Is this a propos or what? The day after I put up a post explaining why the idea of "Renaissance" music should be, on the advice of Richard Taruskin, laid to rest, the New York Times puts up an article 5 Minutes That Will Make You Love Renaissance Music. There is a long and impressive list of performers, critics and even musicologists that offer suggestions as to "Renaissance" music you should be listening to.
Laurie Stras, musicologist
I’ve spent a significant portion of my adulthood living — in my imagination — in the Renaissance, with women from history who are now as much a part of my life as the women in my ensemble, Musica Secreta. By reconstructing their lives and their music, I’ve felt their humanity reaching across the centuries.
Another sample:
Andrea Bayer, Metropolitan Museum of Art deputy director
In Renaissance and Baroque Italy, the visual arts, music and poetry were often intertwined aspects of a unified enterprise that ennobled the human spirit. Music has always been a component of my approach as a museum curator, particularly in my research on Evaristo Baschenis, the great 17th-century painter of still lifes of musical instruments, and as a current running through my 2008 Met exhibition “Art and Love in Renaissance Italy.” I particularly love Cecilia Bartoli’s version of Caccini’s song “Amarilli, mia bella.” It may not be the most historically precise performance, but it exquisitely captures the intimacy of the verse.
Now don't get me wrong, there is a lot of lovely music here that would be worth your while to listen to. But it is pretty obvious that, like certain aspects of the early music movement and their claims to "authenticity," there are powerful commercial and marketing reasons for promoting the idea of "Renaissance music." Here we see how that works in practice. How do you sell early music to the general public? Well, some good marketing tactics are to claim historical authenticity and package it together with the more familiar works of Renaissance art and literature. Otherwise you are faced with the messy details of how music follows its own path quite different from the other arts. Reality, in other words.
Oh, and Caccini's song "Amarilli mia bella," which I have performed on numerous occasions, is an excellent example of early 17th century music and typically categorized as "Baroque," not "Renaissance" music. Heh!
This realization of the lute part is from Robert Dowland's 1610 collection A Musical Banquet. Robert is the son of John Dowland, the great English "Renaissance" lutenist and composer. Just to add a few more messy details.
UPDATE: Andrea Bayer provides a great example of what I described (following Taruskin) as the fallacy of essentialism, or the idea that there are certain inherent or immanent qualities that define an age or style when these are often no more than intellectual conveniences. The quote is:
In Renaissance and Baroque Italy, the visual arts, music and poetry were often intertwined aspects of a unified enterprise that ennobled the human spirit.
This is pure empty culture-babble, popping like a soap bubble as soon as examined. The histories of the visual arts, literature and music are very different from one another as even a brief acquaintance will show and were anything but a unified enterprise, though an international style in music did develop--though by "international" we are only talking about French, English and Italian music.
Perhaps to add to the observational humor I've been reading Rob Wegman's book The Crisis of Music in Early Modern Europe, 1470-1530. My general sense has been that in "standard" music history nobody would describe 1470 to 1530 as "early modern" even though this is common enough in history in other topics (like Ephraim Radner charting the evolution of concepts of pneumatology from early modernism to the present and spanning Columbus to the present day).
ReplyDeleteIt's been interesting reading, Wegman going through the arguments for and against polyphonic liturgical music and how readily Plato and Aristotle were invoked (but selectively) to argue against and for polyphonic music. Wegman points out that the use of the philosophers was strategic and selective. Early modern Christian polemicists invoking Aristotle to defend polyphonic music did not mention his claims that music was not useful or necessary except in secondary ways. I'm still early into the book but I notice he scrupulously avoided terms like "medieval" or "Renaissance" in the first 90 pages. He also argues that it wasn't until the early modern era in Europe there were arguments against the usefulness of music as a whole, and that many polemics for and against music focused ire on imaginary figures who were decadent monsters on the one hand and bellicose haters of all music on the other. That such people didn't necessarily exist in the real world as they do in the polemics has to be kept in mind when reading tracts from the 1470s through the 1530s. :) There were clergy who felt hamstrung by foundation and grant restrictions on money that was to be spent on upscale requiem masses where the money could have been directed to helping poor people but the donor stipulations restricted expenditures, for instance. So it's been fascinating to read so far. A good deal of polemic that is passed off as "anti-music" by music historians turns out to not be particularly anti-music much at all. The music was symptomatic of more flesh and blood objections to patronage systems and what money was spent on. Ergo later more extreme stances by Zwingli or Erasmus who were (especially in Zwingli's case) not only not against music but musically active.
A lot of what was driving these kinds of debates was the religious reformation in various forms. Taruskin points out that, except for a few fragments, we have lost nearly all of the early English polyphony between the 11th century and the beginning of the fifteenth due to he destruction of the abbeys and monasteries during the Anglican reformation.
ReplyDeleteIt's refreshing to disagree with you once in a while Bryan. I gotta get back to this one but gotta run now!
ReplyDeleteI think I can guess what is annoying you! I had similar feelings the first time I read the Taruskin article on "authenticity" because it seemed to be threatening something I held dear. Later I realized that his critique was not about the music, but the marketing.
ReplyDeleteBut yes, I welcome debate and we can't debate unless we disagree!