Musique et humanisme a la Renaissance.

The question of the relationship between humanism and music in the Renaissance is complex and fascinating. Music was a late-comer to the humanistic fold, and suffered from the lack of musical compositions from classical antiquity that could have served as models for Renaissance composers. Nevertheless humanism did play an important role in the musical world of the Renaissance: we can see its influence on attitudes towards music and its performance in aristocratic circles when we read Castiglione's II cortegiano; we can trace the growing concern with the expression of the text in vocal music to the influence of the humanists; we credit important development of the late Renaissance - first among them the birth of opera - at least in part to the serious reappraisal of classical writings about music that took place during the second half of the sixteenth century. For all these$reasons - and the list could be much longer - the title Musique et humanisme a la Renaissance is very ambitious. Those who might approach this volume expecting an organic and exhaustive treatment of the topic will definitely be disappointed: this is a collection of a dozen essays of varying length dealing with particular aspects of the larger phenomenon, but without claims of comprehensive coverage of the subject. All the essays included were apparently presented at a conference on this theme held at the Sorbonne in early 1992. Unfortunately, one source of annoyance to the reader is that complete information about this conference is lacking: nowhere in the book, for instance, is there the exact date of this gathering. The reader is thus forced to reconstruct the details from a couple of introductory addresses and from a list of the nine previous volumes published.

The contributors, including several distinguished scholars, have presented essays that, as is often the case in this type of volume, vary greatly not only in length, but also in substance. Most, but not all, of the contributions seem to have been revised for publication, and thus include copious bibliographical references and, in some cases, are slightly longer than a normal conference format would allow. There are some essays that deal with topics relatively marginal to the central problem: for example Francis Higman, writing on Huguenot music and poetry, makes only a tenuous connection between that subject and humanism. Most of the essays, however, do confront the theme of the conference in a more direct way. One of the most interesting is the contribution of Claude Palisca on the Spanish theorist and humanist Francisco de Salinas, partly a re-working of an earlier paper that appeared in the proceedings of the conference Espana en la musica de Occidente (Madrid, 1987). Similarly, an essay on the Christian kabbalists and music, by Jean-Francois Maillard, provides much interesting information from an unusual angle. In general, though, the conference topic is much too broad to allow the various contributions to coalesce into an organic whole. A general bibliography on the subject (compiled by Isabelle Pantin, who seems to have acted as editor of this volume) is supplied, but the specialist will not find it particularly useful or comprehensive.

Giulio M. Ongaro UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA