A Correspondence of Renaissance Musicians.

The hundred-odd letters contained in this volume are the largest surviving Renaissance correspondence on musical matters. Isolated letters from or concerning fifteenth- and sixteenth-century musicians may be more interesting than any found here, in part because of their rarity; the letters of Orlando di Lasso to his ducal employers are more entertaining; those of Claudio Monteverdi are more personally revealing. But for sheer volume, for the number of individual points of interest raised, and for what they tell us in general about the musical culture of the first half of the Cinquecento the correspondence here under consideration is unrivalled.

The main body of the letters is contained in a manuscript of Venetian origin, now in the Vatican Library (MS Vat. lat. 5318); some eighteenth- and nineteenth-century copies and a few detached fragments survive elsewhere. The letters were assembled by Giovanni del Lago, a Venetian music theorist and one of the principal correspondents, evidently with an eye to publish them during the printed epistolary vogue started by Pietro Aretino. They were not published; but they passed into the hands of a son, then a grandson of the great printer Aldo Manuzio, and by the early seventeenth century they were in the Vatican, part of the large body of material acquired during the reigns of Paul V and Gregory XV. The editors of A Correspondence of Renaissance Musicians have accounted for the entire history of the collection except for its first transfer from del Lago to Paolo Manuzio.

Although we owe the survival of these letters to del Lago he is not the hero of the story. In the eyes of the editors he is more the villain of the piece: he plagiarized to an extent remarkable even for the times; he deliberately misdated letters, and some of them were clearly never sent (the recipient being already dead, for instance). Still, he did collect and save a large number of letters (there are a few crucial gaps), and he did not hide his "editorial" activities well enough to escape the detection of the astute twentieth-century editors. The star of the collection is Giovanni Spataro (ca. 1458-1541), a Bolognese composer, choirmaster (at San Petronio) and theorist, loyal pupil of the Spanish theorist Bartolomeo Ramis, tireless foe of the Milanese composer-theorist Franchino Gafori. Spataro's letters are the most numerous and the most important in the collection; and since he published little, from these letters we get valuable information about his theoretical concerns as well as telling clues about his personality, a remarkably acerbic and combative one.

The other chief correspondent is Pietro Aaron, a Florentine theorist resident in Venice during most of the period covered by the letters. We learn here that Aaron, virtually none of whose music survives, was in fact an active composer; and since he was the most prolific and most important Italian theorist between Gafori and Zarlino, it is of great interest to see revealed much of his development as a thinker about music, to learn of his deep and on the whole humble reliance on Spataro, and to get a glimpse of his personality. Aaron was not as testy, certainly not as destructively critical as Spataro; but he wrote vivid and disarmingly frank letters, free of self-importance and possessed of a good deal of rough charm.

What is this correspondence about? Many pieces of music, some now lost and a few previously unattributed, are mentioned in it. Some of the music referred to was new at the time, but a lot of it was old, some surprisingly so (Dunstable, Dufay and several of his older contemporaries). Pieces are not discussed at length but are cited for specific features, usually canonic artifice or peculiarities of notational practice. Spataro, though he scoffed at del Lago's excessive veneration of "antique" theorists and composers, was fascinated by canons and by details of the system of mensural notation, subtleties that he grieved to see passing from practice in the work of contemporary composers.

The largest part of the correspondence is devoted to matters of notation. Sometimes points of real interest, such as debate over whether ligatures should always mark the beginning of perfect values in tempus perfectum, are raised. There is a good deal of repetition, and much of the material is well known to students of Renaissance notation; still, one reads on, never knowing when a nugget of useful information--such as the repeated mention of the cartella, a kind of slate on which composers could write in score--might turn up.

Spataro loved puzzle canons and notational intricacy, both vanishing from the scene as he wrote. He was a sturdy defender of the doctrine of equality of the brevis (and hence inequality of smaller note values in different mensurations), a lost cause against the prevailing view of equality of the minima championed by his enemy Gafori. He never wavered from the view that Pythagorean tuning was the proper theoretical basis for music (he of course recognized that tempering of intervals was necessary in practice) even though he lived to see just intonation all but take its place. Yet he interested himself in more than rear-guard defense of tradition. Much is said in these letters of the applicability of hexachord-building, through the doctrine of conjunctae, on every note of the chromatic scale, allowing in theory a breadth of chromaticism not to be matched in practice even by Gesualdo at the end of the sixteenth century (he was thus not taken aback by the chromatic experiment of Willaert's celebrated "duo" though he did question its correctness of tuning). Spataro and his correspondents were fascinated by the ancient Greek genera--this some twenty years before the experiments of Vicentino--and Spataro even wrote some enharmonic music, though he thought it unsuitable for performance by contemporary musicians.

The range of subject in this correspondence is not, however, very broad. There is almost no discussion of mode, in polyphony or even in chant. Spataro was not interested in text-music relationships and in fact pooh-poohed the idea that texted music should be faithfully and correctly declamatory in nature. Del Lago is credited with real interest in this latter subject; but it arises in only one of his letters, and then only in passing. The correspondents send each other music, but they do not discuss it, as they do points of theory, in detail (nor does the music itself survive in the correspondence). Readers looking for revelations on these and other points will be disappointed, and in fact after reading this enormous volume one wonders whether its content is truly representative of the musical concerns of the period, and just a bit whether it is everything the editors claim for it.

If they err on the side of proprietary enthusiasm, the editors cannot be faulted for much else. Some slanting of the evidence in favor of the views of Edward Lowinsky (on musica ficta and chromaticism, chiefly) is to be found; it was certainly to be expected. On the whole the editors, and especially Bonnie Blackburn, have done a remarkable job. The correspondence is completely and painstakingly transcribed; it is informatively annotated and is all translated, in a mercifully abbreviated way that retains the essence while eliminating repetitions and rhetorical superfluities. Helpful introductory chapters on the chief correspondents and on matters of substance are provided (only the chapter on mensural notation, good as far as it goes, seems too skimpy); a biographical dictionary and a glossary of terms come at the end.

All in all this volume is a splendid achievement. It is dedicated to the memory of Knud Jeppesen, the first twentieth-century musicologist to do serious work on the letters; but the spirit of the late Edward Lowinsky, who worked on the collection for nearly forty years, is everywhere in the book, and it not only generous but right that his name should appear as one of the editors.

UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA, CHAPEL HILL