Music and Musicians in Renaissance Cities and Towns. (Reviews).

Fiona Kisby, ed., Music and Musicians in Renaissance Cities and Towns.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. xiv + 188 pp. n.p. ISBN: 0-521-66171-4.

A more accurately descriptive title for this book might have been "Musicians and Music-Making...", for only a few of the thirteen essays contained in it deal at all with music itself, but are concerned rather with the lives and professional activity-- no means all of it musical--of selected people inside a selectively determined urban context. The principle of selection is, for the editor if not for all the contributors, one of exclusion: not to be considered are court and ecclesiastic centers where sacred and secular polyphony was cultivated, or, in the editor's words, produced, by "a set of compositional techniques used by 'great male composers' to write pre-composed - as opposed to improvised - mensural polyphonic music"(5).

In the editor's view, concentration by musicologists on written polyphony and especially on its technical characteristics has frightened off historians and students of the Renaissance. What we (readers) want, we are told, is the story of music unencumbered by analytical description and enfolded into a context of urban history. What musicologists must do, to use the hectoring language of the editor (I counted nine uses of "must" and its synonyms on pages 6-7 alone) is turn away from analysis to context (which she appears to assume has been totally absent), and within context, away from courts and their chapels to the streets and, to paraphrase Anna Russell (in words certainly unacceptable to Fiona Kisby), "the uncouth vocal and instrumental utterance of the people."

Kisby's position is in general the familiar stance, influenced by Marxist and feminist ideas, of the New Musicology. Her particular loyalty is to the subdiscipline of urban history, which she embraces with the fervor of a new convert. Her summary of the book's essays, which makes up the second part of her Introduction, suggests that the essays' thirteen authors share her enthusiasm and have joined in espousing her recommended approach.

Some do, some do nor. Soterrana Aguirre Rincon's "Music and Court in Charles V's Valladolid," interesting as it is, seems to have strayed in from another book. More what Kisby must have had in mind is John J. McGavin's "Secular Music in the Burgh of Haddington, 1530-1640," which describes musicians at the most popular level in this Scottish town; its only reference to upper-class musical activity is to "rough music" intended as a practical joke (54). Also in cooperative vein is Gretchen Peters' "Civic Subsidy and Musicians in Southern France During the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries," which compares musical activity in Montpellier, Toulouse, and Avignon and finds the last the least interesting because the town was dominated by the papal court (whose musicians are barely mentioned).

For the most part these essays avoid theorizing and give straightforward accounts of their varied subject matter, dealing with the activities of cathedral and parish church musicians, members of the chapels of Oxford colleges, and the work of musical guilds. An attempt is made at broad coverage (farthest afield are towns and religious institutions in Spanish America), but the emphasis is on English/Scottish/Irish material, the subject of six of the essays. The contributions of experienced scholars such as Reinhard Strohm, dealing with the varied sources of musical patronage in Austrian cities, and Iain Fenlon, discussing the blend of sacred and secular elements in civic ceremony in Venice, all aimed at glorifying the city's oligarchic republican signoria, are excellent examples of the subordination of detail to clearly stated themes. Some of the other essays are less successful in this respect, providing a numbing amount of archival detail brought forth to no very clear purpose.

A theme that runs through a number of these essays is the effect of the Reformation on musicians' lives. Particularly welcome here are Beat Kumin's "Masses, Morris and Metrical Psalms: Music in the English Parish," and Magnus Williamson's "The Role of Religious Guilds in the Cultivation of Ritual Polyphony in England: the Case of Louth, 1450-1550." Both give sympathetic and fresh accounts of pre-Reformation parish life, and though they see elements of continuity, they find the Reformation to have been primarily disruptive to ordinary musicians, such as the singers who performed the very numerous endowed votive services, abruptly cut off when these endowments were terminated. Also interesting is James Saunders' well-written essay on "Music and Moonlighting: the Cathedral Choirmen of Early Modern England, 1558-1649," which gives a full and amusing picture of the highly varied outside jobs of post-Reformation choirmen, who supplemented their meager emoluments and filled the time left free by the reduced schedule of liturgical song with activities ranging from non-musical church tasks to keeping pigs and even keeping ale-houses.

There is a good deal of pleasant and instructive reading in this small book, its labored and tendentious Introduction apart. Music-making in urban contexts shows itself here as an engaging and rewarding field; it need not stand in opposition to Renaissance polyphony, one of the glories of the age, but can help in many ways to deepen and humanize our picture of a vital period in the early-modern culture we have inherited.