This collection of thirteen essays stems from two 2011 conferences marking the 450th anniversary of Peter Philips’s birth. Under the general theme of networks and interconnectedness, the essays center on the keyboard music of Philips and his contemporaries in England, the Low Countries, Italy, and Germany, as well as on musical, cultural, and religious topics more broadly. Coeditor David J. Smith introduces the volume and draws its themes together: “The present collection of essays demonstrates that an appreciation of complex cultural networks can result in fresh insights into the interpretation of music from the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries” (1). The complexity of the networks taken up in the volume is daunting, and the degree to which they can be verified is severely limited by the loss of evidential material; sometimes the authors read more into the evidence than is really there (is the organ book of the Crutched Friars of Liège, the subject of Émilie Corswaren’s essay, “of the highest importance to music history in general” [35]?). Similarly, sometimes the authors draw analogies that are either too broad to have meaning, or are anachronistic (“What were the equivalent social networks [to Facebook and Twitter] in early seventeenth-century Italy?” [231]). References between and among articles are rare, and there are other indications that the editors were perhaps too lenient with authors regarding consistency and unity of approach. Readers will suffer little loss if they take the essays individually rather than as a unified whole; the volume is not organized explicitly according to subtopic.

Smith begins the collection with a helpful examination of Philips’s keyboard music in a social context that considers the era broadly, drawing enlightening connections among Philips, Sweelinck, Byrd, Morley, and Tomkins, as well as Francis Tregian and Charles Paget. Peter van Kranenburg and Johan Zoutendijk’s essay explores ways to authenticate the composers of musical works, many of which survive anonymously, through analysis of diminutions (ornamentation) found in the keyboard music of Philips, John Bull, and William Browne. This is work in progress, but their preliminary results are promising. Frustratingly, the authors take up briefly a newly discovered manuscript containing works of Browne (Ghent, Stadsarchief, MS reeks 96 nr.1), only to set this aside for future consideration. Their understanding of the term diminution is somewhat questionable, as they overlook that the ornaments are based on underlying musical lines within a vocal compositional paradigm. Diminutions that extend beyond five notes (e.g., diminutions of eight semiquavers that stand for a single minim) are not considered as such, and their examples could be interpreted quite differently were this level of analysis applied carefully. It would also have been useful for them to consider the underlying assumption of their work, which takes composer identification as its goal: why does associating a particular composer’s name with a composition valorize it?

One of the volume’s most convincing essays is Julia R. Dokter’s rhetorical analysis of Sweelinck’s variations on Psalm 36. The variations’ melodic theme could have been drawn from any one of twelve possible origins; relying on musical-rhetorical analysis, Dokter demonstrates that Sweelinck employed Marot’s setting of Psalm 36 (Genevan Psalter [1562]) in its original (French) version, and not a German or Dutch translation. Contrary to current opinion, Sweelinck freely employed musical ideas that assigned semantic meaning to musical figures. Arne Spohr’s discussion of violinist William Brade’s extraordinary career in Denmark and north Germany is particularly interesting. Brade’s restless career comprised at least fifteen appointments in thirty-six years. He published four sets of ensemble music in north Germany between 1609 and 1621, and was, in Spohr’s words, “a crucial figure for the transfer of solo violin playing from the sphere of the court to the sphere of the city, and thus the founding-father of a city-based ‘Hanseatic school’ of violin playing.” The last essay of the collection, Abigail Ballantyne’s discussion of the nearly 200 published letters of Adriano Banchieri (1568–1634), provides a careful analysis of Banchieri’s recipients, who included clerics, literati, patrons (real and potential), publishers, and musicians. Ballantyne sheds welcome light on a number of aspects of the culture in which Banchieri lived, including his dealings with vendors of his books, publishers, and financial supporters.

A short review like this can give only a hint of such a varied collection of essays; the five singled out above are noteworthy in this reader’s estimation, and other readers will no doubt find much of interest in other essays. Most provide new insight to their subject matter, and will be important for researchers within the confines of their individual topics.