This transition to a new mode of musical representation, toward the identification of the musical with a singing individual, provided the underlying premise for what is arguably the most successful genre innovation in music history: the invention of opera. Much more could be said about the influence of this development in other areas, including instrumental music, non-notated music, the conception of musical affect, and the perception of music in general. These changes between the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries should be considered, admitting certain reservations, a paradigm shift on the model of the concepts of Thomas Kuhn.
Deciding upon a comparably clear starting point is a more difficult prospect. The changes that took place around 1600 offer a bit of help, insofar as the polyphonic modes that were ultimately displaced by monody must have achieved dominance at some distinct moment. With a reasonable degree of certainty, the first twenty-five years of the fifteenth century present themselves as such a point in time. In fact multivoice music was polyphonic from the very beginning, and the introduction of multivoice features in the secular songs of the fourteenth century stands as a significant guidepost. But in the early fifteenth century the conception of polyphony underwent a decisive change. This was manifest first and foremost in the fascination borne out in a new conception of consonance using the intervals of the third and sixth. Whether this phenomenon was English in origin — as attested by two fifteenth-century witnesses, the chronicler Ulrich von Richenthal of Constance and the canon Martin Le Franc of Lausanne — can quickly be thrown into doubt by examining music created around 1400 in Italy. But more decisive than this conception of consonance is a related change in technique, whereby the relationship between consonance and dissonance was regulated in a new way. Polyphonic settings no longer consisted of a more or less open field between fixed points of consonance; instead, dissonances had to be prepared such that polyphonic settings led to them, and they were subsequently resolved via a more procedural operation. This shift can be observed in paradigmatic fashion in two motets of Guillaume Dufay (musical examples 1a and 1b). Ecclesie militantis, one of only a few five-voice works from before 1450, was written in 1431 for the coronation of Pope Eugene IV in Rome and shows, at least in principle, the "old" format, attributable perhaps to the challenges that a five-voice setting presented. The four-voice Nuper rosarum flores, composed for the same client in 1436, who consecrated the Cathedral of Florence during his exile, shows clear evidence of the new procedures. The contrast between the introductory duets of these two works illustrates a fundamental change in musical perception that will be discussed in greater detail later. For the time being it serves as the second chronological boundary for this inquiry.
Thus the procedures of the early fifteenth century distinguish themselves quite clearly from the practices of the fourteenth century. Again and again in general research into the Renaissance scholars have sought "origins" in the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries (often as a corrective to Burckhardt), often under rubrics such as "Protorenaissance." This has often been the case in music history, especially concerning music from fourteenth-century northern Italy. In this repertoire one can find many meaningful qualities that shaped the following century, among them the embedding of music in civic- governmental contexts, the differentiation of genres, and the emerging social profile of the figure of the "composer." And yet the conditions for cognitive and practical engagement with multivoice music shifted so markedly in the early fifteenth century that it seems justified to draw a boundary at this moment. This is not to say that the motets of Guillaume de Machaut or the ballades of Lorenzo da Firenze should be consigned to an "antechamber" of the history of the musical work (in the sense of a "Protorenaissance"), which would be silly enough. Nevertheless it appears, or at least it is a premise of this book, that the fundamental changes that took place are of greater significance than such continuities. The musical history of the fourteenth century is a history in its own right and should be considered on its own terms. Examples from this previous era will be brought to bear only when they are absolutely indispensable to understanding the phenomenon under discussion.
(Continues…)
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Table of Contents
Foreword Christopher Reynolds ix
Preface xiii
Chapter 1 The Era and Its Terms 1
Chapter 2 Social Reality and Cultural Interaction 47
Chapter 3 Text and Texts 83
Chapter 4 Forms of Perception 122
Chapter 5 Memoria 159
Glossary 191
Notes 199
Bibliography 211
Index 219