Reading Renaissance music theory: Hearing with the Eyes and Music Theory and Natural Order from the Renaissance to the early Twentieth Century. (Reviews) .

Cristle Collins Judd, Reading Renaissance Music Theory. Hearing with the Eyes.

(Cambridge Studies in Music Theory and Analysis, 14.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. 81 figs. + 22 musical examples + 23 tables + xxiii + 339 PP. $69.95. ISBN: 0-521-77144-7.

Suzannah Clark and Alexander Rehding, eds. Music Theory and Natural Order from the Renaissance to the Early Twentieth Century.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. xi + 9 ill. + 243 pp. $64.95. ISBN: 0-521-77191-9.

Adopting perspectives derived from studies of the history of the book and related considerations of textual materiality, Cristle Collins Judd examines the musical examples and citations from a selection of Renaissance music theory treatises as a "unique point of contact between music and writing about music" (xix), an integration of music and text which is in fact largely ignored in previous studies of sixteenth-century printed collections of music. The result is an extremely interesting and thought-provoking book, which opens with a brief discussion of the nature of music exemplarity and of the process of "reading" music that is presented in the form of examples within a text, an act which Judd refers to as "silent listening" or "silent hearing" (16).

In an introductory chapter on music theory incunabula in which she focuses on the treatises of Franchino Gaffurio, published before the appearance of a printed polyphonic repertory, Judd concludes that the nature and production of Gaffurio's musical examples are tied directly to manuscript culture. This provides a convenient backdrop for her first case study, an investigation of the relationship between the musical citations in the treatises of the Florentine theorist Pietro Aron and the printed collections of polyphonic music produced by Ottaviano Petrucci, working in Venice in the first quarter of the sixteenth century. In particular, in selecting citations for his Trattato (published in 1525), Aron, Judd argues, "accepts Petrucci's authority as arbiter of repertory in a way that simultaneously bolsters his own credibility by instantiating his writing with references to printed sources, available in multiple copies with fixed notation" (57).

In the following chapter, Judd connects Reformation ideology in Nuremberg to theorist Sebald Heyden's selection of musical examples for his treatises; that these very examples formed a repertory that became for a number of later theorists a musical source in its own right is a fascinating case of intertextuality. In particular, Judd refers to the German Swiss Catholic humanist Heinrich Glarean's appropriation of a set of Heyden's examples for use in his own treatise on mode, the Dodecachordon (1547), as a graceful transition to two chapters on Glarean's process of exemplification. Following a methodology familiar to readers of Hayden White, Judd builds a convincing case that Glarean's use of examples should be understood within the rhetorical framework of the treatise as a whole, a framework which she suggests is informed by Erasmus' De duplici copia verborum ac rerum; that is, she demonstrates that Glarean's use of notebooks of musical examples - musical "commonplace-books" - which in turn mediated his sele ction of examples for the Dodecachordon, broadly reflects Erasmus' precepts. Her painstaking reconstruction of this process of selection and of the sources used is presented in the second of the two chapters on Glarean.

The next section of the book contains two chapters devoted to Gioseffo Zarlino and his treatise Le istitutioni harmoniche (1558), described by Judd as "the culmination of the art of presenting musical examples in printed treatises within an intellectual culture in which musical theory had achieved its own place" (180). She begins with a publication history of the Istitutioni, which Zarlino used both as a means to career advancement and to enhance his image as composer and theoretician by positioning himself as the heir apparent to his teacher Adriano Willaert. The latter was accomplished, Judd argues, both by overt references to Willaert's teaching and by the use of musical citations which tie the work specifically to the contents of Willaert's collection Musica nova and to Zarlino's own motet prints -Musici quinque vocum (1549) and Modulationes sex vocum (1566). She examines the 1549 print in some detail, remarking on Zarlino's adoption of Glarean's dodecachordal nomenclature, and then turns to the process of building the case that the musical citations included in the Istitutioni, and in its 1573 revision, show how a printed repertory actually shaped theoretical discourse. Zarlino, she concludes, "masterfully manipulated the associations of his works and image- to the 'newest' modal theory in 1549, to the 'newest' music in 1558, to his own theory in 1566, and again to his own music in 1573" (261).

Judd concludes her study with a reception history of the motet Magnus es tu Domine I Tu pauperum refugium by Josquin des Prez and an epilogue in which she reiterates her desire to know what music notation can mean when it is surrounded by theoretical text. And that is the basis of the one real criticism that I have of this informative and stimulating book. Two of the four major studies are of citations of music, rather than of the use of musical examples within the text, so that I found the opening remarks on music exemplarity and the promised investigation of what it can mean to 'read" music within a text to be somewhat misleading. This is a small objection, however, to a truly significant achievement.

Music Theory and Natural Order, a collection of essays which grew out of a conference on Music Theory's Nature, held at Oxford in March 1998, has as a unifying theme the investigation of the various ways in which music theorists have represented and appropriated conceptions of "natural order" so as to avoid criticism on the grounds that the rules of their theoretical systems are baseless and arbitrary. The idea that the laws of nature should also be related to the laws of music - so that music is in fact a special case of universal principles - is an interesting one, and the variety and high-quality of the nine articles in this volume are impressive indeed. The first major section, four articles on "The Disenchantment and Re-Enchantment of Music," begins with Daniel K. L. Chua's demonstration of Vincenzo Galilei's ambivalence toward the rationalization of music that Galilei himself had advocated through "correction" of the Pythagorean tuning ratios, which in antiquity where taken as cosmological principles. Linda Phyllis Austern's contribution is a careful examination of changes in the iconography of music and nature in seventeenth-century England along the lines of Carolyn Merchant's description of the changing understanding of nature -- occasioned by the scientific revolution -- from nurturing womb to laboratory cadaver. David E. Cohen challenges the idea that Jean-Philippe Rameau's famous attempt to ground music in a natural principle, the corps sonore, is related to his "discovery" of the problem of music cognition, and demonstrates, through a subtle and nuanced discussion, that Rameau relied upon a concept of "musical instinct," a "gift of nature" which he took to be a faculty of the senses, not of the mind. Finally, in "Nietzsche, Riemann, Wagner: when music lies," Leslie David Blasius explores what it means for a theory of music to be true.

Scott Burnham opens part 2, "Natural Forms--Forming Nature," with a gracefully written reappraisal of what is generally understood to be "the burden of our sense of sonata form: the idea of return as resolution and the closely related ideas of teleological process and unequivocal completion" (113). On the contrary, Burnham demonstrates, using musical examples from Haydn and Beethoven, sonata form can be much less than a psychodrama with a single desired outcome; it can demonstrate to us another basic rhythm of life, eternal renewal. In the remaining two contributions to this section Alexander Rehding examines August Halm's early twentieth-century German idealist approach to the formulation of an ontology of sonata and fugue; and Suzannah Clark discusses in detail Arthur von Qettingen's attempt to relate all aspects of harmony to one "natural" principle, the major-minor system.

In a final section, "Constructions of Identity," Ian Biddle analyzes nineteenth-century German critical writing on music as a transformation from a reading motivated by desire to an activity related to the invasion and exploration of a musical "body." Music Theory and Natural Order concludes with Peter A. Hoyt's identification of Antoine Reicha's appeal to the "music of savages" as an attempt to justify certain foundational presumptions of his 1814 Traite de melodie.

The excellent essays which form this volume, although focused specifically on music and music theory, are case studies of the universal tendency to substantiate ideology by means of appeals to "nature" and "natural order" and, as such, are certainly of general interest.