Composers at Work: The Craft of Musical Composition 1450-1600.

Jessie Ann Owens. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. xxii + 345 pp. $50. ISBN: 0-19-509577-4.

Owens's book is a very important study of the compositional process in Renaissance music because it is the first systematic investigation of the entire field. It sheds light on a broad range of primary documents, beginning with sources which pertain to instruction in composition, and to the arrangement or presentation of music in different formats for reading and writing. This is followed by an interesting, but necessarily brief, chapter which reports evidence of how composers thought about music before writing it down. Then it moves on logically to studies of erasable tablets and autograph manuscripts used for composing. The latter gives rise to a substantial chapter on sketches, drafts, and fair copies in which Owens presents a typology for the interpretation of autograph manuscripts. The book concludes with four case studies which focus on Francesco Corteccia (1502-71), Cipriano de Rore (ca. 1515-65), Henricus Isaac (ca. 1450-1517), and Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (ca. 1525-94).

On the basis of the carefully assembled evidence, Owens argues that composers of the period from 1450 to 1600 followed an essentially additive process. More specifically, she shows that they composed each vocal line in turn, or wrote two voices and then added a third, and that they often drafted segments of the complete composition which they could piece together, a technique which bears some similarity to the construction of a patchwork quilt. While some of this was conjectured before, it has also been quite widely thought that sixteenth-century composers worked simultaneously with all voices in a polyphonic texture and that they composed using early forms of musical scores which place the voices one above another. Owens acknowledges that, in the case of keyboard music, composers and performers were accustomed to working with a score format. But in the case of vocal music, the additive process was the standard in composition and both composers and performers worked from vocal parts: scores served for study and quasi-scores (with the voices not aligned) for drafting brief passages.

There is much to be thankful for in this book. In the process of reporting and assessing current scholarship pertaining to the many facets of music composition, Owens sets out a program of analysis and future investigation which promises to give shape and direction to this field of inquiry. Indeed, as she points out, further research may not only refine her preliminary conclusions, but may also show that they hold true for music composition of the late Middle Ages. Hence the book will be of great interest to specialists in music of the period from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries and not just from 1450 to 1600, as the title suggests. And they will especially appreciate that the threads of the argument are amply supported by a generous number of plates of musical manuscripts (including many identified as autographs), treatises, and other documents, by substantial musical examples, and by long quotations with reliable and readable translations.

But the book also has much to offer to those whose research touches on other facets of Renaissance culture, particularly with respect to the creative process in the arts. Indeed, the notion of additive or consecutive construction begs for comparative studies with other art forms, as do the various stages from teaching and thinking about music composition to its graphic representation which Owens articulates. Finally, it will be of general interest that Owens calls for a reevaluation of the use of memory. Drawing on historical accounts and the evidence of musical formats, Owens shows that musicians were able to write and to perform using formats which put much different demands on the memory in so far as the various elements of the piece were not displayed in the neatly aligned manner of the modern score.

University of Toronto