Music in the German Renaissance: Sources, Styles and Contexts.

This volume contains from-running research in sacred and secular art music in the Holy Roman Empire between c. 1400 and c. 1620, surprisingly well-balanced in its contents and chronological layout. It expands on the themes of an itinerant colloquium, organized by John Kmetz, in New York and Chicago during November/December 1990. A guiding light of the enterprise had been the sadly missed Howard Mayer Brown (d. 1993). Kmetz has taken a courageous step. The "German Renaissance" is not an uncontroversial concept when it comes to music. The relative weight, accuracy, and conviction carried by the fourteen essays is by no means uniform, nor is the editing. The proofreaders did not entirely solve their difficult task; the music examples in chapters 1, 2, 6, and 7 would have needed another thorough check. The English translations of chapters 1 and 6 from the original German fall short of the general linguistic standard of the book, and that of chapter 8 is not a paradigm of clarity.

The first five chapters are source studies. Lorenz Welker discusses provenances and author ascriptions in the transmission of Dufay songs and other French music to early fifteenth-century Central Europe. He ascribes an anonymous piece surviving in this sphere to Dufay himself. Other scholars have stumbled on this particular path before. A music autograph by Henricus Isaac (c. 1498), one of the earliest extant composer autographs, is analyzed by Jessie Ann Owens for its relevance to our knowledge of compositional processes. This careful study confirms the opinion that composers such as Isaac were still devoted to polyphonic, linear procedures. Tom R. Ward reports, not for the first time but now in detail, on music manuscripts owned by the mid-fifteenth-century Leipzig magister Johannes Klein and on his sphere.

Iain Fenlon reconstructs, in turn, the library of the music theorist and humanist Heinrich Glarean, in which classical texts are paramount. This elegant, illuminating article evokes the cultural climate of Renaissance Basle, mentioning Erasmus, Zasius, Holbein, Froben, and the Venetian humanistic press. Martin Morell's account of the library of Georg Knoff, "bibliophile and devotee of Italian music in late sixteenth-century Danzig," reveals aspects of Hanseatic musical culture, as well as the biography of a forgotten music patron.

Analytical and genre essays follow. Martin Just's interpretation of the compositional practice of Choralbearbeitungen about 1500 offers penetrating technical understanding, but only to readers who can, at critical points, guess the original German expressions despite the poor translation. An engaged study by Adelyn Peck Leverett traces the earliest specimens of the later ubiquitous genre of the polyphonic Missa brevis to the Austrian-Milanese orbit, c. 1470. Martin Staehelin takes a huge subject - the origins of the German Tenorlied perhaps a little too lightly. He asserts interaction between indigenous improvisation and imported three-part composition, but seems to underrate the criterion that tenors of polyphonic Tenorlieder are supposed to have been pre-existent. Ludwig Finscher, by contrast, presents the interpenetration of Lied and madrigal, 1580-1600, as an unresolved and complex question, providing a great number of cool observations and stimulating questions.

The third section of the book is entitled "Contexts." The transmission of Philippe de Vitry's motet texts in Germany, as reconstructed by Andrew Wathey, is a somewhat hermetic context, and yet typical for academic circles of the time. Wathey's interesting study exists in an earlier printed version. Also Keith Polk exploits his earlier, very successful studies of German instrumental music. The editor, John Kmetz, contributes a superb essay on what he calls "The Piperinus-Amerbach partbooks." This case study of music teaching in humanist Basle is nourished by codicological evidence. The reader wishes we had more such cases, or indeed more such essays. Stanley Boorman's contribution almost outdoes its predecessor. Liturgical prints from Salzburg (c.1500) are turned into witnesses for chant extemporization; the essay must be read to be fully appreciated. Robert Lindell concludes the volume with plenty of new documentation - mainly archival - of musical life at the Prague court of Rudolf II.

Most of the contributors indulge in the special and characteristic sides of Central European musical culture. This spirit of exploration produces some enquiries from which musicological research could profit on a much larger scale. Boorman, Fenlon, Finscher, Kmetz, and Owens are worth reading even if you are not interested in the "Germany" side of Renaissance culture, the others if you are.

REINHARD STROHM King's College, London