John Tucke: A Case Study in Early Tudor Music Theory.

Major theoretical writings on music are generally "restored" in toto from a primary source, or, when a treatise enjoyed a wide-ranging circulation, from several or more surviving documents that may be categorized as primary, secondary, and so on. Of Boethius' De institutione musica, for example, 137 manuscripts survive from the ninth through fifteenth centuries from which many independent textual and illustrative traditions can be identified. Thus, with a hitherto neglected compilation of texts on musical notation, terminology, and compositional procedures from the hand of an unrecognized author of the first quarter of the sixteenth century, Woodley departs from the mainstream treatment of the transmission of music theory by excerpting parts of the paper manuscript and focusing upon social and intellectual contexts. His presentation is meticulous and the detailed narrative of the records of John Tucke's life and locale is engaging as much for its prose as its methodology. He incorporates the most current research on the mensural and proportional notation of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, but the acknowledged influences that suggest the unique turn he has taken are G.F. Lytle's social history and J.-J. Nattiez's application of semiology to music. While many have been calling for such musicological work from various quarters of the discipline, Woodley has done it. The author points out that it is precisely Tucke's lack of musical and historical distinction that renders this type of study worthwhile. Because many surviving music theory texts (extending beyond the area of British polyphony dealt with here) arise from similarly modest circumstances, Woodley's project is groundbreaking.

Tucke apparently began collecting theoretical materials at the age of eighteen at Winchester College, copied them into a "notebook" during his years at New College, Oxford, and continued this compilation during his tenure as lay master of the Lady Chapel of the Benedictine abbey of St. Peter, Gloucester. His notes range from regulae and diagrams of mensural relationships derived from John Hothby (d. 1486), an Oxford graduate and Carmelite monk who settled in Lucca and whose significance has been explored by Gilbert Reaney, to commonplace scribbles and a few medicinal recipes. To be added to Ulrich Michel's important 1970 study of the influential ars nova theorist Jehan de Murs (c. 13001350) is Tucke's abbreviation of Jehan's Libellus cantus mensurabilis with which he began his "notebook."

The selected excerpts are intriguing. Coloration, indicative of proportional temporal relationships among note values, gains an unprecedented sophistication in Tucke's notes (summarized in Table 1), and Woodley suggests that the scheme may have developed within a small circle and over several generations of composers. The general absence of such coloration in surviving practical sources might suggest that extant later copies of lost sources were monochromatically renotated. Woodley examines two passages in Thomas Ashwell's Mass Ave Maria to demonstrate how such re-notation may have come about. He also gives great attention to the term typus or transumpcio, discussing and analyzing a three-part selection by Cornysh from the Henry VIII manuscript. This leads to an "extended interpretation" that regards the compositional process of figurative or motivic construction as a matter of aesthetic and stylistic coherence.

Some of the ideas Tucke recorded that might have been discussed further include the relationship of notational coloration to heraldry (which Woodley announces will appear in a forthcoming publication), the use of arsis and thesis for retrograde and inversion in melody, the astrological and metallurgical parallels to the solfeggio system, and the combination of musical rhythm with Greek poetic meters that might be traced to the Oxford quadrivial scholar and author of an important treatise on alchemy at the beginning of the fourteenth century, Walter Odington. All in all, Woodley's contribution is substantial not only for the material he covers but for the methods, both historical and analytical, he employs.

SANDRA PINEGAR New York City