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The ‘Rise of European Music’ and the Rights of Others
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2020
Extract
Two conspicuous scholars have honoured the publication of my book The Rise of European Music, 1380–1500 (Cambridge, 1993) with reactions that may interest a much wider readership. Lewis Lockwood's review of the book, in Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 120 (1995), 151–62, and Christopher Page's essay ‘Towards: Music in the Rise of Europe’, in The Musical Times, 136 (1995), 127–34, are both highly engaging, masterly studies of the basic dividing lines in history and the historian's dilemma of distributing his attention among all the issues that have a claim on it. That both find the time to confer generous praise on the book is a demonstration of scholarly solidarity of which I do not feel worthy. If all the objections they also raise against the book are justified, then their kind evaluations of it are doubly undeserved.
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- Copyright © Royal Musical Association, 1996
References
1 Unfortunately, there is only one noun corresponding to the verbs ‘to rise’ and ‘to arise’ Titles such as ‘The Rise of Romanticism’ or ‘The Rise of Opera’ are to be read as denoting an origin, not, as is the case with the title of William McNeill's The Rise of the West (Chicago and London, 1963), an ascent to power over others The title of my book obviously belongs to the former groupGoogle Scholar
2 The Rise of European Music, 1Google Scholar
3 Lewis Lockwood. Music in Renaissance Ferrara 1400–1505 (Oxford, 1984), 288, 291Google Scholar
4 See The Rise of European Music, 550–1, 294–5, 309–13Google Scholar
5 Music in Renaissance Ferrara, 7.Google Scholar
6 See Cahn, Peter, ‘Zur Vorgeschichte des “Opus perfectum et absolutum” in der Musikauffassung um 1500’, Zeichen und Struktur in der Musik der Renaissance, ed. Klaus Hortschansky (Kassel and Basle, 1989), 11–26, and my forthcoming study on the role of humanists in shaping the idea of a musical Renaissance (New Oxford History of Music, rev edn, iii)Google Scholar
7 Lockwood is particularly concerned (p 158) with the absence in my book of a unified ‘life and works’ chapter on Josquin, and generally with the lack of a good Josquin monograph. Sharing the latter concern I urged the publishers Dent in the early 1980s to commission such a volume from Lewis Lockwood Heaven only seems to remember what happened to that proposal.Google Scholar
8 See also La musica come linguaggio universale Genesi e storia di un'idea, ed Raffaele Pozzi (Florence, 1990).Google Scholar
9 It is not, as Lockwood reads it, just another name for my individual enthusiasm for the subject and for the musical glory of ‘the great men of this time’ (see his p 155)Google Scholar
10 See, for example, The Rise of European Music, 86 and 328 (ballata and carole), 150–2 (songs influenced by ‘Robin et Marion’ plays and by dance, c 1420), 273 (choreae in church), 294–6 (koledy and kindelwiegen), 347–8 (careers of dance tunes) Christopher Page disregards some of these references.Google Scholar
11 Ibid, 2 ‘We go further today by accepting that music of whatever kind and ancestry is universal, and that every human being has a right to music, for personal recreation or any other purpose Such beliefs, however, are rooted in the opinions of fifteenth-century European musicians – humanists and others‘Google Scholar
12 See ibid, 313–19, and Musica privata. Die Rolle der Musik im privaten Leben Festschrift zum 65 Geburtstag von Walter Salmen, ed Monika Fink et al (Innsbruck, 1991)Google Scholar
13 Quoted from his article ‘Renaissance’, The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (London, 1980), xv, 736–41 (p 740)Google Scholar
14 See-his-influential article ‘Music and Culture in 15th-Century Italy’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 19 (1966), 127–61.Google Scholar
15 See ibid, and other writings assembled in his Music and Culture in Italy from the Middle Ages to the Baroque (Cambridge, Mass., 1984)Google Scholar
16 Claude V. Palisca, Humanism in Italian Renaissance Musical Thought (New Haven and London, 1985) See also his excellent survey ‘Humanism and Music’, Renaissance and Humanism Foundations, Forms and Legacy, ed Albert Rabil, Jr, iii (Philadelphia, 1988), 450–85Google Scholar
17 For sacred musical life, see Cattin, Giulio, ‘Church Patronage of Music in Fifteenth-Century Italy’, Music in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. Iain Fenlon (Cambridge, 1981), 21–36. The work of Pirrotta's pupil Masakata Kanazawa – see his ‘Polyphonic Music for Vespers in the Fifteenth Century’ (Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 1966) – has been incompletely rechannelled into the considerations of the Pirrotta school. Fourteenth-century historiography is luckier, with contributions such as Nino Pirrotta, ‘New Glimpses of an Unwritten Tradition’, Music and Culture, 51–71, and F Alberto Gallo, ‘Due “siciliane” del trecento’, Annales musicelogiques, 7 (1964–77), 43–50Google Scholar
18 Lewis Lockwood devotes seven lines of his nine-page review to this section, twice characterizing it as ‘long’ but saying very little else (p 157)Google Scholar