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Book reviews

Early Music , Vol. xxxv, No. 2 © The Author 2007. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.

Bonnie J. Blackburn

Musical humanism for beginners

Claude V. Palisca, Music and ideas in the 16 th and 17 thcenturies, ed. Thomas J. Mathiesen (Urbana: University

of Illinois Press, 2006 ), $35 

Does Ficino make you dizzy? Does Pythagorean number

theory send a chill down your spine? Do the intricacies of

tuning systems in the 16th century perplex you? All these

and much more are explained in Claude V. Palisca’s

magisterial Humanism in Italian Renaissance musical

thought   (New Haven, 1985), but for non-specialists the

book is rather daunting. Palisca must have realized this

himself, for he has now revisited his earlier studies andproduced a work that is marvellously informative, lucid

and readable, and that should appeal to readers of Early

music  .

When Palisca died unexpectedly in 2001 he had nearly

finished the present book, which has been brought to

completion by Thomas J. Mathiesen and appears fittingly

as the first volume in the Studies in the History of Music

Theory and Literature, published by the University of Illi-

nois Press. The task of completing another author’s work

is very difficult, and we all have reason to be grateful to

Mathiesen. Reading the book was like listening to Palisca

once again.

The chapter titles give a good idea of the contents of

the book: ‘Musical change and intellectual history’, ‘Uni-

versal harmony’, ‘Sense over reason: the anti-theoretical

tradition’, ‘The poetics of musical composition’, ‘Human-

ist revival of the modes and genera’, ‘Humanist reaction

to polyphony’, ‘Theories of monody and dramatic music’,

‘Music and scientific discovery’, ‘Ancient and modern:

styles and genres’, ‘Theories of the affections and imita-

tion’, and ‘Music and rhetoric’, followed by an appendix

of the principal treatises cited. The title is rather more

general than the book itself, for the emphasis is firmly on16th-century Italy in the first six chapters, and the ‘17th

century’ does not extend much beyond Monteverdi

except in the last two chapters, which also discuss Kircher,

Mersenne and Descartes.

Sometimes it is startling to come upon earlier discus-

sions that speak aptly to modern concerns, for example

performance practice. ‘Music and rhetoric’ had become

a matter of compositional style and analysis for German

theoreticians such as Joachim Burmeister ( Musica poet-

ica , 1606), whose theories are applied here to a different

example than the one Palisca had used in his earlierbook (Lasso’s In me transierunt  ). Lasso’s Cum rides mihi 

offers a telling example of a range of rhetorical ploys; he

would probably have been amused to see them analysed

in such pompous terms as hypotyposis and pathopoeia . In

such pieces the rhetoric is part of the compositional fab-

ric. But earlier writers considered rhetoric more a man-

ner of performance: the term used is  pronunciatio , by

which one judged an orator. Nicola Vicentino (L’antica

musica ridotta alla moderna prattica , 1555) applies it to

music: ‘The measure should change according to the

words, now slower and now faster. … The experience of

the orator can be instructive, if you observe the tech-nique he follows in his oration. For he speaks now loud

and now soft, now slow and now fast, thus greatly mov-

ing his listeners. This technique of changing the measure

has a powerful effect on the soul’ (quoted on p.208; for

all translations the original is given in a footnote). We

might think this remark relevant only to solo singing,

and yet Vicentino writes before the age of monody, and

he could very well have vocal ensembles in mind. This is

a lesson that should be taken to heart by modern groups,

especially in sacred music, where the tendency too often

is to sing straight through at the same speed and the

same dynamic level.

Throughout the book Palisca quotes extensively from

the original authors, allowing us to see how they grap-

pled with the problems that interested them. Plato’s

maxim that in song (melos ) the text (logos ) should gov-

ern melody (harmonia ) and rhythm (rhythmos ) is a leit-

motiv of the whole book. However, most 16th-century

readers—  and even Giulio Cesare Monteverdi—  depended

on Ficino’s Latin translation, where melos was rendered

as melodia , and they misunderstood harmonia in a nar-

rower (and more modern) sense than Plato intended.

Nevertheless, the meaning came through: the text shouldbe the mistress of the harmony, the hallmark of the sec-

onda prattica . But considering Vicentino’s words quoted

earlier, was the debate ancient or modern, or was it

timeless?

doi:10.1093/em/cam016