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MUSICALISING HISTORY
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 November 2019
Abstract
While there have been growing calls for historians to listen to the past, there are also significant barriers to integrating music in particular into broader historical practice. This article reflects on both the gains and difficulties of this integration, moving from an interrogation of the category of music to three case studies. These concern musical terms, compositional practices and cultures from the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries, revisiting some key debates in musicology: first, the highly charged language of sweetness deployed in the fifteenth century; second, connections discerned in nineteenth-century music history between medieval polyphony and contemporary attitudes towards time and authority; and, third, debate over the anti-Jewish implications of Handel's music, which we approach through his Dixit Dominus and a history of psalm interpretation stretching back to late antiquity. Through these case studies, we suggest the contribution of music to necessarily interdisciplinary fields including the study of temporality and emotions, but also explore how a historical hermeneutic with a long pedigree – ‘diversity of times’ (diversitas temporum) – might help to reframe arguments about musical interpretation. The article concludes by arguing that the very difficulty and slipperiness of music as a source can encourage properly reflective historical practice.
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Gladstone Prize Winner
References
1 A number of general works now address these trends, including Charles Burnett, Michael Fend and Penelope Gouk (eds.), The Second Sense: Studies in Hearing and Musical Judgement from Antiquity to the Seventeenth Century (1991); Erlmann, Veit (ed.), Hearing Cultures: Essays on Sound, Listening, and Modernity (Oxford, 2004)Google Scholar; Smith, Mark M. (ed.), Hearing History: A Reader (Athens, GA, 2004)Google Scholar; Fulcher, Jane F. (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the New Cultural History of Music (New York, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Pinch, Trevor J. and Bijsterveld, Karin (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies (New York, 2012)Google Scholar; Bull, Michael and Back, Les (eds.), The Auditory Culture Reader, 2nd rev. edn (Oxford, 2015)Google Scholar. Important individual studies include Corbin, Alain, Village Bells: Sound and Meaning in the Nineteenth-Century French Countryside (New York, 1998)Google Scholar; Thompson, Emily Ann, The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900–1933 (Cambridge, MA, 2002)Google Scholar; Sterne, Jonathan, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham, NC, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Erlmann, Veit, Reason and Resonance: A History of Modern Aurality (New York, 2010)Google Scholar; Dillon, Emma, The Sense of Sound: Musical Meaning in France, 1260–1330 (New York, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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37 See Summa Theologiae 1.1.10, 1.10.2.4, 1.14.13; Compendium Theologiae, ch. 133. For further discussion, see Champion, Fullness of Time, 71–2.
38 A speculative extension of this argument could be made to Iuvenis qui puellam. Charles Warren has argued that the fermata originally had a referential function: the dot signifies the notated note; the arc signified the improvisatory material elaborated around it (on debates surrounding this interpretation, see n. 37 above). The fermata, then, could be seen as embodying visually the same temporal schemas which are heard in the music: the fermata is a diagram of diachronic improvisation around points of authoritative and rich harmonic stasis. Warren, ‘Punctus Organi and Cantus Coronatus’, 132, 135–6.
39 Bowie, Andrew, Music, Philosophy, and Modernity (Cambridge, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, advocates approaching music as way of thinking, rather than simply an object (and problem) for verbal thought.
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50 ‘Expositio in Psalmum CIX’, in Magni Aurelii Cassiodori Senatoris Opera 2.2 [CCSL 98] (Turnhout, 1958), 1012.
51 Fasciculus Mirre, Leiden, Bibliotheek der Rijksuniversiteit, Ms. Lett. 357, f. 113v, cited in Marrow, Passion Iconography, 106–7.
52 Ibid., 106. To Marrow's example – Bob Jones University Gallery, Greenville (inv. no. P64.336) – should be added Musée des Beaux-Arts, Tourcoing (inv. no. D335, dated 1630), and an example in a private collection (1639). The scene also appears in a betrayal image. See Härting, Ursula, Frans Francken der Jüngere (1581–1642): Die Gemälde mit kritischem Oeuvrekatalog (Freren, 1989), 281–2Google Scholar.
53 On such crowds, see Lipton, Sara, Dark Mirror: Jews, Vision, and Witness in Medieval Christian Art, 1000–1500 (New York, 2014)Google Scholar.
54 Jerome, Tractatus, 229.
55 Except at measures 23–25 for the tenors, for tessitura reasons; the first entry is a leap of a fourth.
56 John Eliot Gardiner, sleeve notes to Gardiner, Choir, Monteverdi and Soloists, English Baroque, Live at Milton Court: Handel, Bach, Scarlatti (Monteverdi Productions, 2014), 7Google Scholar.
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60 See Graham Dixon, ‘Handel's Vesper Music: Towards a Liturgical Reconstruction’, Musical Times, 126 (1985), 393, 395–7; idem, ‘Handel's Music for the Carmelites: A Study in Liturgy and Some Observations on Performance’, Early Music, 15 (1987), 16–30. Other occasions are possible, but less likely. Handel certainly directed music for the Feast on 15 July 1707. See recently Riepe, Juliane, Händel vor dem Fernrohr. Die Italienreise (Beeskow, 2013), 207n, 236, 237n, 447Google Scholar. Donald Burrows observes that the context of Dixit’s first performance has ‘generated strong disagreements, rival performances and recordings, and bizarre situations that would make good material for an extended comedy film’. Burrows, , ‘What We Know – and What We Don't Know – about Handel's Career in Rome’, in Georg Friedrich Händel in Rom: Beiträge der Internationalen Tagung am Deutschen Historischen Institut in Rom, 17–20 Oktober 2007, ed. Ehrmann-Herfort, Sabine and Schnettger, Matthias (Kassel, 2010), 103Google Scholar. The work's composition history is also debated. Intriguingly, John H. Roberts has recently (and persuasively) argued that Handel probably completed a version of Dixit Dominus in Venice, but ‘later revised it in Rome, discarding the original last two sections [including De torrente] in favor of new versions’. Roberts, , ‘“Souvenirs de Florence”: Additions to the Handel Canon’, Handel Jahrbuch, 57 (2011), 205–7Google Scholar.
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62 See Riepe, Händel vor dem Fernrohr, 143.
63 Brown, Howard Mayer, ‘Emulation, Competition, and Homage: Imitation and Theories of Imitation in the Renaissance’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 35 (1982)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Relationships between Handel's Dixit and other settings are debated. See Marx, Hans Joachim, ‘Händels lateinsiche Kirchenmusik und ihr gattungsgeschichtlicher Kontext’, Göttinger Händel Beiträge, 5 (1993), esp. 118–19, 142Google Scholar; Riepe, Händel vor dem Fernrohr, 160–1.
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65 On musicians for the Carmelite Feasts, see Riepe, Händel vor dem Fernrohr, 237–8.
66 Detailed grapplings with music and anti-Jewish traditions include Roberts, John H., ‘False Messiah’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 63 (2010), 45–97CrossRefGoogle Scholar; HaCohen, Ruth, The Music Libel against the Jews (New Haven, 2012)Google Scholar; Marissen, Michael, Tainted Glory in Handel's ‘Messiah’ (New Haven, 2014)Google Scholar.
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