Baroque Music by Claude V. PaliscaReview by: David BurrowsNotes, Second Series, Vol. 25, No. 4 (Jun., 1969), pp. 717-718Published by: Music Library AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/896624 .

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BOOK REVIEWS Compiled and edited by DON M. RANDEL

Baroque Music. By Claude V. Palisca. (Prentice-Hall History of Music Series. Ed. by H. Wiley Hitchcock.) Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall rc19681. [230 p.; cloth $5.95, paper $2.95]

Palisca's volume for the Prentice-Hall series fulfills the requirements for a good textbook and more: it is in itself a solid and erudite contribution to Baroque stud- ies. It is largely restricted in scope to problems of evolving musical style: Palisca does not attempt in it to set music in its cultural context, as for example Albert Seay does in his volume on the Medieval period for the same series. The supporting structure is exemplary. The bibliographies at the end of each chapter are full and up to date (though given the restriction of emphasis noted above, it would have been useful to include some background reading), and there is a generous supply of examples-some one hundred. Unfor- tunately, in the copies I have seen, the visual definition in the examples is such that halves and quarters can be hard to distinguish.

In presenting the development of style during his period, Palisca covers a wide range of literature, but, perhaps in defer- ence to problems of space, the discussion of any particular composition is highly concentrated. For this reason any student using Baroque Music must be urged even more strongly than usual to refer con- stantly to the scores for a sense of the whole and for aspects Palisca does not go into. This he can easily do, for the pieces chosen for discussion are drawn for the most part from literature readily avail- able in modern editions and in many cases in HAM, Schering, or Parrish and Ohl. One good way to use Baroque Music as a text, given its condensed treatment of a large number of works, would be for the instructor to make a point of spending a relatively much longer time in class with relatively fewer pieces than is done in the book.

A special virtue of Baroque Music is its treatment of music as nearly as possible in

the terms of its makers and users. It is filled with citations of contemporary authors from Girolamo Mei to Scheibe and Mizler. An example of Palisca's use of contemporary concepts in analysis is his application of Christoph Bernhard's rhe- torical categories to works by Schutz in the chapter on "The Sacred Concerto in Ger- many." Touches like this offer the student the incidental benefit of insights into a scholar's way of thinking and working.

For all its scholarly density the text reads along quite easily and naturally. H. Wiley Hitchcock's Foreword defines the ideal of the Prentice-Hall series as books that are "comprehensive, authoritative, and engagingly written." Palisca's is cer- tainly authoritative and engagingly writ- ten, but in his Preface he explicitly disclaims comprehensiveness: "Certain important figures are hardly named, while others lesser known are treated at length, and this goes also for the various cate- gories of composition." Despite the dis- claimer, the keyboard music of Francois Couperin does seem a surprising omission, together with the rest of the clavecin school and the lutenists that preceded them. In fact, the dance suite as culti- vated by anyone anywhere receives scant mention. As though to make up for this, there is a remarkably detailed treatment in Chapter V of early Baroque lute and keyboard music, traced well back into the sixteenth century. In general Palisca is good on showing Renaissance precedents for Baroque practices.

A teacher can always allow for such omissions in his reading list. Another problem, but of a quite different kind, comes up in Chapter I, "The Baroque Ideal." Here Palisca proposes a subjective criterion for Baroque style: "If there is any common thread that unites the great variety of music that we call baroque...

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it is an underlying faith in music's power, indeed its obligation, to move the affec- tions. Whether it is a madrigal of Maren- zio in the late 16th century or an aria of Bach or Handel in the 1730's, this belief strongly determines the musical style. If we want to ascertain whether we have crossed the boundary into the baroque or out of it, there is no better test than to ask if the expression of the affections is the dominant goal in fashioning a piece of music." Palisca is essentially in agreement on this point with the position taken by the late Arnold Salop in his "On Stylistic Unity in Renaissance-Baroque Distinc- tions," (in Essays in Musicology: A Birth- day Offeriing for Willi Apel). The difficulty with giving a student a subjective criterion such as this, rather than one dealing with features objectively there in the music, is that he may then feel free to apply or to withhold the label "Baroque" on the basis of his untutored responses, finding evidence for "the expression of the affec-

tions" in the most miscellaneous reper- tory. This could be chaotic, and the point calls for careful discussion and illustration in class.

Taken as a whole, Baroque Music is more than a setting forth of the present state of our understanding of its subject, valuable as such statements are; it is a new contribution to that understanding-some- thing that is most unusual in a textbook. Passages like Palisca's discussion of the term "concerto" and its meanings in Chap- ter IV are instructive for the professional scholar as well as the student. And it has that great merit in a text, that by and large it leaves the teacher who chooses it free in good conscience to indulge in favorite emphases or idiosyncratic inter- pretations with the assurance that a bal- anced, up-to-date view of the subject is in his students' hands.

DAVID BURROWS New York University

New Looks at Italian Opera; Essays in Honor of Donald J. Grout. Ed. by William W. Austin. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1968. [ix, 290 p.; $8.50]

William Austin says (p. viii) of Grout's own work: ". . . there is a natural alter- nation of specialized research and broader humane concern. Though both accident and calculation affect this alternation, it is more like a musical rhythm, with many interacting levels of tension and relaxa- tion." The editor has attempted obviously to impose the same characteristics upon this collection of essays.

The basic order is chronological: two essays each for the early Baroque, high Baroque, Classic, and Romantic eras. But there is superimposed a rhythmic progres- sion of varying types of essays beginning with aesthetic problems, some musical, some more abstract, debated within the Florentine academies. It proceeds to more concretely musical subjects: analyses of formal concepts and of a particular libret- to and operatic score, a biographical study, and a bibliographic study of a rep- ertory. And it ends with "humane con- cern"-a Romantic wedding of music and literature.

The initial essay, "The Alterati of Flor- ence, Pioneers in the Theory of Dramatic

Music," by Claude V. Palisca, to my mind one of the most important studies on this subject in recent years, brings into focus the academic background to the well- known musical events leading from the intermedio to opera. New understanding is achieved of the role of the academies in the formulation of the Baroque concepts not only of dramatic music but also of the affections and their relation to art, of the nature of artistic creativity and inspira- tion, and of other ideas which stand be- hind the transformations of that time.

The second essay, "Early Opera and Aria," by Nino Pirotta, makes a transition to regions more specifically musical, as he attempts to distinguish among subtle shades of meaning denoted by the terms recitar cantando and cantar recitando, stile ra,,resentativo or recitativo, and aria. Dwelling a moment on the aesthetic rea- soning behind the preference of the early poets and musicians for pastoral rather than tragic subjects, he continues with a survey of recitar cantando and aria in the first decades of operatic history.

The second pair turns to specific operas.

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