Music in the English Courtly Masque: 1604-1640.

Peter Walls. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996. 8 pls. + xx + 372 pp. $70. ISBN: n.a.

The English masque has long been fraught with peril for the modern scholarly investigator. First, in our own era of careful delineation between discrete areas of intellectual inquiry, the masque has become a strange species whose component parts fall into a variety of well-defined territories, but which belongs wholly to no single area. Second, because the form was meant to be ephemeral and elite, tied to a specific performance and set of performers, no masque survives completely intact, and certain aspects remain necessarily irretrievable. Third, largely because of academic fashion in the relevant disciplines, the masque is often inappropriately considered in the shadows of the stage-play or of more permanent architectural or visual products, as a precursor to English opera, or an English response to the musical and intellectual forces that led to the creation of French ballet de court or Italian opera. And fourth, masque scholarship has been dominated by literary investigations, in spite of the publication of several important critical editions of masque music during the 1970s and early 80s. Walls's competent study not only represents the first comprehensive investigation of music in the Jacobean and Caroline courtly masque, but goes a long way toward overcoming some of these inherent limitations. Through the meticulous use of copious literary, musical, visual artistic, and intellectual historical primary source materials from England, France, Germany, and Italy, and through a thorough command of modern scholarly studies in all relevant areas, Walls presents a convincing and engaging picture of the place of music in the English courtly masque and its relationship to other English and continental musical and dramatic genres.

The book is most broadly organized historically, moving from the central issues of the Jacobean court masque to an epilogue concerning the genre after its heyday at the court of Charles I. It also progresses from the most general information about the masque form and its literary and musical sources, through the styles and antecedents of its vocal and instrumental music, to specific inquiries into performance practice and staging. Walls therefore avoids the greatest pitfall of truly comprehensive scholarship on multimedia performance genres by managing to present in-depth information on several discrete topics without sacrificing continuity or a clear sense of purpose. Material is further unified by the author's continuous references to the occasionally paradoxical relationship between the symbolic and literal aspects of masque music, between the music discussed and music heard, and between the music that has survived and the often cryptic stage-directions that tell us of missing music or sound effects. Like much of the finest recent musicological inquiry into pre-Enlightenment cultures, Walls's book relies on an understanding of the intellectual position of music among the other arts and sciences, particularly vital to any discussion of the masque, here presented by necessity in brief summary form but with copious footnotes. And like the finest traditional musical scholarship, this study emphasizes compositional style and process, performance practices, limitations governed by available resources, and other aspects contributing to the sound and pragmatic usage of the music itself. Perhaps the strongest and most original contributions of this work are its clear study of job demarcation in what was probably the most widely collaborative of late Renaissance performing arts, its discussion of architectural appropriation of the intellectual meaning of music as a parallel art of harmony and proportion, and its careful reconsideration of the precise link between the Caroline masque and French ballet. Like all initial general studies of neglected aspects of major genres, this one is full of tantalizing scraps of information that beg for future in-depth consideration, particularly those referring to musical emblematics and to audience acceptance of full-grown men with tenor voices as heroines.

LINDA PHYLLIS AUSTERN University of Iowa