Raffaele Brandolini, On Music and Poetry (De musica et poesia, 1513). (Reviews).

Ann E. Moyer, ed. and trans., Raffaele Brandolini, On Music and Poetry (De musica et Poesia, 1513)

Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2001. xxxv + 124 PP. $34. ISBN: 0-86698-274-4.

The author of a useful book on musical scholarship in Renaissance Italy, Musica scientia: Musical Scholarship in the Italian Renaissance (Ithaca, 1992), Ann Moyer has now turned to a single scholar-poet-musician, Raffaele Brandolini (c. 1465-1517). Brandolini and his slightly better-known brother Aurelio (1454-97) were both Latinists who wrote on a variety of subjects (little of their work was published, almost none in their lifetime). They were both clerics but neither held stable ecclesiastic positions; both wrote and improvised Latin poetry; and both were blind or nearly so. They were part of the seemingly endless tribe of humanist scholars of minor fame, who led peripatetic lives, were always poor and always dependent on aristocratic patronage.

Raffaele, born in Florence and raised in Naples, eventually settled in Rome, where he tutored the young Giovanni Maria del Monte (much later to become Pope Julius III) and became a cubicularius at the papal court. He remained there when Giovanni de' Medici became Pope Leo X in 1513, and taught rhetoric at the University of Rome.

De musica et poetica, dedicated to Leo X, survives only in the dedicatory manuscript copy addressed to the pope. Whether it was orally delivered by the author is not known, but the work is in the form of an oration. Its subjects are music, chiefly that of antiquity, and Latin poetry Brandolini devotes the first part of his oration to a thorough rehearsal of anecdotal information relating to the laus musicae tradition. Moyer gives Brandolini a bit more credit than he may perhaps deserve as "the earliest humanist to try and study music mainly in humanistic and cultural ... terms" (xvii); scholars such as Giorgio Valla certainly had already done so, even if they mixed this with technical lore on ancient music, which Brandolini did not. But she is right in emphasizing Brandolini's exhaustiveness; nearly thirty of the treatise's eighty-odd folios are concerned with music, with anecdotes from classical literature (scrupulously identified by Moyer) told at wearisome length, varied only by a few references to modern lay and ecclesiastical rulers who delighted in music.

The section concerning poetry follows, less comprehensive than that on music but certainly long enough. It gradually turns toward matters of declamation, especially extemporaneously conceived verse performed ad lyram, that is, with improvised melody accompanied by the singer-poet on a stringed instrument, in Brandolini's time probably the lira da braccio. This is what the best of the ancient poets did, and it is fully worth revival, thinks Brandolini, especially in contrast to the vulgar and trivial matter heard at many a court entertainment in modern times. Of this, his favorite kind of performance, the author says:

And so no one should dare to impeach the use of the lyre at banquets, no one the singing and reciting of a song there, unless he be bereft of spirit and intellect. But perhaps someone faults the quality of the song and the practice of extemporaneous speaking, claiming that elegiac song, which I have been accustomed to use often with the lyre, is by nature mournful and soft, and not appropriate for the cheerfulness of banquets; and that an improvised song is not capable of capturing notice and attention. I claim that elegiac song arose from the soul's strongest and most wholesome emotions, that is, from its pity and tears; further, that an extempore song unquestionably merits greater credit and admiration than one carefully composed (81-83).

Extolling improvised poetry-cum-music turns out to be Brandolini's chief aim in this treatise. His tone often seems defensive. The work in fact addresses a negative critic of this kind of performance, the Apostolic Protonotary Corradolo Stanga (xiv; 8-9). Both Raffaele and his brother improvised Latin verse in this way; just what the content of the verse was, and how the performance sounded, we do not know, though like Stanga we might, if we did know, find it less than exhilarating. Some clue about the music might be furnished by an aer di versi latini, textless and so suitable for improvisation, published in Petrucci's fourth frottola book, Strambotti, Ode, Frottole, Sonetti, Et modo de cantar versi latini e capituli. Libro quarto (Venice, 1505).

Brandolini lived in an age of popular imp improvvisatori who sang epic and lyric verse -- Ariosto and Petrarch -- as well as their own poems, to music of their own. He clearly considered himself, as an accomplished Latinist, to be above the level of these men, though he does acknowledge (98-99) a few of them as highly skilled; but one may wonder whether listeners at courtly entertainments, even those of Pope Leo X, preferred a Brandolini performance to one by singer-poets of the like of Serafino Aquilano or L'Unico Aretino (Bernardo Accolti).

Brandolini's work is, if less than compelling, a pleasant enough read in Moyer's clear and fluent translation (the Latin text, edited by Marc Laureys, appears on facing pages). Early readers or listeners -- if there were any -- would have recognized at least some of its allusions, perhaps enjoyed hearing those new to them, and certainly liked the contemporary references. The defensive and occasionally self-serving tone of the oration would probably have been all too familiar, its querulousness expected from a humanist scholar. A certain immediacy of tone in Brandolini's writing draws us in, may even make us want to hear a sample of his musically declaimed improvisatory verse. Thus in a way he succeeds, as does his competent and sympathetic translator.