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Recent Research in the Renaissance: Criticism and Patronage*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Howard Mayer Brown
Howard Mayer Brown*
Affiliation:
The University of Chicago
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Extract

The book that everyone in musicology is talking about this year—not just those of us working in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries—is Joseph Kerman's Contemplating Music (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985; called simply Musicology in the English edition). In it, Kerman argues against what he calls positivism, which he defines as a rigid and non-judgmental pursuit of dry facts, and in favor of the higher criticism, by which he seems to mean analysis—or at least some penetrating discussion of the way individual pieces work and what makes them great—informed by a sense of history and written in a humanistic style, with a personal commitment on the part of the author to the quality of the music with which he is concerned.

Type
Research Article
Information
Renaissance Quarterly , Volume 40 , Issue 1 , Spring 1987 , pp. 1 - 10
Copyright
Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 1987

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Footnotes

*

This paper was read in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on March 22, 1986, as part of the Recent Trends in Renaissance Studies Panel at a plenary session of the National Conference of the Renaissance Society of America.

References

1 Jehoash Hirshberg, “The Music of the Late Fourteenth Century: A Study in Musical Style,” Ph. D. dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 1971. See also Hirshberg, , “Hexachordal and Modal Structure in Machaut's Polyphonic Chansons,” in Studies in Musicology in Honor of Otto E. Albrecht, ed. Hill, John Walter (Cassel, Basel and London: Bärenreiter, 1980), pp. 19–42.Google Scholar

2 Treitler, Leo, “Tone Systems in the Secular Works of Guillaume Dufay,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 18 (1965): 131–169.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3 Perkins, Leeman L., “Mode and Structure in the Masses of Josquin ,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 26 (1973): 189–293.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4 Meier, Bernhard, Die Tonarten der klassischen Vokalpolyphonie (Utrecht: Oosthoek, Scheltema and Holkema, 1974)Google Scholar; and see his numerous essays on more restricted aspects ot modality and its application to the analysis of sixteenth-century music.

5 Powers, Harold S., “Tonal Types and Modal Categories in Renaissance Polyphony,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 34 (1981): 428-70.CrossRefGoogle Scholar See also Dahlhaus, Carl, Untersuchungen über die Entstehung der harmonischen Tonalität (Cassel and Basel: Barenreiter, 1968).Google Scholar

6 See Susan McClary, “The Transition from Modal to Tonal Organization in the Works of Monteverdi,” Ph. D. dissertation, Harvard University, 1976; Benito Rivera, “The Two-Voice Framework and Its Harmonization in Arcadelt's First Book of Madrigals,” Music Analysis (forthcoming); and Kerman, Joseph, The Masses and Motets of William Byrd (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1981).Google Scholar