The Introduction to the Cambridge History of Fifteenth-century Music

THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORY OF

FIFTEENTH-CENTURY MUSIC * EDITED BY

ANNA MARIA BUSSE BERGER AND

J E S S E RO D I N

University Printing House, Cambridge CB2 8BS, United Kingdom Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge.

It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107015241 © Cambridge University Press 2015 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press.

First published 2015 Printed in the United Kingdom by TJ International Ltd. Padstow Cornwall A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data The Cambridge history of fifteenth-century music / edited by Anna Maria Busse Berger and Jesse Rodin. pages cm – (The Cambridge history of music) Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-107-01524-1 1. Music – 15th century – History and criticism. I. Berger, Anna Maria Busse. II. Rodin, Jesse.

ML172.C33 2015 780.90 031–dc23 2014034794 ISBN

978-1-107-01524-1 Hardback

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Contents List of figures xii List of music examples xv Notes on contributors xix Acknowledgments xxvii Abbreviations xxviii Introduction

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ANNA MARIA BUSSE BERGER AND JESSE RODIN

PART I HISTORIOGRAPHY LISTENING

19

20

1 . Hearing Josquin hearing Busnoys

21

MICHAEL LONG

2 . Religion and the senses in fifteenth-century Europe

40

KLAUS PIETSCHMANN

53

TERMS AND CONCEPTS

3 . The work concept

55

LAURENZ LÜTTEKEN

4 . The L’homme armé tradition – and the limits of musical borrowing 69 JESSE RODIN

COMPOSER STUDIES

85

5 . Guillaume Du Fay: evidence and interpretation ALEJANDRO ENRIQUE PLANCHART

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viii

Contents

6 . Jean d’Ockeghem

105

LAWRENCE F. BERNSTEIN

7 . Josquin and epistemology

119

JESSE RODIN

PART II IMPROVISATION AND C O M P O S I T I O N 137

8 . Oral composition in fifteenth-century music

139

ANNA MARIA BUSSE BERGER

9 . Improvisation as concept and musical practice in the fifteenth century 149 PHILIPPE CANGUILHEM

10 . How did Oswald von Wolkenstein make his contrafacta? 164 ANNA MARIA BUSSE BERGER

11 . Making a motet: Josquin’s Ave Maria . . . virgo serena

183

JOHN MILSOM

12 . The origins of pervasive imitation

200

JULIE E. CUMMING AND PETER SCHUBERT

PART III HUMANISM

229

13 . Humanism and music in Italy

231

JAMES HANKINS

14 . Fifteenth-century humanism and music outside Italy 263 REINHARD STROHM

15 . Poetic humanism and music in the fifteenth century

281

LEOFRANC HOLFORD-STREVENS

16 . Canterino and improvvisatore: oral poetry and performance BLAKE WILSON

292

Contents

ix

17 . Liturgical humanism: saints’ Offices from the Italian peninsula in the fifteenth century 311 ALISON K. FRAZIER

PART IV MUSIC AND OTHER ARTS

331

18 . Architecture and music in fifteenth-century Italy

333

DEBORAH HOWARD

19 . Music and feasts in the fifteenth century

361

ANTHONY M. CUMMINGS

20 . French lyrics and songs for the New Year, ca. 1380–1420

374

YOLANDA PLUMLEY

PART V MUSIC IN CHURCHES, COURTS, AND C I T I E S 401

21 . Musical institutions in the fifteenth century and their political contexts 403 KLAUS PIETSCHMANN

22 . Music and musicians at the Burgundian court in the fifteenth century 427 DAVID FIALA

23 . The papal chapel in the late fifteenth century

446

RICHARD SHERR

24 . The beneficial system and fifteenth-century polyphony

463

PAMELA F. STARR

25 . Professional women singers in the fifteenth century: a tale of two Annas 476 BONNIE J. BLACKBURN

26 . Savonarola and the boys of Florence: songs and politics PATRICK MACEY

486

x

Contents

PART VI RELIGIOUS DEVOTION AND LITURGY

27 . Music and ritual

511

M. JENNIFER BLOXAM

28 . Marian devotion in the fifteenth century

528

DAVID J. ROTHENBERG

29 . Affective literature and sacred themes in fifteenth-century music 545 ANNE WALTERS ROBERTSON

PART VII THEORY AND PRACTICE

561

30 . Measuring measurable music in the fifteenth century 563 ANNE STONE

31 . The transformative impulse

587

EMILY ZAZULIA

32 . Transformations in music theory and music treatises 602 EVAN A. MACCARTHY

615

PART VIII SOURCES

33 . Polyphonic sources, ca. 1400–1450

617

MARGARET BENT

34 . Polyphonic sources, ca. 1450–1500

641

THOMAS SCHMIDT-BESTE

PART IX GENRES

663

35 . The polyphonic mass in the fifteenth century ANDREW KIRKMAN

36 . The fifteenth-century motet LAURENZ LÜTTEKEN

701

665

509

Contents

37 . Fifteenth-century song

xi

719

NICOLE SCHWINDT

38 . Instrumental music in the fifteenth century

745

KEITH POLK

39 . Sacred song in the fifteenth century: cantio, carol, lauda, Kirchenlied 755 REINHARD STROHM

40 . Plainsong in the age of polyphony

771

RICHARD SHERR

PART X RECEPTION

785

41 . The most popular songs of the fifteenth century

787

DAVID FALLOWS

42 . The nineteenth-century reception of fifteenth-century sacred music 802 ANDREW KIRKMAN

43 . The modern reception of the music of Jean d’Ockeghem

811

LAWRENCE F. BERNSTEIN

44 . Recordings of fifteenth-century music

823

HONEY MECONI

45 . Solidarity with the long-departed: fifteenth-century echoes in twentieth-century music 833 RICHARD TARUSKIN

Index

848

Introduction ANNA MARIA BUSSE BERGER AND JESSE RODIN

At one time or another most students of early music encounter a problem: there is a wide gap between introductory texts, which after a certain point are no longer enough, and the scholarly literature, which, owing to a sea of unfamiliar terms and concepts and an understandable tendency toward heightened specificity, can seem impenetrable. This book aims to fill that gap – not by dumbing down a vibrant and long-standing scholarly tradition, but through creative and wide-ranging essays by leading scholars that treat a variety of topics in compact form. Our authors – thirty-eight in all, represented in no fewer than forty-five essays – have endeavored to reflect the most recent research while framing their contributions so as to invite specialist and non-specialist readers alike.

Histories of music typically address music students and music scholars. This volume is certainly intended for these audiences, but from the beginning we have also sought to engage the disciplines of art history, literature, social history, the history of ideas, and cultural studies. We have thought too of the general reader. This might be someone who has listened to a motet by Josquin des Prez or spent time in Florence’s museums and is wondering how humanism might have manifested itself in music. Or it might be someone who, having heard echoes of “early music” in Stravinsky’s Mass, is curious about where the composer got his ideas. Fifty years ago it would have been unthinkable to address a book of this kind to such a wide readership; fifteenth-century music was known only to specialists, and few pieces were recorded. Now for the first time we find ourselves in a historical moment when music from all periods is available online. If a reader wants to listen to one of the works discussed in this volume, chances are good that she can do so in a matter of seconds.

There are many other reasons a book such as this could not have been written fifty years ago. In the past few decades, the widespread availability of modern editions and recordings has facilitated an unprecedented depth of scholarly engagement with the repertory and theoretical literature; this change is reflected above all in Part II, which offers striking insights into improvisation and compositional process, and Part VII, which evinces a sophisticated

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understanding of music theory, in particular the discourses around and uses of musical notation. New work on humanism (Part III) has enriched our understanding of this important intellectual “movement,” thanks in no small measure to contributions by scholars outside musicology (Hankins, Frazier).

A multidisciplinary perspective also characterizes Part IV, which showcases the ever wider intellectual and aesthetic contexts scholars have discerned for fifteenth-century music. Our field is more attuned to questions of historiography and reception than ever before; it is not for nothing that we have chosen Part I and Part X, which explore how we confront the past, as bookends. Even those portions of the book that may at first blush seem commensurate with older writings reflect fundamentally new ways of thinking – about the central role played by genres in defining the musical landscape (Part IX), the complex interplay between institutions, urban environments, gender, and politics in shaping musical practices (Part V), relationships between music and sacred themes (Part VI), and the materiality and intellectual background of the musical sources upon which so much of our field depends (Part VIII).

Other changes are more explicitly historiographical. Take as one example the shifting fortunes of fifteenth-century composers. Whereas half a century ago the period was defined mainly by the trio Du Fay (then “Dufay”), Ockeghem, and Josquin, with a few others waiting in the wings, we now embrace a more pluralistic view that has benefited from work on Agricola, Bedyngham, Binchois, Busnoys, Compère, Dunstaple, Gaspar, Isaac, Morton, Obrecht, de Orto, Regis, and La Rue, among others.1 In a similar vein, for our views of individual musicians we are no longer as reliant as we once were on the pronouncements of theorists. (Petrus de Domarto, whom Richard Taruskin aptly dubbed “Tinctoris’s perennial whipping boy,” is no longer considered a third-rate composer2 – nor, for that matter, is Tinctoris himself.) If the handful of composer studies included here (Part I) continues to center upon the “big three,” that is in part because their best works number among the most extraordinary aesthetic and intellectual achievements of the age. It is also because these composers have loomed so large in the scholarship and because the methodological questions that arise from their music are unusually rich.

1 See the relevant bibliographies in NG2. Further examples, with a focus on the most recent literature, include: Gallagher, Johannes Regis; special issues of the Journal of the Alamire Foundation (on Jacob Obrecht: vols. 2–3, 2010–11) and the Journal of Musicology (on Henricus Isaac: vol. 27, 2011); Rodin, Josquin’s Rome (on Gaspar and de Orto); and Fitch, “‘Virtual’ Ascriptions in Ms. AugsS 142a.”

2 See Taruskin, “Antoine Busnoys and the L’homme armé Tradition,” 284, and Wegman, “Petrus de Domarto’s Missa Spiritus almus.”

Introduction

3

Still another change is geographical. It has long been known that a staggering percentage of fifteenth-century musicians originated in a tiny geographic area, a portion of the Burgundian territories bounded by Cambrai, Namur, Leuven, and Bruges (now northwestern Belgium and northernmost France). Trained in local schools (maîtrises) evidently characterized by overachievement, many of these musicians moved from place to place with dizzying frequency, traipsing not only across the Alps, to Italy, but also to and from England, Spain, Poland, Hungary, and Bohemia. In the fifteenth century such travel was by no means unique to musicians: one finds movement by merchants and bankers between the financial centers of Bruges, Florence, and Lübeck; a tendency of Italian courts to import from the North not only musicians, but also tapestries and oil paintings; and increasingly close political ties between East and West that owe in part to the Councils of Constance and Basel. The upshot, as concerns the history of music, was the development of an international musical style, with “international” now defined more broadly than ever before. As several essays in this volume attest, many so-called peripheral areas are turning out to have been important centers in their own right.3

The fifteenth century – and periodization There is a certain freedom in writing a history of Western music bound only by the chronological range 1400–1500. The ostensibly neutral dates, imposed benevolently by the organizers of this series, obviate the usual requirement to embrace (or repudiate) one or another received periodization. There need be no “Middle Ages,” no “Renaissance” here – and indeed these terms, particularly the latter, will make few appearances in these pages.4 Their absence is salutary in several respects. To give just one example: by concluding in the middle of the so-called “Josquin generation” we are able to avoid an unfortunate tendency to cast that era merely as the progenitor of sixteenth-century contrapuntal practice and the precursor of new, proto-madrigalistic ideals of word–tone relations. More generally, the lack of an assigned “thesis” has freed our authors to tell complex, nuanced, sometimes even contradictory stories.

To our ears, this cacophony is all to the good.

3 See the contributions by Strohm, Pietschmann (“Institutions”), Berger (“Oswald”), Bent, SchmidtBeste, and Schwindt. On the “international” style more generally, see above all Strohm, The Rise of European Music.

4 One caveat is that of all the volumes in this series organized by century, ours is the earliest. The ars antiqua and ars nova, not to mention the four or so centuries before them, have been herded into a single, “medieval” volume – which in turn puts pressure on our volume to be “non-medieval.”

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Still, escaping a monolithic title is not the same as escaping its resonances.

Whether we speak of “late medieval,” “Renaissance,” or “early modern,” these terms – Cellarian, Burckhardtian, Johnsonian – linger in our imaginations.5 This remains true even when we reject such terms outright; doing so merely catches us in a reactive pose, as we define our subject against rather than through them. Put differently, we are more or less stuck.6 But whereas some would lament this situation, we prefer to think that it is not so very dire. On the contrary, periodization can help us see patterns, which after all is a main task of the historian. Indeed the period designations we are in one sense so grateful to have avoided are in another sense useful for organizing our thinking. And the problems thrown up by the collision of periods and the values that attend them can guide us toward greater subtlety and away from the oversimplified views such labels are often said to impose.

This volume therefore grapples – continues to grapple – with a swirl of historical developments that caused earlier writers to see new periods beginning in the years 1380, 1400, 1420, 1450, 1480, and 1500. Ours is a long fifteenth century, one that takes account of historicizing trends around 1400 that look back to the end of the trecento, and that peers just far enough into the sixteenth century to witness the first flowering of polyphonic music printing.7 Those who go in search of early modernity and “Renaissances” will find them: in the emergence of a strong work concept (Lütteken), in the new importance placed on the senses in experiencing music (Pietschmann), in stylistic ruptures with music of previous generations (Cumming/Schubert, Milsom, Rodin), and, perhaps above all, in unprecedentedly rich portraits of fifteenth-century humanism (Hankins, Strohm, Holford-Strevens, Wilson, Frazier). By contrast, anyone for whom the fifteenth century is “late medieval” will be drawn to essays that convey the ongoing importance of the memorial archive (Berger) and the manuscript tradition (Bent, SchmidtBeste), continuities in notation and music theory (Stone, Zazulia, MacCarthy), and the enduring value placed on ritual, devotion, and ecclesiastical authority (Bloxam, Rothenberg, Robertson, Sherr, Starr) – though every one of these authors, we hasten to add, focuses on change at least as much as sameness, allowing the material, not an externally imposed label, to generate thematic coherence.

5 See Cellarius, Historia universalis; Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy; and Johnson, Early Modern Europe. With respect to the first of these terms the story is immensely complex; credit can by no means be given exclusively to Cellarius. See, for instance, Gordon, Medium Aevum and the Middle Age; and Robinson, “Medieval, the Middle Ages.”

6 Cf. Strohm, “‘Medieval Music’ or ‘Early European Music’?” Our thanks to Professor Strohm for sharing an advance copy of his text.

7 On the latter see above all, and with references to further literature, Boorman, Ottaviano Petrucci.

Introduction

5

Book overview Historiography is all. The way we write history – the values we bring to bear, the decisions we make about what to include and what to leave out, even the terms we use – conditions our thinking at the most basic level. In conceiving this volume we have done our utmost to reflect the state of the field while also pushing at its edges. On the one hand, we have not shied away from soliciting overviews – creative and thoughtfully organized overviews, but overviews nonetheless – of topics we believe are nowhere else covered adequately at a commensurate length. On the other, we have invited essays by scholars outside musicology and allocated extra space to areas that strike us as particularly vibrant or promising. And we have sought to showcase a variety of perspectives and methodologies by assembling a large and international team of authors.

We pray that you, dear reader, will forgive us for failing to deliver complete coverage: for reasons both conceptual and practical, we have (sometimes inadvertently) skipped over major areas of inquiry. Our essays on music in churches, courts, and cities, for instance (Part V), include precious little on Ferrara, Naples, Milan, St. Peter’s in Rome, and Bruges, musical centers to which significant studies have been devoted;8 this is in part for reasons of space, in part because several essays on music in other civic and courtly contexts give at least a sense of the relevant issues. Similarly, we have included only three essays on the history of music theory (Part VII), in this case because the Cambridge History series devotes an entire volume to the subject.9 Other omissions are subtler. The relatively little space we give to issues of gender and sexuality, for example (cf. Blackburn), reflects the slow rate at which these topics have found their way into musicological studies of this period;10 this circumstance may, more than any ideologically driven aversion, reflect a perceived paucity of historical materials. We have also given relatively short shrift to performance practice (more on this below),11 the institutions of music pedagogy,12 and the practice of editing,13 all worthy topics for which a substantial literature exists. As editors we recognize that any choice is a choice 8 See Lockwood, Music in Renaissance Ferrara; Atlas, Music at the Aragonese Court of Naples; Merkley and Merkley, Music and Patronage in the Sforza Court; Reynolds, Papal Patronage and the Music of St. Peter’s; and Strohm, Music in Late Medieval Bruges.

9 The Cambridge History of Western Music Theory, ed. Christensen.

10 A notable exception is Higgins, “Parisian Nobles, a Scottish Princess, and the Woman’s Voice.”

11 Major studies include Performance Practice, ed. Brown and Sadie; and Leech-Wilkinson, The Modern Invention of Medieval Music.

12 On the maîtrise see Becker, “The Maîtrise in Northern France and Burgundy”; Wright, Music and Ceremony at Notre Dame of Paris, ch. 5; and Demouy, “Une source inédite de l’histoire des maîtrises.” For England see Mould, The English Chorister. See also Music Education in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, ed.

Murray et al.

13 The standard studies are Caldwell, Editing Early Music and Grier, The Critical Editing of Music.

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against – and though we did not frame our decisions about what to include in negative terms, we acknowledge that the contents and organization of this volume reflect our historiographical priorities.

Thus while this is not a book about the historiography of fifteenth-century music, it seems sensible to begin (Part I) with essays that address head-on some of the challenges posed by the study of this period. Michael Long asks what it means to “hear” and “listen to” music of the fifteenth century. In an analysis of the hydraulis (organ) mentioned at the outset of a famous motet by Antoine Busnoys and, arguably, echoed decades later in a mass by Josquin, he considers how, through cultural allusion and sheer sonic forcefulness, the sound of the cantus firmus might have created a “quasi-ritual cultural moment,” illuminating “experiential modes located outside the hierarchical apparatuses of ‘preparation’ that inform our understanding of historical aural reception.” Arguing from a very different perspective, Klaus Pietschmann approaches the practice of listening through an analysis of contemporary texts. Having identified several “essential modes of perception,” he examines the “doctrine of the internal senses and their effect on music comprehension . . . with a special focus on the spiritual efficacy of sacred polyphony” on the one hand, and the “justification of earthly sensual pleasure” on the other. Together these essays can help us hear fifteenth-century music with greater clarity, historical sensitivity, and self-awareness.

In recent decades scholars have struggled to reach consensus about the terms we use to describe pieces of music and the relationships between them. In this volume we have striven for some degree of terminological uniformity, but we have also chosen not to intervene in cases of substantive disagreement. Where one scholar speaks of “isorhythm” (Lütteken), others now avoid the term;14 and where one essay uses “fuga” to identify certain kinds of melodic repetition (Milsom), another prefers “imitation” (Cumming/Schubert).15 In some cases the choice of modern formulation carries especially significant implications.

The terms “work” and “musical borrowing,” for instance, are in one sense purely pragmatic, but as the contributions by Laurenz Lütteken and Jesse Rodin in Part I reveal, they carry immense weight. In an innovative essay that reasserts the importance of the “work” while grounding the work concept in a robust theoretical context, Lütteken pinpoints five “theoretical and practical premises upon which the musical work of art depends . . .: notation and 14 See Bent, “What Is Isorhythm?,” which can be fruitfully read alongside Emily Zazulia’s essay in this volume.

15 Milsom lays out a proposed analytical terminology for fifteenth- and sixteenth-century music in “Crecquillon, Clemens, and Four-Voice Fuga.” See also Cumming, “Text Setting and Imitative Technique.”

Introduction

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written tradition, authorship and professionalization, historicity and historical memory, the position of music in emerging generic classifications of the arts, reproducibility, and ‘aesthetics’.” Rodin reassesses the famous tradition of polyphonic masses on the L’homme armé melody as well as the emphasis scholars have placed on “musical borrowing.” Fifteenth-century polyphony is strikingly allusive: this was an age in which composers regularly based new works on older ones, choosing as models not only chant but also recent polyphonic compositions. Rodin begins by “propos[ing] a new way of parsing the musical connections that bind several [L’homme armé masses] together”; he then turns the “discussion on its head by questioning the terminological propriety and methodological value of musical borrowing all told.”

Each of the composer-based studies in this section offers insight into a particular figure while also confronting poignant historiographical questions.

In an impressive précis of Du Fay’s life and works, Alejandro Planchart observes how, relative to other fifteenth-century composers, “the gaps in Du Fay’s biography are comparatively small, the succession of his patrons and employers comparatively clear. Thus it is possible not merely to establish many basic facts, but also to bring these facts into conversation with broader cultural and political developments.” Lawrence Bernstein focuses on questions that have beclouded the study of Jean d’Ockeghem. Using subtle analytical methods born of deep engagement with the music, Bernstein puts forward a new model for interpreting Ockeghem’s compositions, grappling along the way with a fraught historiography. In an essay on Josquin that takes as its point of departure a famous article by Joshua Rifkin, Rodin suggests that the study of this composer poses unparalleled historiographical and epistemological challenges.16 After identifying five central problems with which every student of Josquin must contend, Rodin makes an argument about how to move forward, asking us “to contextualize with respect to the evidence we have rather than the evidence we wish we had; to tell a richly textured story without falling into storytelling; and to maintain high evidentiary standards without neglecting our historical imaginations.”

Composer-based discussions usually circle back, at one point or another, to that most traditional of musicological topics: the history of musical style.

While out of fashion in certain quarters, style analysis is for this period a cutting-edge area of research, thanks both to our newfound intimacy with the music and the ever expanding range of techniques scholars are using to evaluate it. In recent years there has emerged an exciting literature on

16 See “Problems of Authorship in Josquin,” in conjunction with several other significant contributions (e.g., “Munich, Milan, and a Marian Motet”; “A Black Hole?”; and “Musste Josquin Josquin werden?”).

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improvisation, composition, and the intersection between the two (Part II).

Central to both these practices is the musical memory. In an essay on the memorial archive, Anna Maria Busse Berger highlights the degree to which the memoria served as a foundation for all fifteenth-century musicians, who were trained to memorize interval progressions and visualize polyphonic structures in the mind.17 With this framework in place, readers can fruitfully approach Philippe Canguilhem’s essay on the practice and intellectual context of improvisation. Canguilhem reframes the debate about the meaning of cantare super librum (“singing upon the book”), arguing that fifteenth-century thinkers understood “counterpoint” to embrace both written and improvised polyphony.18 In doing so he corrects the modern misconception that improvisation is characterized by an absence of compositional planning. In a similar vein, Berger’s study of Oswald von Wolkenstein interrogates the borders between oral and literate culture through the example of an almost certainly illiterate musician. Drawing on the work of the anthropologist Jack Goody, Berger posits a “secondary orality” that distinguishes “between oral culture, on the one hand, and oral plus written and printed culture, on the other” – a distinction that can help us understand how “the written page permitted different ways of memorizing material and texts.”

Moving into the realm of so-called art music, two further essays examine the preserved repertory from sophisticated analytical vantage points. In a discussion of Josquin’s famous Ave Maria . . . virgo serena, John Milsom changes the state of play with respect to this hotly contested piece, using “forensic analysis” of Josquin’s stretto fuga to distance the motet from Milan. In doing so he also asks what it means to approach polyphonic works of this period. Julie Cumming and Peter Schubert, by contrast, trace a single technique – imitation – across three successive generations of composers; their analysis lends unprecedented clarity to a procedure that developed in the fifteenth century and would come to dominate musical practice throughout much of the sixteenth.

This volume breaks ground in its treatment of the relationship between music and fifteenth-century humanism (Part III). As James Hankins explains, humanists “came to colonize a cultural space somewhere between theology . . . and the professional studies of law and medicine” – that is, the “liberal arts, the arts worthy of a free man or woman, of people who did not (in theory) have to earn a living.” In a persuasive multidisciplinary study, Hankins reasserts the importance of the Italian humanists, who “championed a new way of judging

17 A wider discussion of these issues appears in Berger, Medieval Music and the Art of Memory.

18 This argument resonates with one first made in Sachs, “Arten improvisierter Mehrstimmigkeit.”

Introduction

9

music according to its moral and civic purposes . . . and . . . created an audience of educated amateurs for ‘classic’ music.”

In spite of mounting evidence to the contrary, humanism is often said to be a uniquely Italian phenomenon – which makes Reinhard Strohm’s contribution particularly welcome. Tracing a common set of humanistic tendencies across a wide geographic area, Strohm argues that even if non-Italian humanists did not transform their local cultures, they viewed them through humanistic eyes. The impact of their ideas on musical composition can be seen in “the application of rhetorical figures (colores rhetorici ) to the musical texture,” the setting of “a greater variety of Latin poetic forms,” their defense of “incorrect” (i.e., nonclassical) Latin pronunciation, and the development of “the modern understanding of composed music as a ‘completed and independent work’.”

Leofranc Holford-Strevens turns a spotlight on the second of these developments, examining the formal properties of Latin poetry set by fifteenthcentury composers. Casting the fifteenth century as an era of possibility and change, Holford-Strevens expertly describes the “protracted process” by which Latin literature was remodeled “upon the grammar, style, and form of classical prose and poetry.”

Humanism fostered an environment that, to quote Blake Wilson, “promoted the virtues of an active life of civic engagement, and an attendant focus on oral discourse in the vernacular in conjunction with the newly exalted disciplines of rhetoric and poetry.” Wilson’s essay demonstrates how the canterino and improvvisatore gave voice to the humanists’ ideals.

Like Strohm’s, Alison Frazier’s essay is in one sense a corrective, this time to the notion that humanism is a uniquely secular phenomenon. Presenting exciting new research on Offices created for women saints, Frazier shows how fifteenth-century humanists undertook bold experiments in ritual, “colonizing” the sacred genres of the saint’s Life, biblical exegesis, and the liturgical Office in an effort to enhance their impact on the faithful. Taken together these essays paint a dynamic, multifaceted image of humanism, one that serves as an invitation to further scholarly inquiry. They also draw seamlessly on recent work in other disciplines.

Nowhere is this multidisciplinary strategy more prevalent than in Part IV, which brings music into conversation with architecture, feasting, and poetry to convey the wide range of contexts in which it was experienced. In an insightful essay that unites acoustics, space, building practices, and institutional contexts, Deborah Howard describes “the intimate relationship between space and musical performance.” She “chart[s] colliding waves of interaction, in which,” for example, “northern polyphony attuned to flamboyant Gothic settings was grafted into Italian liturgy and ceremonial, to be framed within

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architectural settings increasingly tinged by the inspiration of ancient Rome.” Anthony Cummings observes an important connection between music-making and dining: “both activities occur in ‘real time’ and are dynamic or kinetic in nature.” Drawing on contemporary accounts of often lavish banquets, Cummings shows how combining these practices generated multimedia and multi-sensory aesthetic experiences. Such feasts often included sung lyric poetry, the genre at the center of Yolanda Plumley’s rich account of New Year songs. Investigating a large corpus of poetic texts, Plumley discerns the generic and textual norms that bind this repertory, both musical and literary, together. She further illuminates how these songs participate in a culture of late medieval gift-giving, a “social transaction between author and patron, or lover and lady.”

The fifteenth-century institutions that supported musical pursuits – church, court, city – held sway over practically every aspect of musical production: the types of music that were cultivated, performance contexts, the extent and means of dissemination, the economic status and daily schedule of professional musicians, even who was allowed to perform and listen. While a volume such as this can scarcely address all the subtleties that shaped the institutional mediation of musical practices, Part V offers both a robust overview and a series of case studies that, taken together, give texture to the institutional politics of fifteenth-century music-making. Pietschmann’s overview chapter defines the musical institution as “a group of musicians attached to a courtly, ecclesiastical, or civic entity that provided a foothold or financial support for musical production.” Identifying the fifteenth century as a decisive period in the development of musical institutions, Pietschmann focuses on the court chapel, taking a comparative approach to the question of music’s function and arguing that chapels tended “to project exclusivity and cachet . . . and foster internal stability and identity.”

In the North, the most famous chapel of the period was that of the Valois dukes of Burgundy, who sought, in the words of David Fiala, “to immerse their courts in the most luxurious of sonic environments.” Notwithstanding a piteous survival rate of polyphonic sources, Fiala is able to offer a sophisticated account of music at the Burgundian court, thanks in part to the extensive archival holdings of the Burgundian state.

Richard Sherr takes us behind the veil of the Sistine Chapel, certainly the most important site of polyphonic music-making in late fifteenth-century Italy. His study, which critically evaluates the writings of papal master of ceremonies Johannes Burckard, offers fresh insights about institutional hierarchy, the responsibilities and changing status of the singers, and matters of performance practice. The Vatican remains at the center of Pamela Starr’s

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essay, which probes above all the economics of earning a living as a fifteenthcentury singer. With extraordinary clarity, Starr describes the process by which singers navigated a labyrinthine papal bureaucracy to procure “benefices” – that is, remunerated posts held by ordained clergy. Starr further shows how the study of beneficial documents has yielded a gold mine of biographical and prosopographical information about fifteenth-century musicians.

Precious biographical details are sometimes also lurking in surviving letters, chronicles, and poems. Through two closely related case studies, Bonnie Blackburn uses evidence of this kind to illuminate the world of the female musician. These women were either anonymous singers and players or “high-born ladies, daughters or wives of courtiers and rulers”; they were not only “extremely talented but also confident entrepreneurs.” Blackburn’s essay relates significant discoveries about performance contexts and practice. It also alerts us to how issues of gender can inform the study of fifteenth-century music.

In late fifteenth-century Florence, the lauda stood at the meeting point between seemingly disparate but in fact deeply interconnected elements: religious fervor, Carnival celebrations, and political upheaval. Focusing on the influential figure of Girolamo Savonarola, Patrick Macey paints a nuanced picture of this tumultuous cultural moment, helping us understand how urban environments fostered a unique kind of music-making.

The lauda epitomizes something important: in an era that lacked a dividing line between realms that we today would characterize as “secular” and “sacred,” the expression of religious values extended well beyond the walls of the church. Through three complementary studies, Part VI explores the importance to music of religious devotion and liturgy.

The tight link between music and religious ritual undergirds Jennifer Bloxam’s essay. Drawing on six “basic genres of ritual action” defined by Catherine Bell, Bloxam offers an interpretive framework for the analysis of music and ritual, inviting us to “focus on music’s function in relation to the different and overlapping purposes of ritual behavior.” David Rothenberg reminds us that the veneration of the Virgin Mary was central to fifteenthcentury music-making. Drawing on polyphonic works from across the century, he shows how Mary’s dual status as “the exalted Queen of Heaven and a humble lady of this earth” conditioned devotional practices both public and private, with a concomitant heterogeneity of musical genres (e.g., mass and song-style motet) in which her veneration found expression.

Noting the prevalence of certain sacred themes in fifteenth-century music, Anne Walters Robertson asks: “What shared experiences helped drive the cultivation and circulation of beloved sacred motifs?” To answer this question

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she explores the practice of reading “sacred affective literature,” texts translated into the vernacular in the fifteenth century that “required the reader to immerse herself in the details of Jesus’ life and that of the Virgin.” Robertson uses these texts as an interpretive lens through which to evaluate both “sacred” and “secular” polyphonic works; she even proposes that affective writings can help us understand why composers of this era began to set text with newfound sensitivity.

The past few decades have witnessed ever closer scholarly engagement with the music-theoretical literature, on the one hand, and the notational worlds of the preserved repertory, on the other. Part VII brings these subjects together.

In an essay distinguished by its clarity of presentation, Anne Stone presents an overview of fifteenth-century musical notation. Taking as a guide the Libellus cantus mensurabilis, a fourteenth-century treatise that was read and commented on throughout the fifteenth century, Stone demystifies many complex features of rhythmic and metrical notation as theorized by writers on music and put into practice by composers.

Modern and late medieval musical notation are conceptually distinct in a central respect: whereas for us the interpretation of note shapes is usually fixed, in the fifteenth century these signs gained meaning only through contextualizing “metasigns.” Taking this conceptual difference as a starting point, Emily Zazulia introduces what she terms the “aesthetic of notational fixity,” a novel and important compositional paradigm within which singularly notated musical lines could spawn manifold sonic realizations. Zazulia’s impressive study charts the development of this concept as both a theoretical idea and a notational reality in the works of major composers of the period.

Turning to the theorists themselves, Evan MacCarthy considers the changing content and organization of treatises on music. Filtering his discussion through the lens of genre, MacCarthy contrasts treatises that fit squarely “into a larger program of quadrivial studies” with those by writers such as Prosdocimus de Beldemandis and, even more, Tinctoris, who “infused speculative ideas with a keen awareness of musical practice and contemporary repertory.”

For us moderns, of course, access to the repertory is almost entirely dependent on the surviving sources. Part VIII is devoted to a pair of magisterial studies by Margaret Bent and Thomas Schmidt-Beste that describe the extant manuscripts of polyphonic music in the first and second halves of the century, respectively. Far more than mere surveys, these essays contend with a range of issues: geographical distribution, survival rates, types of sources, owners, makers, and scribes, authorship, and the performing life of the repertory.

Bent and Schmidt-Beste also offer insight into the material qualities of the books, including size, intended use, notation, page layout, texting practices,

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compilation, and organization – qualities that in many cases are easy for readers to observe in action, thanks to the increasing number of digitized manuscript images now available online. While Schmidt-Beste’s essay stops just short of the transition, beginning in 1501, from manuscript to print, he nonetheless reminds us that the so-called “great paradigm shift” effected by the introduction of print “did not by any means imply a decline in manuscript production and use.” Indeed in many ways the vibrant manuscript culture of the sixteenth century can be interpreted as a continuation of older practices.

While many fifteenth-century sources are essentially miscellanies, even more betray one or another type of generic organization: one finds songbooks devoted almost exclusively to settings of forme fixe poetry, institutional manuscripts in which liturgical and paraliturgical music is organized according to local requirements, even private books that group masses separately from motets. Taken together this picture underscores the powerful role played by genres, the subject of Part IX, in disciplining musical practice. In fifteenthcentury music one finds a fairly small number of genres, each encompassing a large and heterogeneous repertory. The closest we have to a contemporary account of musical genres is a statement by Tinctoris, who in his Diffinitorium musices (Dictionary of Musical Terms) adapts Cicero’s threefold classification of oratory, characterizing the mass as great (magnus), the motet as middling (mediocris), and the song as small (parvus). We have followed Tinctoris’s scheme to the extent that Part IX begins with these three genres – but we have also endeavored to reflect the range of the surviving repertory by commissioning chapters on instrumental music, sacred song, and chant.

Andrew Kirkman interprets the polyphonic mass as a genre “whose time had come: physical expression of eschatological concerns, responding to fear of purgatory, reached its peak at this time, as seen in expressions of devotion for intercession by the saints, and especially the Virgin, in church building, iconography of various kinds, ritual, and music.” After tracing the origins of the mass in the fourteenth century, Kirkman uses a series of carefully chosen examples from across the century as the basis for an elegant discussion of developments in musical symbolism and style.

Of all fifteenth-century musical genres, the motet is surely the hardest to pin down. Lütteken observes how, relative to the previous century, contemporary “definitions . . . present fundamental interpretive challenges, insofar as they describe a genre that was no longer governed by any discrete set of normative features” but rather by “functional polysemy, itself an indicator of the transition to the modern age.” Lütteken’s analysis draws attention to “the development of new and intricate compositional norms in a highly diverse ritual-functional context.”

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Songs “are first and foremost actions – a practice,” writes Nicole Schwindt.

In a discussion that moves seamlessly between musical and cultural analysis, she characterizes the fifteenth century as “a decisive period for song as an artistic form: . . . songs . . . were set down as verbal and musical texts, composed in multi-voice structures with fixed rhythms, increasingly attributed to their creators by name, reproduced by performers, and inserted into complex intertextual exchanges.”

Keith Polk alerts us to innovations in instrumental music: new instruments, instrument combinations, and manuscript sources, the rise of patronage, and the advent of improvisation manuals. Polk casts the end of the century (ca. 1480–1500) as a watershed, arguing that changes in scoring, style, repertory, performance practice, and listening habits transformed the very fabric of instrumental music-making.

Strohm describes a vast and international corpus of non-liturgical sacred songs on poetic texts that emerged in the fifteenth century. These mostly anonymous songs “are serenely unaffected by distinctions such as ‘Middle Ages vs. Renaissance,’ or ‘polyphony vs. monophony’.” Taken together they reflect “the growing participation of lay people in the singing of God’s praise.”

They have also filtered down to the present day, as many continue to be sung in church services of one kind or another.

That Gregorian chant was the daily bread of every late medieval church musician is a well-known fact of the period. Less clear today, in part because chant scholars have tended to focus on earlier sources, is the issue of how chant was performed in the fifteenth century. Drawing in part on the writings of Tinctoris, Sherr illuminates a surprisingly heterogeneous practice characterized by regional chant “dialects” and a variety of approaches to rhythm. In a provocative twist, the author asks us to reevaluate the received wisdom that the place where a given polyphonic work was composed can be deduced from the version of the chant melody upon which it is based.

From the beginning, generic classification has impinged on the reception of fifteenth-century music, the subject of Part X. In an essay on the reception of the chanson, David Fallows “draw[s] a path through fifteenth-century song in terms of the pieces that survive in the largest number of sources.” His discussion brims with insights about manuscript survival rates, repertorial longevity, canonicity, anonymity and attribution, popularity as a measure of the composer’s (sometimes shifting) fame, and performance practice.

After 1500 the reception of fifteenth-century music took a curious turn: thanks in part to the sudden arrival of polyphonic music printing (1501), some works continued to be preserved and written about long after their first performances. In this respect Josquin was very much in the right place at the

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right time, as it was his music (and, to a much smaller extent, that of his contemporaries) that remained in the canon, largely to the exclusion of Binchois, Busnoys, and company. This highly skewed reception persisted until ca. 1600, after which fifteenth-century music largely faded from view, only to be taken up again during the next great age of history writing: the nineteenth century.

Crucially – and understandably, given the sources then available – nineteenth-century historians (e.g., Raphael Georg Kiesewetter and August Wilhelm Ambros) relied mainly on sixteenth-century sources, above all the writings of Henricus Glareanus, when discussing fifteenth-century music.

Ambros, whose way of thinking was indebted to Hegelian dialectics, was really the first historian to lavish the music of this period with not only praise but also astonishing intellectual energy. Kirkman deftly shows how Ambros’s philosophical orientation helps explain his decision to place the cyclic mass at the center of the inquiry, to privilege authored works over anonymous ones, and to raise the compositional technique of imitation to a position of central importance – all choices that continue to exert an influence on modern scholarship.

A web of influences accounts for the tortured reception of Johannes (Jean d’) Ockeghem. Ockeghem reception began in earnest in the sixteenth century in theoretical treatises by Adrian Petit Coclico and Ambrosius Wilphlingseder, gained force in the eighteenth in the writings of Charles Burney, John Hawkins, and Johann Forkel, and pushed through not only to the nineteenth-century historians but on to Heinrich Besseler and his followers in the 1920s. Bernstein’s elegant essay brings clarity to this history, revealing the forces that led to the vilification and, eventually, adulation of this extraordinary figure.

Such adulation – not just of Ockeghem, but of many contemporary composers – has persisted in part thanks to the advent of recording technology, which has allowed fifteenth-century music to be fixed in more or less infinitely reproducible sound. In an essay that brings together issues of performance practice with matters economic, generic, and reportorial, Honey Meconi traces recordings of fifteenth-century music from their beginnings in the 1930s up to the present day.

Even as performances and recordings of fifteenth-century music have proliferated, it must be acknowledged that the literature on performance practice has dwindled. In part this simply reflects the way the scholarly winds have been blowing: while the lively debates of the late twentieth century – about text underlay, tempo, the use of instruments, instrumentation, pitch standards, and so on – are hardly settled, in recent years a healthy pluralism has taken hold,

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with scholars increasingly inclined to embrace a range of historically informed performance practices. Such pluralism may in part reflect a collective sense that we lack the evidence, at least right now, to push these questions significantly further. But even if this volume addresses them only occasionally (Meconi, Schmidt-Beste), this is not in any way to debase such discussions. On the contrary, the field of performance practice seems ripe for a resurgence, thanks to a proliferation of conversations between historians of music, art, and architecture, and the advent of digital resources for reimagining timbre, tempo, and acoustical environments. It may yet be possible to say more about the performance forces for, and the sound of, a mass by Obrecht sung at St. Donatian’s in Bruges, or the rondeau Je ne vis oncques la pareille as it was performed at the Feast of the Pheasant, with the tenor reportedly sung by a stag.

The project of recovering and indeed reconceiving that musical world can be detected in the music of many twentieth-century composers. Before the full flowering of the recording industry, some composers began not only to study fifteenth-century music, but also to edit and perform it. Casting the twentieth century as “an age of sonic archeology,” Richard Taruskin describes the engagement of figures such as Schoenberg, Webern, Stravinsky, and Hindemith with Du Fay, Isaac, Josquin, and their contemporaries. These modernists were interested above all in “structural” features then prized by scholars (e.g., imitation canon, cantus-firmus procedure, and isorhythm) – and one should recall that Webern was himself a scholar who in 1909 published an edition of Isaac’s Choralis Constantinus. One finds in this period a “confluence of musicology and advanced composition that made the twentieth century, the century of modernism, as if paradoxically more sympathetic to the distant musical past than any previous century had been.” Even if, as Taruskin observes, interest in fifteenth-century compositional techniques has waned in recent decades, one still finds prominent echoes, such as a work by the scholarcomposer Fabrice Fitch that takes not Josquin but Agricola as its point of departure (Agricologies, 2004–8). It seems only fitting to conclude with an essay that traces the reception of fifteenth-century music up to the present day – a reception that has shaped this book in myriad ways and that this book will inevitably and, we hope, helpfully play its own role in shaping for future generations.

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