Orlando di Lasso's Imitation Magnificats for Counter-Reformation Munich.

Crook's fine study, focused on a comparatively obscure subspecies of liturgical composition, is not so narrow as its title suggests. He notes that Lasso's "imitation" Magnificats (i.e., those composed upon pre-existing motets, madrigals and chansons, rather than upon psalmodic formulas from plainsong) remind us how much we yet can learn from Lasso, whose devotion and skill enabled him to embrace and sustain a diverse inheritance. For Lasso, says the author's final paragraph, "the imitation Magnificat was neither timesaving convenience nor agonistic subversion of the past," but instead expressed the respect and confidence with which Lasso "granted the past its voice and at the same time found his own." Although in his lifetime the notoriously productive Lasso was the most famous composer in Europe, the 101 settings of the Magnificat reliably credited to him only became fully accessible in modern score in the 1980s.

The sixteenth-century Magnificat, with its idiosyncratic ties to the Catholic liturgy's declining but persistent medieval system of eight church modes, reveals tonal relationships particularly in the Magnificats of Tone Seven - that help illuminate the faceted polyphonic application of the still incompletely understood modal system. Crook examines these in unparalleled detail, indicating as well their application to other species of vocal polypbony. His descriptions evoke an urgency on Lasso's part - almost surely influenced by the politics of the Wittelsbach court he served - to revitalize traditional rites of the Catholic Church during one of the severest crises of its history. These factors give the book a more seminal significance than most works focused on a single species by even so prominent a composer as Lasso.

Beginning with an illuminating introductory chapter, the book discusses, in two major sections of two chapters each, respectively (1) the liturgical and cultural contexts in and for which Lasso composed this mountain of material; and (2) the techniques and practices he applied to the requirements these contexts laid on him. Four appendices display detailed aspects of matters described in the central chapters, including an example of a modal plainsong formula as probably performed by Lasso's own choir; a catalogue of all his Magnificats, in approximate order of composition; a verbatim transcript (alas, untranslated) of a 1673 set of instructions for rites practiced in the Diocese of Freising, to which Munich belonged during Lasso's thirty-eight years as Kapellmeister there (1556-94); and outline analyses of thirty-five "imitation" Magnificats by Lasso, tracing specific passages of each to specific portions of their models.

Crook's detailed analyses give an enlightening view of adjustments imposed on the venerated modal system by the ever-widening practice of sacral polyphony. Lasso stood firmly among the conservatives of his epoch, but one cannot regard as reactionary his resourceful use of the technique(s) of "imitation" and of the "tonal types" that Crook has isolated. The author's detailed evidence shows close interaction of liturgical polyphony with the old modal system in the last generations of its long hegemony over European music's foundations. Musical examples, placed close to the analyses they illustrate, outline the subtle but real relationships between the "tonal type" of the model over against that of the "imitation" Magnificat based on it, and raise intriguing implications of intertextuality between model and Magnificat, which Crook explores at length.

This reviewer acknowledges a reservation about terminology. Crook notes that in Lasso's time the term "imitation" commonly described random variation upon material taken from compositions of earlier origin, and insists that it supplant the term "parody," which for the better part of a century has been current on both sides of the Atlantic. He notes that outside the field of Renaissance music "parody" connotes caricature rather than re-use of existing material, that it was little used in Lasso's time (though he ignores Georg Quitschreiber's De Parodia, published at Jena in 1611) and - most important - that Lasso never applied it to his own works. Neither "parody" nor "imitation" is very satisfactory, but "parody" - mostly by default - has a certain currency among musicologists. Today's uninitiated might think a "parody Magnificat" a burlesque, but they could also think an "imitation Magnificat" a counterfeit, or one in pervading fugal imitation (following sixteenth-century usage, Crook calls that procedure "fugue," evoking yet another source of confusion). The OED gives "parody" connotations of both variation and burlesque, and "imitation" connotations of both counterfeit and musical repetition, but for the musical technique at hand no reference for either. That being so, what is accomplished by insisting on a change?

Nevertheless, in a brilliant study like this the introduction of even problematic new usages is scarcely a fault. The central concepts are clear, and the book's strength is such that in a few years' time we may come to see the term "parody" yield to "imitation," understood as Crook intends us to understand it.

JAMES ERB Richmond, Virginia