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Tinctoris on the great composers
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2008
Extract
Johannes Tinctoris, in the prologue to his Liber de arte contrapuncti of 1477, having demonstrated his wide literary and philosophical culture, and declared that, to his astonishment, no music over forty years old is deemed worthy by the learned of a hearing, praises five living composers and three recently deceased, whose works are of such sweet savour that he judges them worthy even of the immortal gods; in so elegant a context only the pagan phrase will serve. He continues (§18): ‘Ea quoque profecto numquam audio, numquam considero quin laetior ac doctior evadam, unde quemadmodum Virgilius in illo opere divino Eneidos Homero, ita iis hercule in meis opusculis utor archetypis’.
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Footnotes
*
This article is the result of Dr Christopher Page's interest in a passing suggestion; I am grateful to him both for that interest and for the transcription in n. 11.
References
1 Johannis Tinctoris opera theoretica, ed. Albert Seay, Corpus Scriptorum de Musica 22 (American Institute of Musicology, 1975), II, 12.
2 At prol. §11 ‘Immo Aristoteli ac Commentatori [my cap.] cum nostris recentioribus philosophisin caelo nee realem nec intentionalem esse sonum manifestissime probantibus irrefragabilitercredo], Seay glosses [commentatori[ as Aquinas; his comments on De Caelo were certainly read, but Commentator is as regular an antonomasia for Averroes as Philosophus for Aristotle.
3 Jessie Ann Owens, ‘Music Historiography and the Definition of “Renaissance”’, Notes, 47 (1990),305–30, esp. 315–18, demonstrates that this famous text exemplifies a topos – which is not tosay a mere form of words.
4 Respectively Ockeghem, Regis, Busnoys, Caron, Faugues; Dunstaple, Binchois, Dufay; all except Faugues are praised in Proportionate musices, prologue, §11 (IIa, 10 Seay), and with the addition of Carlier, Morton and (as transmitted) Obrecht (b. 1458) in Complexus effectuum musices 19. 7 (I,176 Seay). Cf. too below, n. 15.
5 One example is worth a thousand: Girolamo Vida, Bishop of Alba, writing to congratulate Pietro Bembo on his cardinalate, not only exclaims ‘dij immortales quanta bonorum omnium voluptate/atque laetitia’, but maintains that thanks are due ‘dijs primum immortalibus, qui optimi pont. menti clarissimum lumen praetulere, ut tarn egregie rei p. consulere posset’; the res publica in question is the Church. (BL MS Add. 21520, f. 19.)
6 ‘And in fact I never hear, I never study them without coming away more cheerful and with a better understanding of the art; so that as Vergil in that divine work the Aeneid used Homer, so do I use them in my little works as models.’ The asseveration hercule cannot by ‘Hercules’ be plausibly Englished. Cf. Macrobius, Saturnalia 5. 13. 40: ‘qui per omnem poesin suam hoc uno est praecipue usus archetypo’.
7 The form ‘philosophus’, printed by Seay at Liber de arte contrapuncti, prol. §9, would in context have to be the Greek accusative plural ΦιλοσόΦονϚ; but all three manuscripts read ‘philosophos’.
8 Thus the Greek proverbs at Liber de natura et proprietate tonorum, prol. §3 and Tractatus de notis et pausis 2. 6. 6 (I, 65; II, 120 Seay) come respectively from Cicero, Tusculanae Disputationes 1. 41 and two places in Jerome, Apologia contra Rufinum 1. 17. 3 and Epistula adversus Rufinum 33. 11–12, ed. P. Lardet, CCSL 79 (Turnhout, 1983), 15, 103. At De inventione et usu musicae, ed. Karl Weinmann, rev. Wilhelm Fischer (Tutzing, 1961), 40, Eratosthenes’ testimony comes from a scholion on Germanicus’ Aratea also cited by Florentius de Faxolis (see below, n. 36), fols. 16v–17r, but his name from Hyginus, Astronomica 2. 7; however, the corrupt form ‘Heradostenis’ points to a manuscript, no doubt one of the many blending these and other sources.
9 Thus the citations from Appian and Plutarch in De inventione et usu musicae, pp. 37–8, come from the translations by Petrus Candidus and Johannes Petri respectively.
10 See Agosrino Pertusi, Leonzio Pilato fra Petrarca e Boccaccio: Le sue versioni omeriche negli autografi di Venezia e la cultura greca del primo Umanesimo (Venice and Rome, 1964); all known Latin versions of Homer are recorded at pp. 521–9. Pertusi's doubts (524 n. 2) whether that by Raphael of Volterra (Raffaele Maffei) - in which v. 188 appears as ‘Vnde hilaris tandem doctus quoque plura recedit’ - was published at Brescia in 1497 are well founded: it first appeared at Rome in 1510, having been made for his son-in-law of some two years' standing, Paolo Maffei: see the dedication, with Benedetto Falconcini, Vita del nobil'huomo di Dio Raffaello Maffei, detto il Volaterrano (Rome, 1722), 124. It therefore cannot have existed when Tinctoris wrote. (British Library IB 31219 consists of Valla's Iliad, dated Brescia 1497, bound with the first edition of Raphael's Odyssey; was that the cause of error?)
11 Kindly transcribed for me by Dr Christopher Page from Cambridge University Library, MS Mm in 4; redit is my correction for uidit in the manuscript.
12 Homeri poetarum clarissimi Odissea de erroribus Vlyxis (Srrasburg, 1510), f. 25v. No translator is mentioned (nor does the dedication by ‘Georgius Maxillus alias Übelin’ to Hieronymus Baldung even speak of translation), but incipit and explicit match those given by Pertusi (see n. 10) 142 n. 3 for the version of c. 1460 by Francesco Griffolini d'Arezzo (b. 1420), with which it is identified in the British Library catalogue. However, Camillo Cessi, Storia della letteratura greca, I/I (Turin, 1933), 849, calls it ‘estratta a quanta pare in parte da quella di Fr. Aretino’. I have not seen the manuscripts listed by Johannes Vahlen, ‘Laurentii Vallae opuscula tria, II’, Sitzungsberichte der philosophisch-historischen Classe der kaiserlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 61 (Vienna, 1869), 357–444 at 387–95, or the edition cited by Pertusi 523 n. 1; nor yet G. B. Mancini, Francesco Griffolini cognominato Francesco Aretino (Florence, 1890), id., Francesco Griffolini d'Arezzo traduttore d'Omero (Cortona, 1931).
13 Ed. cit. 30–1; the main source is Boccaccio, Genealogiae deorum gentilium 7. 20. If Tinctoris' false reading ‘Huic’ for ‘Hinc’ in citing Manilius 1. 328 on p. 7v = Weinmann 45 (kindly confirmed for me by Professor David Hiley) is true to Tinctoris' source, and if we accept the typographical arguments of Ronald Woodley, ‘The Printing and Scope of Tinctoris's Fragmentary Treatise De inuentione et usu musice’, Early Music History, 5 (1985), 239–68 at 240–3, for a terminus ante quern of 1483, Tinctoris must have used, not a printed edition of Manilius, but one of the manuscripts copied c. 1470 from what is now Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional 3678 (see G. P. Goold's Teubner edition, p. xxiii and ad loc): the first printed text to exhibit ‘Huic’ (after three with ‘Hinc’) was Laurentius Bonincontrius' edition with commentary, Rome, 26 Oct. 1484, which also extends the pericope one line further; the next, of 1489, is in any case too late. (Nothing is proved by the inherited corruption ‘deductis’ for ‘diductis’ in line 324; ‘Ex’ is Weinmann's misprint for ‘Et’, p. 7r. Note too that it is Weinmann who restores ae and oe for e.)
14 Strabo, Geography 5. 4. 7; Pliny, Natural History 3. 62.
15 See 3. 9. 9 ‘dulcique Parthenope, qua se vatum lumen splendidissimum, Virgilius olim poetice studentem nurritum fuisse gloriatur’ (II, 156–7 Seay), alluding to Georgics 4. 563–4; the previous chapter ends by praising works of the same living composers, and of Dufay among the dead, who had been cited in the prologue.
16 For the original sense of the line, and its exploitation by later authors, see H. D. Jocelyn, Antichthon, 7 (1973), 14–46; although his arguments do not disprove translation of a universalist sentiment expressed (albeit by a speaker who debases it) in the source, such was Menander's standing as a fount of noble quotations that it would undoubtedly have been cited by Greek authors as freely as Terence's verse is by Romans.
17 What follows is but a small part of that more, the part required for elucidating Tinctoris. Is Coleridge's Ancient Mariner a mutant Siren, who causes the Wedding Guest to rise a sadder and a wiser man?
18 Besides the standard reference-books and Homeric commentaries see Siegfried de Rachewiltz, De Sirenibus: An Inquiry into Sirens from Homer to Shakespeare, Harvard Dissertations in Comparative Literature (New York and London, 1987); previous scholarship is reviewed at pp. 254–75.
19 ‘She does not always harm’: Rachewiltz 232.
20 See, for example, Emily Vermeule, Aspects of Death in Early Greek Art and Poetry, Sather Classical Lectures 46 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1979), 201–6; Pierre Courcelle, ‘Quelques symboles funé’- raires du néo-platonisme latin: le vol de Dédale - Ulysse et les Sirènes’, Revue des études anciennes, 46 (1944), 65–93 at 75–93.
21 Philostratus, Vitae sophistarum 1. 17. 1.
22 See now Robert A. Raster's edition of Suetonius, De Grammaticis et Rhetoribus (Oxford, 1995), 152–3.
23 Republic 10, 617 B; ancient expositions are listed by Harold Cherniss on Plutarch, De generatione animae 32 (Moralia 1029 CD = Loeb edn. xiv. 334–8).
24 See Plutarch, Quaest. conv. 9. 14. 6 (Moralia 746 A), cf. Macrobius, Commentarium in Somnium Scipionis 2. 3. 1.
25 The theme is implied in its reinversion by Petrarch, Rime 167, in which, on hearing Laura sing, the poet's soul is ready to die, but is held back by ‘questa sola fra noi dal ciel Sirena’; more straightforwardly, for example, Bembo, Rime 16, and the prophetic Siren of Camões, Os Lusíadas 10. 5–74. All these texts are considered by Rachewiltz; for other Sirens see Jane Davidson Reid, The Oxford Guide to Classical Mythology in the Arts, 1300–1990s (New York, 1993), II, 1004–8. The list could be expanded, above all with the Christian Neoplatonism of Milton's ‘At a Solemn Music’, the source of Parry's Blest Pair of Sirens.
26 ‘Ye gods preserve us! What a valuable thing is wisdom! I never come without going away from you more learned.’
27 See Menandri reliquiae selectae, ed. F. H. Sandbach, 2nd edn (Oxford, 1990), 165–74.
28 As Terence tells us in his prologue, 11. 30–4.
29 Epitrepontes 795 (ed. cit., p. 120): a courtesan ‘knows more things’, πλείον' οἶδε, i.e. is up to more tricks, than a respectable woman.
30 The ancient commentary of Donatus comments ‘nimis impudens assentatio, se fieri doctiorem ex militis sapientia’.
31 Neither Tinctoris nor any contemporary knew Fronto's correspondence, which includes an irritable reference to Gellius (Ad Amicos 1. 19, in M. Cornelius Fronto: Epistulae, ed. M. P. J. van den Hout, 2nd edn (Leipzig, 1988), 182); the grouping of three Frontonian chapters, out of five all told, in the penultimate book of the Nodes Atticae (19. 8, 10, 13; the other two are 2. 26, 13. 29) perhaps serves to exaggerate the closeness to which our present passage is designed to testify.
32 Tinctoris shows knowledge of Gellius in De inventione et usu musicae, citing NA 1. 11. 1–2 and 15. 27 (pp. 35, 39).
33 Remigio Sabbadini, Epistolario di Guarino Veronese, 3 vols., Miscellanea di storia veneta, 3rd ser., 8, 11, 14 (Venice, 1915–19), III, 109.
34 See above, n. 13; Tinctoris cites the end of Jerome's prologue to his translation of Joshua.
35 NA 16. 8. 17 ‘cui sane nisi modum feceris, periculum non mediocre erit, ne ut plerique alii tu quoque in illis dialecticae gyris atque maeandris tamquam apud Sirenios scopulos consenescas’. So (cf. n. 23) Bembo makes Sirens impede and mock his soul in Rime 97. 11–12; Camões dismisses them as pagan fictions at Os Lusíadas 5. 88. 4.
36 In his (alas) still unpublished Liber Musices dedicated to Ascanio Sforza, Milan, Biblioteca Trivulziana MS 2146; a strict judge will observe errors in his Latin, but not mistake his purpose. Albert Seay, ‘The ‘Liber Musices’ of Florentius de Faxolis’, in Musik und Geschichte: Leo Schrade zum sechzigsten Geburtstag (Cologne, 1963), 71–95, is not to be relied on; see Edward E. Lowinsky, ‘Ascanio Sforza's Life: A Key to Josquin's Biography and an Aid to the Chronology of his Works’, in id. (ed.), Josquin des Prez (London, 1976), 31–75 at 48–9 = Music in the Culture of the Renaissance and other Essays, ed. Bonnie J. Blackburn (Chicago, 1989), 541–64 at 550–1.
37 Rerum musicalium opusculum rarum ac insigne (Strasburg [1532], 1535, facs. Monuments of Music and Music Literature in Facsimile, Second Series - Music Literature, 39; New York, 1967), [D6]v; he adds for good measure that tritones moving to perfect consonances are pleasing ‘ante commissuram’ because, as Empedocles teaches, the governing principles of the universe are Strife and Friendship. Commissura is a good Ciceronian word for a join, or the gap thereat, but here requires to be interpreted a posteriori from the context. Tinctoris and others had used clausula, Ciceronian but evidently too uninteresting for Frosch; Florentius, though noting that composers used the cadence ‘ueluti clausula’, preferred to Latinize the vernacular name as cadentia (f. 67r), a word found elsewhere in medieval but not classical writers.
38 See Ronald Woodley, ‘Renaissance Music Theory as Literature: On Reading the Proportionale Musices of Iohannes Tinctoris’, Renaissance Studies, 1 (1987), 209–20.
39 Pagan examples might have been chosen, but I preferred the most striking. Cf. the conclusion to Proportionale musices, 3. 8. 2 (Ila, 60 Seay): ‘licet eas non summis rhethoricae coloribus tinxerit praeter causas in prohemio positas’.
40 Suetonius, Tiberius 70. 3; Browne, Hydriotaphia, ch. 5. More than one answer is available for the first two; see Sir James Frazer's Loeb edition of Apollodorus, II, 45 n. 3, 73 n. 2.