Bonfire Songs: Savonarola's Musical Legacy.

The Renaissance Society of America is pleased to announce that Patrick Macey's Bonfire Songs: Savonarola's Musical Legacy was awarded the Phyllis Goodhart Gordon Book Prize for 1999-2000. Robert R. Holzer's review follows.

Patrick Macey, Bonfire Songs: Savonarola's Musical Legacy (Oxford Monographs on Music.) Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998. xx + 359 pp. $60. ISBN: 0-19-816669-9.

Bonfire Songs won the Gordan Book Prize, which the Renaissance Society of America awards annually to the best book in Renaissance studies. The prize was richly deserved, for Patrick Macey has charted with grace and skill the musical responses to one of the great figures of religious reform, Girolamo Savonarola. Macey has made the volume more attractive still by including a compact disc with fine performances of twenty-eight pieces discussed in the text, all by the Eastman Cappella under his own direction. (He has also, it should be noted, edited a companion volume of scores, Savonarolan Laude, Motets, and Anthems, Recent Researches in the Music of the Renaissance, 116. Madison, WI: A-R Editions, 1999.)

Macey divides his work into two parts. The first, "The Popular Tradition: Secular Song to Lauda," treats mainly of the music heard during Savonarola's time in Florence, simple settings of devotional Italian verse by the friar and his followers. The second part, "The Art Tradition: Musical Settings of Savonarola's Meditations on Psalms 50 and 30," explores the reformer's sixteenth-century legacy; when composers throughout Europe set his Latin prose. In addition to their wealth of detail, the two parts complement one another historiographically. The first places less familiar music within the well-known context of Savonarola's final years, while the second does the reverse: the friar's underground legacy is called upon to shed new light on a familiar repertory.

Part 1 contains five chapters. The first summarizes Savonarola's career and introduces the first of the musics associated with him. His followers, the so-called Piagnoni, took to singing the friar's motto, Psalm 132:1, "Ecce quam bonum et quam jocundum habitare frates in unum" (Behold how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity). A melody for it survives in various sources; Macey provides its "most straightforward version" (27), found in a manuscript of Pistoiese provenance copied after 1522, and proposes that this was likely the one closest to that sung by the Piagnoni.

Such deductive work sets the tone for much of what follows. Thus, chapter 2, "Florentine Music in Savonarola's Time," reconstructs devotional song of the late fifteenth century by joining surviving texts with their likely musical setting. Some of the pairings are easily found, such as those indicated in Serafino Razzi's immensely important Libro primo di laudi spirituali (Venice, 1563). Razzi himself linked some of the poems he collected to the secular tunes to which in Savonarola's time they had been adapted. Macey arrives at other such pairings by more recondite means, here and in the following chapter, "Laude for Savonarolan Carnivals and Other Celebrations, 1496-1498." Teasing out structural similarities between texts in Razzi's collection (those that have fifteenth-century settings) and those of Savonarolan provenance, he expands the likely musical repertory from the friar's heyday.

In chapter 4, "Savonarola Against and For Music," the author at first changes tack. Citing extensively from the friar's sermons, Macey outlines a Savonarolan ethics of music. Franco-Flemish polyphony, the complex style so much the rage among Italian elites, was harshly criticized for calling attention to itself and obscuring the text it set. Not surprisingly, the friar preferred the simpler, chordal style of lauda settings and wrote poetry destined for such music (paradoxically, the same style was used for worldly carnival songs, hence their reworking in sacred guise). Macey now returns to his earlier sleuthing and again proposes previously unsuspected settings of the friar's own verse. He does the same in the final chapter of the first part, "Laude by Piagnoni in Veneration of Savonarola."

The seven chapters that make up part 2 explore another paradox. In the century after his death, the polyphony Savonarola so despised was used to set his two great Psalm meditations, Infelix ego and Tristitia obsedit me. Macey surveys this repertory, ten settings of the former (three of which are in English) and two of latter, in chapter 6; detailed discussion follows in chapters 8-12. These last are a musicological tour de force. Macey provides sharp analytic commentary on music by composers as important and varied as Adrian Willaert (192-205) and William Byrd (287-302). At the same time he skillfully examines the cult of Savonarola, among both the powerful (the Dukes of Ferrara, the Kings of France) and the persecuted (English Protestants and then Catholics), that called such works into being. In chapter 7, "Musical Echoes of Ecce quam bonum in France and Florence," the author looks instead at settings that incorporate the friar's musical motto. Here Macey turns detective once more, suggesting that Savonaro la's name and those of his fellow martyrs, Domenico da Pescia and Silvestro Maruffi, fill the textual blanks in Jean Richafort's O quam dulcis. This approach continues at the beginning of the next chapter, a discussion of Josquin des Prez's Miserere mei Deus. Macey argues convincingly that this monumental setting of Psalm 50 -- the very text that inspired Infelix ego -- is a tribute to Savonarola commissioned in 1503 by Duke Ercole I d'Este. Macey finds similarly evocative tributes from later composers. Though some readers may ask for more proof before accepting every such reading -- I am thinking of the striking claim (235-37) for Palestrina's Tribularer si nescirem and its presumed connection to Cardinal Ippolito II d'Este -- all will be forced to think about such music anew. For that they should be grateful, as they should be for the appearance of this brilliant book.