Music in the Renaissanceby Howard Mayer Brown

Music in the Renaissance by Howard Mayer BrownReview by: Richard SherrNotes, Second Series, Vol. 33, No. 2 (Dec., 1976), pp. 272-274Published by: Music Library AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/897573 .

Accessed: 16/06/2014 01:09

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

Music Library Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Notes.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 195.34.79.228 on Mon, 16 Jun 2014 01:09:46 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=mulias

http://www.jstor.org/stable/897573?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


BOOK REVIEWS Compiled and edited by CHARLES M. ATKINSON

Music in the Renaissance. By Howard Mayer Brown. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1976. [xiv, 384 p.; cloth, $10.95; paper, $7.95]

In the preface to his new book on Renais- sance music, the distinguished scholar Howard Mayer Brown states his reasons for writing it:

Quite simply, I wished to write a book that would introduce university students as well as my colleagues in other disci- plines and interested laymen to the music of the Renaissance, a book that would answer several fundamental questions: What were the most significant features of Renaissance music? Who were its greatest composers? How were they great? In short, what is there about this music that still makes it meaningful for us today? (p. xiii)

This is, then, just the book we have been waiting for since the publication of Reese's monumental Music in the Renaissance. Brown has not tried to duplicate Reese's achievement (who could?), but tries instead to present a picture of Renaissance music that, while not overly detailed, will be intel- ligible to all who are interested, and, more importantly, can be used as a textbook in undergraduate courses.

The book traces the history of musical style from the "contenance angloise" to the "seconda prattica" (ca. 1420-1600), and is divided into four large sections, each section containing about three chapters, as follows: I. The Early Renaissance: 1420-1490, II. The High Renaissance: 1490-1520, III. The High Renaissance: 1520-1560, IV. The Late Renaissance: 1560-1600. As he prom- ises in his preface (p. xiii), Brown places greatest emphasis on the most important composers of each period (Dunstable, Dufay, Ockeghem, Josquin, Palestrina) at- tempting to explain their music through examination of specific examples of their

work in all the genres in which they composed. He also highlights what he considers their most important achievements (the development of the four-voice cantus firmus mass for Dufay, the development of the "classic" Renaissance language for Josquin, etc.). But lesser figures are not ignored; Busnois and Binchois are given ample space, and chapters on "Josquin's Contemporaries" and "The Post-Josquin Generation" offer interesting discussions of the music of Obrecht, Mouton, Willaert, Gombert, Clemens non Papa, and others. When dealing with secular music, Brown devotes a most welcome chapter to f if- teenth-century Italian vocal music, and in- cludes chapters on the "national styles" of the chanson, lied, and madrigal, as well as on instrumental music, all areas in which he is particularly expert. The final chapter, "The End of the Renaissance," describes the activities of the virtuoso madrigalists and of the Camerata, which helped bring down the edifice of Renaissance polyphony. Of further help to the reader are the Bibliographical Notes at the end of each chapter, listing relevant editions and articles in English.. All in all, I think Brown is successful in realizing his objectives. His musical descriptions are well written and manage to avoid descent into a morass of technical terms, and he does convey a sense of how Renaissance music changed over the years.

This is not to say that the book does not have faults. It suffers, first of all, from a number of editorial slips. For instance, on page 11 Brown prints an example (Example 1-4) purporting to be an illustration of the "English - figure" taken from Charles Hamm's article, "A Catalogue of Anony-

272



mous English Music in Fifteenth-Century Continental Manuscripts" (Musica Discipli- na 22 [1968]: 47-76). However, although Brown's example is indeed taken from the article, and shows an undoubted characteristic of English music (outlined triads), it is decidedly not Hamm's "English figure" (a particular ornamented form of under- third cadence shown in the article on page 59). Anyone who took the trouble to look at the article could easily get confused (especially since Hamm considers this "figure" to be an absolute determining characteristic of English music), and we have enough terminological confusion in this business already. Likewise, pages 56-58 of the book are devoted to an interesting discussion of Binchois's chanson Adieu m'amour in which Brown talks about stereo- typed phrase beginnings and then gives a "characteristic sample" of them (Example 2-12). But the characteristic sample is the beginning of the chanson De plus en plus. Since musical examples in the book are consistently taken from pieces discussed in the text, I immediately thought that Brown had really been talking about De plus en plus instead of Adieu m'amour (he was not); this too was confusing, and could have been caught in the editing process.

More disturbing are omissions and mis- takes in the biographies of Brown's most important composers. To do him justice, he has incorporated Craig Wright's recent researches (see "Dufay at Cambrai: Discov- eries and Revisions," Journal of the American Musicological Society 28 [1975]: 175-229) necessitating a new view of Dufay's life after he left Italy.

I am, however, worried about Brown's treatment of the central composer in the book, the only one to whom a whole chapter is devoted: Josquin. A great deal of new information about this composer has come to light recently, and it is therefore dis- appointing to see Brown, in what is sure to become an authoritative textbook, re- peating a number of misstatements of fact and myths that should be laid to rest (e.g., the stories about Josquin and Louis XII). Since Brown not only attended, but played an important part in the Josquin Festival Conference (the Proceedings of which he lists in hisbibliography), I do not understand why he did not see fit to incorporate some of the findings of that conference, such as Herbert Kellman's doubts about the close

relationship between Josquin and the Hapsburgs. Most puzzling is Brown's dating of the famous letter to Ercole d'Este comparing Josquin and Isaac as "September 2, 1495" (p. 119), a date that has never been generally accepted, and has been proven wrong by Lewis Lockwood's con- tribution to the Conference. Lockwood se- curely dates the letter in 1502. And even that would not be so bad if Brown did not use the incorrect date to support his state- ment (p. 121) that Ercole ". . . was interested in him [Josquin] as early as 1495." In short, this section is already in need of a great deal of revision.

New research also raises a basic question about one of Brown's cardinal historical points concerning the rise of the "new" style of motet around the turn of the sixteenth century, a style involving a clearer articulation of the text by means of points of imitation mixed with homo- phonic sections and alternating duos. Ac- cording to Brown, and he is certainly not alone in thinking this, the new manner resulted from a meeting of Netherlandish polyphony with the chordal declamatory music of the Italian frottola and the con- cerns of the Italian humanists for text expression. The prime mover in its development is said to be Josquin in what Brown calls "the 'classical' formulation of his style" (p. 123). Although Brown admits that the chronology of Josquin's motets cannot be ascertained with certainty, he clearly wishes to place Josquin's "new" motets in the period around the turn of the century. This allows him to declare that motets not in this style (such as Illibata Dei virgo nutrix and the Alma Redemptoris/Ave Regina) can "safely be assigned to his Milanese years (1459-ca. 79)" (p. 122). He uses as an example of the "classic" style the well-known motet Ave Maria . . . virgo serena, a work he ascribes to Josquin's middle or Roman- Ferrarese period. Unfortunately, the whole chronological construct falls to the ground if we accept the new dating of the copy of this motet in Munich Bayerische Staats- bibliothek Mus. ms. 3154 (see Thomas Noblitt, "Die Datierung der Handschrift Mus. ms. 3154 der Staatsbibliothek Miun- chen," Die Musikforschung 27 [1974]: 36- 56). The new date assigned to the copy (made not on the basis of style, but on watermark evidence, and by a watermark expert who is not a musicologist) is 1476.

273



It now appears that, instead of being "middle" and "Roman," the motet could be "early" and Milanese." But then what are we to think of the other so-called early Milanese pieces? Could it be that the new style was not a product of chronological evolution but of other factors such as local taste, or even type of text, number of voices, or mode? We might want to take into account here Finscher's observations about Compere's motetti missales, composed for Milan in the 1470s, which he finds re- markably like the "new" Josquin motet. (See Finscher's Loyset Compere [Rome, 1964]. I am completely unconvinced by Brown's attempt [p. 165] to show that these motets were not composed as cycles and had to have been written later). If we consider also that the real popularizers of the style were the French composers of Mouton's generation (the first also to recognize its possibil- ities for the parody mass), and if we re- member that during the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries Milan was constantly in and out of French hands, then a new picture of the development of the motet may emerge: one in which Josquin does not figure as prominently as we once thought. And I should add that I find the undeniable interest in text setting in sacred polyphonic music of the sixteenth century much closer to the musical ideals of the Counter Reformation than to those of the quattrocento humanists, who were generally disdainful of polyphony to the point of wanting to ban it.

And then there are those controversies which have occupied so many pages in our journals. For these Brown makes, I think, the right decision and does not enter into them, although he usually mentions if doubts have arisen about a particular theory or points the reader to bibliography. Thus, we are told the technical difference between faburden and fauxbourdon (p. 14), but for the question of which came first we are referred to various studies (p. 23). It is because Brown generally handles these problems well that I was surprised at his treatment of one of the most controversial of all theories about Renaissance music, Lowinsky's idea of a secret chromatic art in the Netherlands motet. On pages 207- 208 we are given a description of this technique, including an example from the works of Clemens non Papa, and, since nothing is said to the contrary, we are left with the assumption of universal agreement

on its existence. Now Brown must be per- fectly aware that there are people in the profession who do not accept Lowinsky's thesis, and, while he has every right to accept it himself, and to throw the weight of his authority behind it as he does in his book, I do not see why he could not have followed his own example and men- tioned in his Bibliographical Notes that there were a number of unfavorable reviews of Lowinsky's book (see Marcus van Crevel, "Secret Chromatic Art in the Netherlands Motet?" Tijdschrift der Vereeniging voor Ne- derl. Musiekgeschiedenis 16 [1946]: 253-304, for example), and that Lowinsky himself has recognized that there is opposition in his article "Secret Chromatic Art Re-exam- ined" (Barry Brook et al., eds., Perspectives in Musicology [New York, 1972]: 91-135) in which he constantly refutes his "critics."

Finally, I would like to point out what some people might consider a serious omis- sion caused by Brown's decision not to include an extensive discussion of the so- called English madrigal. I think I understand, and to a certain extent I sympathize, with Brown's reasons for doing this; after all, the English madrigal existed for only a short period of time, and most of its repertory was published after 1600, the basic chronological limit of Brown's book. Nevertheless, I am afraid that these pieces are still the first that come to the minds of university students and interested laymen (the very people for whom Brown is writing the book) when they think of the Renaissance. Furthermore, the English madrigal is traditionally discussed in the context of the Renaissance, and no book purporting to be about the Baroque devotes any time to it. I think, therefore, that Brown should either have discussed it or told us why he was leaving it out, and where we could go for more information.

Yet in spite of these criticisms, I would recommend the book for its real grasp of the whole spectrum of Renaissance music, for its insightful musical descriptions, for its easy readability, and for its many well- chosen musical examples. Brown clearly knows what he is talking about, and knows how to communicate his knowledge. The book is handsomely printed (I could find only two typos: 1558 for 1458 on p. 28, Fur for Fux on p. 284). It is, unfortunately, provided only with an index of names.

RICHARD SHERR Smith College

274



Documents

Music in the Renaissanceby Howard Mayer Brown