Songs and Musicians in the Fifteenth Century.

David Fallows. (Collected Studies Series, 519.) Aldershot, Hampshire and Brookfield, VT: Variorum, 1996. 6 pls. + viii + 326 pp. $89.95. ISBN: 0-86078-561-0.

David Fallows has been at the forefront of scholarship on fifteenth-century music for the past twenty years. This book is a collection of his essays published in various sources from 1976 to 1994. They are grouped under three broad headings: England, Mainland Europe, and Performance. A minimum of supplementary commentary is found in an appendix of additions and corrections.

The essays cover a wide variety of topics relating to fifteenth-century polyphonic song. Most are concerned with questions that cannot be answered definitively, owing to the scarcity or contradictory nature of the surviving evidence. Fallows devotes several studies to reconstructing and analyzing repertories from which little music survives, including English and Spanish song around 1450 and lute music before 1500. He also offers new views on controversial issues such as conflicting attributions and the provenance of the important manuscript Berlin 78.C.28 (c. 1465), which he regards as the sole significant source of music copied in Florence between c. 1415 and c. 1485. Reversing the usual direction of scholarly borrowing, he uses musical evidence to argue that French was a living language in Italian courts up to c. 1450, although literary scholars have maintained that it died out around 1400.

One of the most important insights to emerge from Fallows's studies is an appreciation of the complexity of the relationship between English and French music in the fifteenth century. In contrast to the story in every music history textbook that French composers encountered English music at some critical moment and created a new style in imitation of it, he presents a more complex picture of influences passing in both directions, and extending to Italy, over several decades. He even shows that the standard textbook example of "English style," the motet Quam pulchra es, is more likely the work of the Frenchman Binchois than the Englishman Dunstable. Although Fallows does not raise the issue, his views have important implications for the concept of the musical Renaissance, which has never fit comfortably into the standard historical narrative.

Fallows is concerned not only with the study of music as transmitted in manuscript sources, but also with the additional information necessary to determine how it sounded in performance. Essential aspects of musical sound, such as the numbers and types of voices and instruments participating in a performance, the application of words to melodies, the absolute pitch level, and the nature of ornamentation added by performers, can be reconstructed only from careful analysis of scattered bits of evidence. Fallows has assembled all of the known documents with specific information on performing resources for fifteenth-century polyphony. He believes there is less evidence for combining voices and instruments in secular songs, but more for the occasional use of instruments in church, than most scholars acknowledge. His views on other aspects of performance practice offer similar challenges to conventional wisdom.

One of the virtues of Fallows's studies is that they raise as many questions as they answer. His opinions have not always gone unchallenged, but they have stimulated much fruitful rethinking of issues once considered settled or beyond the reach of scholarship. Having a selection of his best work available in a single volume is a great convenience that should stimulate further work on the fascinating problems that have occupied him.

RUTH I. DEFFORD Hunter College and Graduate Center, CUNY