- The art historian Madeline H. Caviness points out difficulties in employing the term ‘Gothic’ in her review of Michael Camille's book, The Gothic Idol: Ideology and Image-making in Medieval Art, also published by Cambridge University Press (1989); see Speculum, 68 (1993), 122. The use of this term is catchy, largely meaningless, potentially pejorative.
- With this in mind, I have completed a catalogue raisonné describing all the sources containing the Latin sequence, 900–1600, with an incipit volume including all the concordances of each text-music combination, soon to appear in the series Répertoire international des sources musicales (RISM). See also Nancy van Deusen, ‘The Medieval Latin Sequence: A Complete Catalogue of the Sources and Editions of the Texts and Melodies’, Journal of the Plainsong and Mediaval Music Society, 5 (1982), 56–60.
- Cf. Nancy van Deusen, ‘The Sequence Repertory at Nevers Cathedral’, Basler Studien zur Interpretation der alten Musik: Forum musicologicum, 2 (1980), 44–59.
- All these points are substantiated in Nancy van Deusen, ‘The Use and Significance of the Sequence’, Musica disciplina, 40 (1986), 1–46. Prof. Fassler repeats a suggestion that sequences were commentaries to the Alleluia, but neither the commentary format nor the relationship, commentary to text, is in any respect, visually or contextually, present. This further creates an unbalanced view of the sequence as being related solely to the Alleluia; the genre is also connected to an important part of the Mass ceremony, the Gospel reading, a connection made clear in manuscript format, in rationalia, and most importantly within the sequence texts themselves.
- In her discussion of Nevers cathedral Fassler concludes that ‘if the assignment of lat. 3126 of St. Martin is correct, then the Augustinians of Nevers cared a great deal both about sequences and about the place in the liturgy where they were sung’ (pp. 103–4). I have argued that Nevers as a cathedral milieu contained multiple influences within its corporate structure, in contradistinction to monastic communities, and that cathedrals must therefore be compared with other cathedrals; cf. commentary volume to Music at Nevers Cathedral: Principal Sources of Medieval Chant, 2 vols. (Binningen, 1980), and ‘Music at Nevers Cathedral: Relationships between a Medieval Institution and Manuscript Transmission’, Musicology (Journal of the Australian Musicological Society), 7 (1982), 30–40.
- See Nancy van Deusen, ‘A Theory of Composition’, Theology and Music in the Early University—The Case of Robert Grosseteste and Anonymous IV (Leiden and London, 1994), 127–45.
- See Cassiodorus, Expositio psalmorum, ed. Marcus Adriaen, Corpus Christianorum series latina, 97–8 (Turnhout, 1958), ii, 837.4: ‘Merito ergo talis calculus totius redemptionis nostrae continet formam, qui per obliquas lineas charactere suo sanctae crucis imitatur figuram et in digitis decori circuii rotunditate concluditur.’
- Christ as head of the church has a long and widespread medieval exposition, not only within the psalm commentary but also within the Genesis commentary traditions. Cf. Cassiodorus, Expositio psalmorum, i, 183.4: ‘Corona enim non improbe circumeuntium disciplinorum videtur significare conventum quia ipsum docentem desiderantium apostolorum circuitus ambiebat. Haec est corona capitis, hos regale diadema, quod non ornaret impositum sed de Christo Domino potius ornaretur. In hac enim corona et totius mundi circulum merito poterimus advertere; in quo generalis significatur Ecclesia.’ Cassiodorus was influenced by Augustine, De Genesi ad litteram. Robert Grosseteste, c. 1222–35, referring to Jerome, brings into the discussion of Christ as caput ecclesie Christ's statement (John, iv. 34) ‘My meat is to do the will of him who sent me, and finish his work’: ‘Inde igitur pascitur Christus, unde in se vei in nobis et nos in ipso voluntatem Patris et opus perficimus; nec aliunde convenit nos pasci, qui sumus eius membra, quam unde pascitur ipse, qui est nostrum capud.’ The head, of course, chews. (Hexaemeron, ed. Richard C. Dales and Servus Gieben O.F.M., Auctores Britannici medii aevi, 6, London, 1982, 261; cf. van Deusen, Theology and Music in the Early University, 151.)
- An example occurs on p. 21: ‘From these subjects comes an explanation of medieval views of human language and its expressive powers, one which relates directly to the kinds of changes in these views which have recently been the focus of study in other fields, in communication theory and literary criticism, and in the writings of the art historian Michael Camille.’ The accompanying footnote reads: ‘See especially the writings of Brian Stock which have influenced the work of medievalists in several disciplines.’
- See my remarks in my foreword to Oliver Strunk, Essays on Music in the Western World (New York, 1974), vii–viii.
- Arthur Mendel, ‘Gustave Reese (1899–1977): A Personal Memoir’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 30 (1977), 363.
- Harold Ellis Wooldridge, Oxford History of Music, i-ii (Oxford, 1901). For a typically pithy evaluation by Reese, see Music in the Renaissance, 927, under abbreviation ‘OH’ (= Oxford History of Music).
- Cambridge, Mass., 1989, 67–78 and 79–94.
- The older literature on the Renaissance, after Burckhardt, brought forth an avalanche of rebuttals from major medievalists, prominently including Lynn Thorndike; for example, his tough-minded article, ‘Renaissance or Prerenaissance’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 4 (1943), 65–74, repr. in The Renaissance: Medieval or Modern?, ed. Karl H. Dannenfeldt (Boston, Mass., 1959), 79–85. That Thorndike is well worth reading will be clear enough from his comparison of historical periods to former heavyweight champions—‘they never come back’. But attacks like these in no way diverted stalwart partisans of the Burckhardtian view in its purest form from continuing to see the Renaissance as a period of decisive change and awakening, and such partisans are to be found in every field of Renaissance scholarship. In musicology the strongest voice for this view is still that of Edward Lowinsky; see, inter alia, his classic statement of the Renaissance as a period of sharp revolutionary departure from the Middle Ages, in ‘Music in the Culture of the Renaissance’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 15 (1954), 509–53, repr. in Renaissance Essays, ed. Paul Oscar Kristeller and Philip Wiener (New York, 1968), 337–81, and in Lowinsky's collected writings, published as Music in the Culture of the Renaissance and Other Essays (Chicago, 1989), i, 19–39. For brief remarks summarizing the milder and more evolutionary hypothesis that is buried deep but is discernible in Reese, Music in the Renaissance, in comparison to the opposed viewpoint in Lowinsky's essay, see my article ‘Renaissance’, The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (London, 1980), xv, 740 (section 5, ‘Current views of the Renaissance as a period’). At a distance of 15 years from the writing of this article I see no reason to alter its basic view, namely, that while ‘there is no reason to claim that this [the Renaissance] was a “better” age than its predecessor, yet it does appear to have been new in sufficient measure to warrant a separate historical identity, in part carrying forward certain tendencies of the Middle Ages, in part breaking with them’. For a recent and challenging review of the problem, with many references to writers of the period and their ways of construing the historical past, see Jessie Ann Owens, ‘Music Historiography and the Definition of “Renaissance”’, Notes, 47 (1990-1), 305–30.
- See Johan Huizinga, Men and Ideas: Essays byjohan Huizmga (repr. Princeton, 1984), 243: ‘At the sound of the word “Renaissance” the dreamer of past beauty sees purple and gold.’
- See above, note 5.
- See above, note 5.
- Robin George Collingwood, The Idea of History (Oxford, 1946), 327–8, quoted in my Music in Renaissance Ferrara, 1400–1505 (Cambridge, Mass., 1984), 1.
- For a new view of the ‘ars subtilior’ aiming at a revision of both concept and title for the period, see Anne Stone, ‘Writing Rhythm in Late Medieval Italy: Notation and Musical Style in the Manuscript Modena Alpha M. 5, 24’ (Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 1994). Of course Stone's dissertation had not been completed at the time of publication of Prof. Strohm's book.
- See Fallows, ‘The Contenance Angloise: English Influence on Continental Composers of the Fifteenth Century’, Renaissance Studies, 1 (1987), 189–208.
- ‘Binchois' Songs, the Binchois Fragment, and the Two Layers of Escorial A’ (Ph.D. dissertation, Princeton University, 1988).
- See Erwin Panofsky, Early Netherlandish Painting (Cambridge, Mass., 1953), i, 196–7, and Edward Lowinsky, ‘Jan van Eyck's Tymotheos: Sculptor or Musician?’, Studi musicali, 13 (1984), 33–106.
- Johannes Ockeghem, Collected Works, iii: Motets and Chansons, ed. Richard Wexler with Dragan Plamenac, American Musicological Society Studies and Documents, 7 (Boston, Mass., 1992); see the review by Paula Higgins in Renaissance Quarterly, 47 (1994), 443–4. As to Busnois, the conference held on him at Notre Dame University in November 1992, ‘Continuities and Transformations in Musical Culture, 1450–1500: Assessing the Legacy of Antoine Busnoys’, organized by Paula Higgins, revealed more sharply than before the breadth and significance of his work and, by implication, his influence for the period.
- See my remarks on this problem in my ‘Communicating Musicology: A Personal View’, College Music Symposium, 28 (1988), 1–9, which was the substance of my Presidential Address to the American Musicological Society in 1987. Among other things I wrote (p. 8): ‘In Renaissance studies… we are still waiting for even the first English language biography or general study of Josquin Desprez, let alone comparable books on such figures as Mouton, Willaert, Rore, Gombert, Clemens, Marenzio, or even Orlando di Lasso. Books like Fallows's Dufay, Watkins's Gesualdo, or Hammond's Frescobaldi have shown that it can be done, but they have not yet been followed up.’ As of this writing, seven years later, the situation is unchanged.
- I also incorporated into the Italian translation the various singers who had not been listed in the English version, and who were mentioned by William Prizer in his review in Journal of the American Musicological Society, 40 (1987), 95–104; see La musica a Ferrara nel Rinascimento, 393ff., where the indication ‘Prizer’ is added to the lists of singers under various years.
- Alfred Einstein, review of Fausto Torrefranca, Il segreto del quattrocento, Music and Letters, 21 (1940), 392–5; also the gentle but, as Einstein noted, ironic review by Benvenuto Disertori in Rivista musicale italiana, 43 (1939), 645–51. At this very moment, when Italian political life is once more dominated by forces of expediency and darkness, and is seemingly unable to restore the sense of hope in democracy that was felt from 1945 until now, reading a review like that of Einstein (so clearly antifascist in tone and meaning) is more salutary than ever.
- Hans-Georg Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode (Tübingen, 1960), trans. as Truth and Method, ed. Garrett Barden and John Cumming (New York, 1985); Paul Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, ed. and trans. John B. Thompson (Cambridge and Paris, 1981).
- This system contains various inconsistencies, which Tomlinson does not mention: there were customarily nine muses, but only eight pitches in a diatonic octave, seven planets and four elements; also the Hypomixolydian mode here has no correspondence to ‘musica mundana’ and is deprived of its finalis, as the note d is taken up already by the Dorian mode. See pp. 80ff.
- To elaborate the metaphor: when we are speaking of magical forces, the ingredients are not physical substances and the effect of a ‘meal’ thereby becomes more difficult to ascertain. But one would nevertheless like to know from the authors in both fields whether they only write about meals or actually go to the market and into the kitchen to prepare a meal, and what effect the meal has on the host's guests.
- Tomlinson, p. 94, quoted from Claude V. Patisca, Humanism in Italian Renaissance Musical Thought (New Haven, 1985), 177.
- See Franchino Gafori, De harmonia, trans. Clement A. Miller, Musicological Studies and Documents, 33 (n.p., 1977), 204.
- Gafori, The Theory of Music, trans. with introduction and notes by Walter Kurt Kreyszig, ed. Claude V. Palisca (New Haven, 1993).
- Daniel P. Walker, ‘Musical Humanism in the 16th and Early 17th Centuries’, The Music Review, 2 (1941), 1–13, 111–21, 220–7, 228–308, and 3 (1942), 55–71 (2, p. 9); repr. in Walker, Music, Spirit and Language in the Renaissance, ed. Penelope Gouk (London, 1985), i, 9.
- Marsilio Ficino, Three Books on Life, ed. Carol V. Kaske and John R. Clark (Binghamton, 1989), 357ff.; see also Tomlinson, pp. 88, 113.
- In this context, Tomlinson's criticism of D. P. Walker's Spiritual and Demonic Magic (London, 1958) cannot withstand scrutiny. Tomlinson writes: ‘The crucial misstep in Walker's interpretation of [Ficino's] De Vita is his assumption of a functional difference between the words and the music of Ficino's song: in Walker's interpretation only words, not music, can convey rational significance’ (p. 101). To start with, it appears odd that in a topic where terms such as ‘spiritus’, ‘ratio’, ‘intellectus’, ‘mens’, etc. each have a complex meaning, Tomlinson should render as ‘rational significance’ what Walker consistently called ‘intellectual content’ (see Walker, pp. 6–7, 21, and also Tomlinson, pp. 101ff.). Later on Tomlinson blurs Walker's terminology further when he speaks of ‘Walker's distinction of meaningful words and nonmeaningful music’ (Tomlinson, p. 105) and ‘Walker's dichotomy of rational words and nonsignifying music’ (p. 113). A ‘functional difference between the words and the music’ does not arise in Walker's interpretation of Ficino, because he clearly says that in Ficino's theory ‘it [music] is not separated from text; it does therefore affect the whole man, mind as well as spirit and body’ (Walker, p. 21). Tomlinson also maintains that ‘Walker overlooked the fact that in Ficino's list not only songs but musical sounds in general and words are ascribed to Apollo’ (Tomlinson, p. 104). This is not the case, as can be seen in Walker's reproduction of Ficino's list (see Walker, p. 15). Similarly, Tomlinson's conclusion that Ficino ‘unequivocally affirms without mention of words music's rational, signifying nature’ is contradicted by the concomitant quotation from Ficino in which he refers to ‘songs’ (‘cantus’), that is, music with words; see Tomlinson, pp. 114 and 260.
- See Walker, Spiritual and Demonic Magic, 19ff.
- Concerning the similar problem of the reality of Ficino's ecstasies, Michael Allen presents a cautious view: ‘Whether Ficino experienced such mystical flights himself is difficult to ascertain, but he certainly believed in the absoluteness of their reality and in the possibility of a few men truly attaining them during this life for however brief a time. He customarily sought and, according to eyewitness accounts, effectively achieved trancelike, enraptured states during his Orphic lyre recitals, when he intoned Platonic hymns apparently to the sun.’ Michael J. B. Allen, The Platonism of Marsilio Ficino (Berkeley, 1984), 60. Tomlinson quotes this passage in the following forms: ‘He [Ficino] believed, as Michael Allen has said, in the absolute reality of such mystical flights and in the possibility that some people might attain them, however briefly, during their earthly lives; and he may well have experienced such states himself (The Platonism, p. 60) (Tomlinson, p. 171). ‘This is the form of poetic furor, we may suggest with Allen, that Ficino experienced in his singing to the Orphic lyre (see The Platonism, p. 60) (Tomlinson, p. 173).
- Carlo Ginzburg, The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (London, 1983), xiiiff.
- Paul Richard Blum, ‘Probleme der Ficino Lektüre’, introduction to Marsilio Ficino, Über die Liebe oder Platons Gastmahl (Hamburg, 1984), xiv.
- Tomlinson, p. 12, quoting from Brian Vickers, ‘Analogy versus Identity: The Rejection of Occult Symbolism, 1580–1680’, Occult and Scientific Mentalities in the Renaissance, ed. Vickers (Cambridge, 1984), 95–163 (p. 95).
- Vickers's text begins: ‘It is my contention that the occult and the experimental scientific traditions can be differentiated in several ways: in terms of goals, methods and assumptions. I do not maintain that they were exclusive opposites or that a Renaissance scientist's allegiance can be settled on an either/or, or yes/no, basis. Rather in many instances, especially in the late 16th and 17th centuries, a spectrum of beliefs and attitudes can be distinguished, a continuum from, say, absolutely magical to absolutely mechanistic poles, along which thinkers place themselves at various points depending on their attitudes to certain key topics. One of these topics, not much discussed so far, is the relationship between language and reality.’ (The passage quoted by Tomlinson follows immediately.) Vickers, ‘Analogy versus Identity’, 95.
- A seventeenth-century sceptic with a sense of humour, unfortunately lacking in Ficino, called musical cures of tarantism ‘Carnevaletti delle Donne’, since working-class women seemed particularly affected by this illness. See Tomlinson, p. 160.
- John Ward, ‘Newly Devis'd Measures for Jacobean Masques’, Acta musicologica, 60 (1988), 111–42.
Journal of the Royal Musical Association
Volume 120, 1995 - Issue 1
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