Introduction

Any discussion of recent trends in the study of fourteenth-century music necessitates a consideration of the position of the fourteenth century within music history as a whole. Most scholars of fourteenth-century music, myself included, would generally think of themselves as medievalists, even if they maintain a healthy skepticism with regard to the terms medieval and Renaissance, the latter of which is particularly problematic in its application to music.Footnote ⁴

The source situation for music makes a starting point of 1300 a difficult one. The works of the preceding monophonic song and polyphonic motet traditions continued to be copied in large anthologies, some of which date from the very early fourteenth century. The earliest complete surviving source for the fully fledged new art of polyphonic songs and nonliturgical motets, a repertoire dominated by the works of Guillaume de Machaut, dates from the mid-1350s. Recent attempts to fill the early fourteenth-century gap in sources have drawn attention to notated music sources that are fragmentary and of difficult date and provenance; furthermore, scholars have gleaned clues from poetic works, and have undertaken musico-stylistic extrapolation from the late thirteenth-century motet repertory’s interaction with refrain-structured songs.Footnote ⁵ Some of the earlier motivation for tracing the prehistory of the polyphonic song relied on a problematic musicological assumption that polyphony is of more value and interest than monophony, a tacit premise to which there are some exceptions.Footnote ⁶ This premise is often combined with the historically questionable mapping of the ars nova onto the fourteenth century’s supposedly progressive secularization, and in some cases the scholars’ own cultural (specifically, national) contexts with respect to public expressions of religion can shape attitudes.Footnote ⁷ Nonetheless, once combined with work detailing the persistence of older repertoires well into the fourteenth century, as well as their redaction and updating from around 1300, the picture of musical change in the period comes into sharper focus, with some scholars delineating a long thirteenth century with Machaut at its close as effectively the last trouvère.Footnote ⁸ Overall, and despite no single scholar yet joining together these various strands, there is the merest glimmer of a musicological view that would begin to sit more easily with the long fourteenth century proposed by a number of literary scholars, particularly those in French, who see it defined by the Roman de la Rose and vernacular responses to Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy.Footnote ⁹

In what follows I will pursue four noteworthy and exciting trends in fourteenth-century music research of the last decade or so. This will inevitably be a personal view. First, I discuss attempts to improve the fit between the divergent historiographical narratives of the various humanities disciplines that deal with matters touching on fourteenth-century musical culture, in particular its historical, literary, and visual aspects; this includes approaches using gender and psychoanalytical theories. In the second section I will explore the renewed and somewhat revised interest in the material traces of music in manuscript books. A third section treats the shifting geographical focus of those working on fourteenth-century music. The final section looks at what online resources and publication possibilities are both reflecting and driving. Clearly it will not be possible to mention all the stimulating recent work in this field in a short article, but much of it can be found referenced in the publications that appear in the bibliography.

Musicology among the Disciplines

Musicology and related disciplines, particularly literary studies and the history of the book, have distinct understandings of the fourteenth century. As a result, some recent work interprets musical culture using a wide variety of perspectives and methodologies. Musicology is now mostly up to speed with literary scholarship’s more recent and more positive valuation of fourteenth-century poetry, especially that of Machaut. Early twentieth-century views on Machaut’s lyric were overwhelmingly negative. Alfred Jeanroy found in Machaut’s lyrics “banality, prolixity and platitude” from which “it would be hard to extract twenty lines worth citing.”Footnote ¹⁰ Bartlett Whiting thought Machaut simply lacked the skill to write ballades that avoided “a satiety bordering on nausea,” producing instead “artificial puling melancholy and histrionic love-sick whining … tiresome adulation and namby-pamby praise.”Footnote ¹¹ The 1960s saw a change in attitude, spearheaded by Daniel Poirion and Belgian poet and Romanist Robert Guiette.Footnote ¹²

As a result of this literary turn, recent musical studies have paid far more serious attention to the words of songs and motets in this period, both in terms of the construction of meaning — much of it intertextual — and in terms of its performative delivery in time by means of melody and harmony.Footnote ¹³ Much of the earlier musical analysis of fourteenth-century music had assumed both that text setting and the texts themselves were bad, and focused instead on rhythmic structures (which were of interest to twentieth-century composers in the serialist phase of high modernism) or on harmony (counterpoint). Newer approaches integrate these with new textual insights, offering rich and nuanced analyses of individual works, as seen most recently, for example, in Anna Zayaruznaya’s work on Machaut’s motets.

Literary studies also offer various perspectives from critical theory, although these have been adopted within musicology less widely, since early music studies remain fairly positivistic. Those working on early music who remember the new-musicology battles of the 1980s and 1990s are still nursing their wounds, not least because the practical fallout from the resulting cultural turn was the shift of pedagogical focus from early music and literate musical-technical training to far later music and readings in cultural musicology. As a result, academic jobs that specify expertise in music before 1600 are few, and many faculties employ no one specializing in that period, while they might have two or three people working on American popular musics of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In fact, the traditional date of 1600 as the dividing line between early music and music of the following common-practice period has typically been replaced by a division at 1750 or even 1800, to fit with a post-Enlightenment modernity that is now the dominant or sole focus of many higher education institutions.

Given the very real effects of musicology’s cultural turn on the working conditions and prospects of early music scholars, it is small wonder that many, particularly those already tenured, remain suspicious of critical theory. The field is thus to some extent split. On one side are those who chose to retrench in the face of the critical assaults of the late twentieth century, and on the other those who see the critical and cultural studies as ways of reinvigorating the field and underscoring its continued relevance. These latter are more open to perspectives drawn from the musicology of later periods, and to humanities scholarship generally that deals with earlier periods. The investigation of musical cultures from a feminist perspective, invoking categories of gender and sexuality, is one area that has both sparked new musicological research and also witnessed vocal resistance.Footnote ¹⁴

The newer interdisciplinary tools for approaching fourteenth-century music have included psychoanalysis and psychology. Scholars of early modern theater have worked with the psychological concept of distributed cognition, in which a performative whole is produced without the full cognitive act being appreciated by any single individual performer; this has persuasive parallel applicability to theorizations of polyphonic music in rehearsal and performance.Footnote ¹⁵ Psychoanalytical approaches, particularly Lacanian ones, have been used to scrutinize the gendering of song in Chaucer and the ideas of song as the consolation for desire in Machaut.Footnote ¹⁶ Recent studies using distributed cognition in musicology have focused largely on contemporary rather than historical practices, as for instance those published through the Centre for Musical Performance as Creative Practice (CMPCP).Footnote ¹⁷ Those using psychoanalytical approaches mainly emanate from scholars employed in literature departments who have an interest in poetry and music, or at least the idea of song. This is in part because of the difficulty of getting studies using critical theory past music-journal reviewers and editors, given the level of resistance to such approaches within early music studies discussed above. Those using Lacanian literary approaches have tended to link fourteenth-century lyric with that of the troubadours and trouvères, placing the fourteenth century at the end of a longer period of courtly song. This has arguably lessened the habit of musicologists to see the fourteenth century as radically different from earlier periods merely on account of its polyphonic songs, use of mensural notation with minims, and deployment of raised leading tones at cadences; all were formerly taken as features of a forward-looking ars nova. Several recent studies instead opt to frame the works of Machaut, for example, as the culmination and transformation of a longer tradition.Footnote ¹⁸

Material Contexts

Musicological study has always focused heavily on books of music, but usually only on the music within them; conveniently, many later fourteenth-century music manuscripts contain nothing but music. Yet from the late 1980s onward, some musicologists began following the example of literary scholars in treating the manuscript book, especially when it had varied contents, as a physical whole — as a palpable and meaningful context for individual items within it. The figure of Guillaume de Machaut has been central in leading fourteenth-century music studies back to the consideration of the manuscript book as a significant context for music. Several current projects and recent conferences on Machaut display admirable interdisciplinarity, as for example the multiauthored Machaut in the Book and The Works of Guillaume de Machaut. As Machaut’s own attested attention to bookmaking and the ordering of an entire output is authorial, it fits comfortably within traditional musicological interest in the composer and the composer’s intention. But after Sylvia Huot integrated two of Machaut’s manuscripts into her account of a longer tradition of scribally organized manuscript books, the significance of the codex as context began to exert influence beyond Machaut.Footnote ¹⁹ Early examples of such an approach from musicologists can be seen in the essays in Margaret Bent and Andrew Wathey’s Fauvel Studies, which considered the multiauthor scribal poetics of the interpolated Fauvel, and also the other contents of the codex.Footnote ²⁰

Reinserting musical items into their manuscript contexts has problematized the taxonomies of earlier musicology, especially as they relate to understandings of musical genre. Modern musical editions typically remove individual pieces of music from their manuscript sources, edit them together with their concordances into an urtext, and then re-present them in a tidy corpus of works of a particular kind (defined by scoring, function, genre, or topic) or of a particular named composer. The fourteenth-century repertoire of song, for example, is thus edited in collected-works anthologies organized by author (and, within the author sections, by genre); the far more numerous anonymous songs are organized by genre.Footnote ²¹ Genre is defined by poetic form, namely the so-called formes fixes of balade, rondeau, and virelai, although some songs are in none of these forms and are simply in an “other” category at the end. Within each genre section, the ordering is alphabetically by incipit. This structuralist decontextualization enables a focus on formal features, but more recent attention to the source context has redirected interest to groups of songs in proximity in several sources. These groups might form a meaningful cluster on a particular topic, or relate to each other in other ways. The newer approach has also enabled reflection on how songs were collected, organized, and indexed, and how mise-en-page worked and what role it might have had in the use or meaning of song. These kinds of insights can be found in recent publications of manuscript facsimiles of the core fourteenth-century repertoire and fifteenth-century music-only manuscripts.Footnote ²²

The increased seriousness with which the manuscript book is read as a context for music in this period has also disrupted notions of chronology. Pieces of quite different date can appear alongside one another in the sources and were clearly both current. Although wholesale accounting for the persistence of older music in the fourteenth century is yet to be attempted, some recent studies have considered sources in this light. Notable examples include Judith Peraino’s focus on early fourteenth-century additions to a mid-thirteenth-century trouvère source, and Ardis Butterfield’s consideration of a distinctly fourteenth-century manuscript containing a mixture of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century repertory.Footnote ²³

Scholars have also begun expanding their investigations beyond authors and composers to study users, owners, and readers, essentially a shift from chronicling creation to documenting reception and use. The interest in the whole book has been significant in this regard not just for collections of musical pieces, but also for books of music theory. Their contents have similarly suffered under modern editorial practices that extracted sequences of isolated single works without consideration that the other contents of manuscripts containing music can offer much information about the audience for a treatise. The audience can vary widely from copy to copy of the same theory text, whose exact contents are often significantly tweaked for the purpose. The 2003 volume of addenda and corrigenda for the Répetoire Internationale des Sources Musicales (RISM) music theory series provides listings of what is copied alongside the music theory that it records, unlike earlier volumes in the same series.Footnote ²⁴ One of its editors, Giuliano Di Bacco, has also published a study of the varied manuscript contexts of Johannes de Muris’s music theory, which powerfully shows how informing the study of an authorial work using its varied contexts of (posthumous) manuscript reception can offer an exemplary and fascinating description of broader musical culture.

Changing Geographies

The fall of communist governments in Eastern Europe since 1989 has brought freer access to archives and libraries, and made new early music sources available.Footnote ²⁵ The full proceeds of this practical gain are yet to be fully realized, but the concomitant redrawing of the political and cultural-intellectual maps of Europe and the associated lessening of the nationalistic effect of Cold War politics on musicology have already shifted the geographical focus of fourteenth-century music studies.Footnote ²⁶ Some musicologists beginning in the 1980s pursued center-periphery interests and the idea of an international style around 1400, akin to the one Panofsky posited for art history. The invocation of internationalism for the fourteenth century coincided with the problematization of those categories in the light of changing contemporary notions of center and periphery, together with historiographical reflection on accompanying value judgments about repertoires and their geographies.Footnote ²⁷

The ars nova itself, once squarely perceived as a Parisian and northern French invention, is being traced in more diffuse and southern areas; it is also now subject to historiographical critique.Footnote ²⁸ Some of the newest work on recently discovered fragments is not yet published but is being discussed on the conference circuit and shared outside nontraditional publishing using social media. Margaret Bent intrigued the 2012 meeting of the American Musicological Society with her discovery that the summa-writing theorist formerly known as Jacques of Liège might in fact be de Ispania, and David Catalunya has uncovered a number of new fragments of polyphony in early fourteenth-century notations from Spain and southern France.Footnote ²⁹

The ars subtilior, the modern designation for the more complex rhythmic style of some pieces in the late fourteenth century, was once described by Otto Gombosi as “an episode in the south.”Footnote ³⁰ It has been reclaimed for the French princes of the north (with the proviso that they also spent a lot of time in southern France and Italy) and then reclaimed for Italy, where most of its sources seem to have been copied.Footnote ³¹ Italy’s exclusion from the ars nova on grounds that it had a different system for notating music has been countered in part by the emphasis on the presence of francophone works (both ars nova and ars subtilior in style) in Italy.Footnote ³² That at least one of these francophone works is in Anglo-French fits with the recent discovery of the circulation of English motets in Bologna, also during the late fourteenth century.Footnote ³³ A general recognition of the borderless mobility of music and musicians in this period is now gradually undermining the vestiges of nineteenth-century nation-state musicology.

The relative neglect of early music with text in Germanic languages — mainly the result of insufficient language competence in anglophones — is currently being remedied by the work of a number of scholars working with Karl Kügle at the University of Utrecht, who are competent in English, French, German, and Dutch. Some of Kügle’s own work has treated the relations between francophone and Dutch repertories in the multilingual areas around Bruges.Footnote ³⁴ Reinhard Strohm and Birgit Lodes’s large funded project running between 2011 and 2014, Musical Life of the Late Middle Ages in the Austrian Region (1340–1520), looks set to bring additional nuance to German-language repertoires in the fourteenth century while also attesting to the presence of francophone pieces in Central European libraries and collections.

Virtual Musicology

The kinds of research that new technologies make possible in the era of the worldwide web are critical to interdisciplinary and material approaches to musicology. There is a relation, perhaps less direct, between the changing geography of fourteenth-century music and the new scholarly reliance on virtual access to primary and secondary sources, scholarly debate, and networking. This effects a radical deracination of the evidence, and replaces the necessity to navigate geographical space and foreign libraries with the need to learn new electronic searching techniques and applications so as to control and assimilate large datasets. Not all scholars have embraced these technologies, but scholars of early music are more accustomed than those in many other areas, since they have been served since 1998 by one of the longest-running open-access digital medieval projects, the Digital Image Archive of Medieval Music (DIAMM), which is now more than the simple image repository for which its acronym originally stood, and includes a database of metadata with a faceted browse search.

There is a clear relation between the availability of online resources and the influence of other disciplinary approaches. Online archiving of secondary materials gives a ready conduit for identifying and accessing the work of scholars in other disciplines, yielding links to scholars, periodicals, sources, and periods that one would never have found in any other way. The resulting blurring of disciplinary boundaries online is having a significant effect: musicologists now typically cite and are cited by scholars in a wider variety of disciplines. There is also more of an awareness of the historiography of an issue because the results of a search can be ordered chronologically and large datasets can be managed quickly. The result has been a historiographical turn within current scholarship, newly heavy with an awareness of its own disciplinary baggage. In my view this is a very positive development: the reinvention of wheels can be avoided, and surprising and neglected older secondary sources can be brought to bear on current research. These historiographically oriented perspectives are drawn upon in various recent studies, including some dealing with how fourteenth-century music features in accounts of nineteenth- and twentieth-century revivals of early music.Footnote ³⁵

Online resources are also furthering the renewed interest in material contexts, specifically the manuscript contexts of fourteenth-century music. While DIAMM was a very early provider of digital surrogates online, it has now been joined by a huge number of other projects, individual libraries, and online gateways aggregating them. Examples include Gallica, which makes most of the major French sources available, and Machaut Resources, which aggregates links to a great proportion of the musical and text-based Machaut sources. While the images cannot answer certain narrowly defined codicological questions, they are superior for nearly all other purposes — and in most other respects — to examining the original. One can zoom in beyond what the naked eye can see, and adjust and process the image in ways more sophisticated than mere UV lamps allow. This is an entirely different category of activity from using earlier kinds of images, such as microfilm. High-quality online digital color images enable instant access to precious manuscript materials, making possible the verification of earlier research that may have been done with only a brief few hours of actual manuscript study. And because manuscripts beyond just those with music in them are now equally available to the musicologist, interdisciplinary source study has become more possible. One can easily view sources at random, and discover through online searches manuscripts that would once have been difficult to identify or not worth the time and effort to get permission to view, and that nonetheless turn out to be interesting.

Online databases, often attached to image repositories, have facilitated many different forms of research through their search functionality. But they bring their own problems. They can contain old, incorrect information, and may have an insufficiently staffed “contact us” button. Databases have proliferated and the funding models for projects all too often result in silo sites that remain incomplete or are no longer updated once the project ends or money runs out. Sustainability is a central issue that remains to be addressed properly. The promising database of song and motet texts, Je chante ung chant, is a case in point, and the Digital Manuscript Interoperability project at Stanford University was designed to remedy this situation, although its funding has now also ceased.

Web 2.0 research offers particularly exciting prospects for developing, discussing, and sharing research; what’s “on the web” doesn’t just facilitate research, it is research too.Footnote ³⁶ The beginnings of the online scholarly community’s realization of this promise is already visible, although for many its expansion will require support from their institutions in terms of recognizing online publishing, as well as individual courage about the wisdom of sharing research outputs that are not yet finished. The fourteenth-century discussion groups on Musicologie Médiévale and Facebook are joined by the existence of individual or project blogs, online guerrilla publishing, and microblogging and discussion via Twitter.Footnote ³⁷ Many academics make available conference papers on their academia.edu pages, on their own websites or blogs, or via open-access institutional repositories. Conferences are sometimes live tweeted, enabling them to be followed via a hashtag on Twitter. Various social media make it possible to follow trends in research before traditional publication enshrines them in print. As just one example, the above-mentioned project on Musical Life of the Late Middle Ages in the Austrian Region is being blogged by project assistant Marc Lewon, with plenty of exciting findings relating to the fourteenth century. Objections that these trends are merely ephemeral are well taken, however, since the issue of sustainability is present here, too: there is no guarantee that the URLs listed in my footnotes will work in future years. National libraries around the world are beginning to accept the need to archive important digital scholarly documents and materials, but it will be some time before this becomes the norm.

Conclusions

What should emerge from these recent trends is a more complex and nuanced picture of fourteenth-century musical culture, and a more musically enhanced picture of fourteenth-century history. No longer is it centered in Paris, no longer is it about narrow questions of musical style and taxonomies of genre. Musicology can communicate beyond the confines and particular preoccupations of the discipline, especially as expressed in narrowly parochial national contexts. The current methodological trend in the United Kingdom is toward the scientific and experimental, on the one hand, and the ethnographic and sociological, on the other, neither of which seems immediately amenable to fundamentally historical study. In addition, the drive to consider popular musics as intrinsically more democratic taints the study of fourteenth-century music, nearly all of which emanates (by virtue of only having come down to us because it was written down) from elite, aristocratic environments.

The toughest task remaining is to convince those outside musicology that the fruits of these new approaches are both important and accessible. Because our modern experience of contemporary classical music is bound up with the elite performance of notated music, musical studies can become isolated from the humanities as a rather specialist (performing) arts subject. With some notable exceptions, scholars in other disciplines often excuse themselves from reading musicology by saying that they have “no ear for music” or are “completely unmusical,” as if this is some essential quality. The technical aspects of fourteenth-century music (e.g., its notation and meanings) are no more difficult than those of fourteenth-century Latin, something no scholar of the period 1300–1400 would dismiss with the claim that they just weren’t born with an innate linguistic ability. Musicology is porous to its sister disciplines, and their critical methodologies have been useful to its own development. More of the current work in the discipline is being written with an eye to feeding musicology’s insights back into broader treatments of the fourteenth century. Here’s to that ongoing dialogue.

Editing and Philology

By about 1980 most of the fifteenth-century musical repertory was available in modern editions, largely the result of the massive growth of university music departments in the years after World War II. Since then, with the prime task more or less out of the way, there has been time for reflection. One of the topics of reflection was inevitably the editing and presentation of this music.

The editions of the 1950s and 1960s were nearly all in quartered note values, for various reasons. First, it was felt that the music would be performed far too slowly if in the original note values (people seem to have forgotten that the whole note in the finale of Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony goes rather more quickly than seems appropriate for the whole note in most fifteenth-century music). Another reason was a belief that original note values would be unreadable: Thurston Dart memorably remarked that in the elegant 1920s volumes of Tudor Church Music, “when seen from a distance the notes softly and suddenly vanish away, like the Baker in The Hunting of the Snark” (but then nobody has ever had any difficulty in reading the alla breve fugues in Brahms’s Requiem).Footnote ³⁸ At the same time there was a feeling that reduced note values made patterns easier to see in the music. But perhaps the main reason was a sense around 1950 that it was time to forge a new and cleaner world, with critical editions showing none of the clutter that had informed, for example, the Publikationen älterer Musik. Everything was aimed at making the editions look like the more familiar classics of the nineteenth century. Lists of variant readings were now rigorously hidden away at the back of the volume; also in tune with the mood of the time, those lists were packed into the smallest possible space and made as economic as possible. It should be added that one attraction of quartered note values was that you could get more music to the page.

But with the New Josquin Edition, under the general editorship of Willem Elders (starting in 1987, though not really taking flight until about 2000), there were several new developments. The first of these was the principle of using unreduced note values, a principle that at first spread slowly to other editions but that has now become standard. When confronted with Josquin in original note values, his contemporary Obrecht in halved note values, and most of the music of their less famous colleagues in quartered note values, people began to think that the entire note reduction of fifteenth-century music was an aberration of the postwar years. There suddenly seemed no need to reduce note values — though it should be added that this viewpoint has been far less influential for music of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, where extra complications arise.

Following on from there, the series Early English Church Music moved to an even more fundamental return, starting with volume 42 in 2002, particularly for music of the first half of the century where, for example, a semibrevis can have a value of two, three, or four minime, according to context: all original note shapes were retained, with occasional signs to help the user know which was the correct reading. At the time of writing, there is no other edition that takes such an extreme stance, but it is at least generally agreed that the reduced note values in the second half of the twentieth century were misleading and a serious mistake. Whether that agreement will mean that all those editions must now be remade in line with current views may depend on the future of the economy.

What almost nobody seems to find interesting at present is the use of original clefs — which is a very curious development. In the first half of the twentieth century it seemed normal and correct to use original clefs, largely because the educated musician was expected to be able to read these clefs as a matter of course. By 1950 there were rather fewer who could be trusted to read, say, baritone clef or tenor clef with any confidence. Editors gave way to the inevitable and confined their work to treble and bass clefs; only gradually was the transposed treble clef accepted, since many thought of its use as a complete abdication of responsibility (though leaflets of choral music and vocal scores had routinely been using the transposed treble clef since the beginning of the century). But gradually editors began to prefer this clef, since a very large proportion of fifteenth-century music occupies the two-octave range above and below middle-C and therefore fits that clef much better than the treble or the bass. Until this point, however, there were twenty years’ worth of editions that confined themselves to the treble and bass clefs, with results that are confusing to read and much of the time either change clefs with distracting rapidity or have bizarre quantities of ledger lines for the notes. Only from about 1970 onward did it become absolutely standard to use the transposed treble clef. This of course adds a further reason for reediting the music of the fifteenth century; with the assembly of new sources and the easier processes of self-setting through computer programs, it seems almost inevitable that this work will be redone over the next decades.

On the other hand, there are some who believe that any use of modern clefs is a complete misrepresentation of the music, not least because they imply a fixed pitch standard. Briefly put, if one looks at the three-voice antiphons of Dunstaple, it is easy to see that they all have a total range of about two octaves, with one voice in a range about a fifth higher than the other two. It is also easy to see that they retain the pitch relationship between the voices irrespective of whether the lowest note was F (with clefs C3, C3, G2) or D (with clefs C4, C4, C1) or B-flat (with clefs C5, C5, C3). Back in 1933 when Rudolf von Ficker introduced the principle of halved note values for the fifteenth-century volumes of the Denkmäler der Tonkunst in Österreich (DTÖ), he pleaded eloquently for the retention of the original clefs.Footnote ³⁹ In the intervening years, various scholars have followed his line, but they are still generally regarded as eccentrics and isolationists.

More widely accepted, though mainly applied to English music, was a movement in the 1970s and 1980s for presenting music at the pitch the editor deemed historically justifiable. So a piece from the fifteenth or sixteenth centuries with originally one flat in its staff signature would suddenly appear in critical editions with a key signature of six flats. For practical editions this has its justifications, but for most other purposes it is the equivalent of presenting Bach’s B-minor Mass in B-flat-minor.

Another principle of the New Josquin Edition was that there was no longer any particular need to keep the commentaries compact and hidden in the back of the volume. In the years after World War II the need for economy led to extreme compression: now it became more acceptable for the commentary to be in a separate volume where it could be consulted alongside the music (as had been happening in the Neue Bach-Ausgabe and the Neue Mozart-Ausgabe since 1954–55). And even the editions that kept their commentaries within the volume allowed them more space, inherently inviting editors to be more eloquent and explicit about their decisions and their aesthetic views. So commentaries began to contain the kinds of material that had been used in the other humanities for ages: detailed philological consideration of the notes and their possible errors (even as late as 1990, editors in major monumental series were printing complete musical nonsense without apparently blinking); careful consideration of the identity of the composer, based initially on documentation rather than a vague sense of what was appropriate to a particular composer’s style; construction of a stemma as the basis for an edition; and so on. One upshot of this was that some of the most detailed and up-to-date work in fifteenth-century music appeared in the commentaries to these editions. That had of course been the case in the 1950s with the new Mozart and Bach editions, where long-term general agreement about the notes meant that the editions themselves contained few surprises while the commentaries were often the leading edge of scholarship. This, too, seems still to be far less the case with music of the thirteenth, fourteenth, or sixteenth centuries.

A further development and preoccupation concerns the alignment of text and music. For much music of the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries this is easy: the manuscripts or prints tend to be fairly clear about which syllable goes to which note. For the fifteenth century, though, it is a major problem. Quite why this should be has never been fully explored or explained. On one hand, it resulted from a preoccupation with beauty in the manuscripts; on the other hand, it was a function of an increased floridity in the music, and it may well be that some composers were less concerned about text-music relations.

But this led to a new questioning of the assumptions underlying a critical edition and underlying the notion that there was just one correct solution to most editorial questions. Inevitably the new developments of the internet offered attractive, multiple solutions. So the next development was online editions in which the user could choose between various possibilities: original note values, reduced note values, parts, score, original clefs, modern clefs, original texting, rationalized texting, and so on.

As long as people have been making modern editions of fifteenth-century music, the question of bar lines has perplexed them. Apart from keyboard scores (or, in the sixteenth century, lute tablatures) almost all known music of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries comes down to us not in score but in parts: whether individual partbooks for the individual voices, or in cantus collateralis, that is, with the different voices laid out on a large opening of a choirbook, but still as individual voices. Those voices never have bar lines. The earliest historiographical transcribers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries simply drew bar lines through their scores at regular intervals. But then scholars became nervous that this was a misrepresentation of the music, and particularly nervous that performers would put a heavy accent on the bar line (though music pupils are told from about the age of twelve that they should not sock the bar line, since it gets in the way of the music’s flow). So various other remedies were tried. The most famous of these was the Mensurstrich, devised sometime around 1929, a bar line that stood between the staves and never crossed them. Other remedies included ticks above the stave, dotted bar lines, and much else. Most of these systems are unnecessary, because all the surviving scores from the fifteenth or sixteenth centuries have regular bar lines drawn straight across the score (just like the editions of the eighteenth century). This includes not only the keyboard and lute intabulations, but also the surviving scores, whether isolated fragments such as Vienna, Cod. Vind. 5094 (ca. 1440) or larger score collections such as the 450 folios in the Herdringen collection of the late 1530s.

The question of “editorial accidentals” — unwritten accidentals that the editor believes would have been applied and therefore should be added to modern editions in a distinctive fashion, generally above the note — has been alive since the earliest scored-up transcriptions of music from the fifteenth century. In the 1950s and 1960s there were virulent arguments about the correct use of editorial accidentals — among them some of the most bad-tempered exchanges in the history of musicology. This has receded in recent years, perhaps for two main reasons. First, that different ficta-specific sources, such as lute tablatures in particular, provided wildly different solutions. Second, it became clear that if a group of musicologists were absolutely to agree on the principles they could then be sent into different rooms and would almost certainly produce entirely different solutions for the same piece.

True, there have been voices claiming that editorial accidentals have been badly overapplied in the past, but there seems not to be much following of these views. If at all, they have resulted in online editions that offer the alternative of versions with full editorial accidentals or plain-text versions (on the principle that nobody publishes a continuo realization for Baroque music anymore and that no urtext edition of the classics includes editorial expression marks or phrasing). Where this is moving is unclear.

The Role of the Recording Industry

Obviously, all branches of music have been massively changed by the advent and growth of the recording industry. The moment the history of music becomes a history of something audible at the touch of a button it is fundamentally different from a history that is about notes on a page. A student of painting or architecture can see the masterpieces of Raphael and Bramante, but the student of music previously had to reconstruct those of Josquin and Obrecht from the written notes. The availability in the later 1980s of music by supposedly lesser composers in highly skilled performances highlighted quite suddenly that the age of Raphael and Bramante was equally rich in marvelous composers.

While performances of medieval music had been happening sporadically from the early twentieth century (and indeed before), it was really the 1960s that saw them becoming internationally and commercially successful as a result of recordings distributed across the world. This began with the New York Pro Musica and the growth of other groups in their wake, most particularly Thomas Binkley’s Studio der frühen Musik, David Munrow’s Early Music Consort, and Michael Morrow’s Musica Reservata. These and other groups put a heavy emphasis on musical color, a wide range of different instruments employed in the course of any concert, and a tremendous audience success. The very success of their packed concerts and their widely distributed recordings led in the 1970s and early 1980s to a serious questioning of the role of instruments in this music.

This questioning operated on two main fronts, the aesthetic and the historical. The aesthetic front was concerned whether the vast variety of instruments used in the 1970s was actually helpful to the communication of the music: there was a growing view that the music was good enough to stand by itself without the help of constantly changing orchestration, and that a reduction in variety of color would focus the ear on the details of the counterpoint and on the text. The historical front came from the recently increased research into the history of musical instruments. This was very complicated, but tended to focus around the role of bowed string instruments: no early example survives, but most instruments in pictures before about 1480 have flat bridges, which makes them good for playing with a drone bass but quite inappropriate for the performance of single sophisticated polyphonic lines. Where the pictures did appear to show a curved bridge, the instrument was so tiny as to be far too high for the accompaniment of, say, a Binchois chanson. This in its turn led to the possibility that the instruments, so lovingly reconstructed from early pictures, were largely involved in the unwritten tradition and had little to do with the polyphonic music so lovingly edited from early manuscripts. While the details of these discussions are now very much in the past (albeit never resolved), the consequences for music of the fifteenth century were clear. First, for music before about 1480 many groups were reluctant to use bowed stringed instruments. Second, and as a consequence, the performance and recording of secular music from the fifteenth century became increasingly rare. Third, the consequent rise of all-vocal groups tended to favor the recording of sacred music.

Oddly, there was almost no discussion of the historical impossibility of mixing men and women in a single ensemble for sacred music of the fifteenth century. Perhaps that was because the issues were so clear that nobody thought them worth discussing. But it did mean that some of the most successful recordings of sacred music were (and are still) from ensembles that have women on the top lines, with all the control and fluidity of line that entailed. Rather less oddly, the cathedral choirs with boys played no major role in the recording of sacred music from the fifteenth century, partly because the polyphony that absolutely requires boys did not begin until the very last years of the century (with the music of the Eton Choirbook) and much of this music is so hard that it is beyond the grasp of most boys today.

Very few indeed are the recordings that keep to what must have been the ensemble for nearly all sacred music in the fifteenth century, namely with mature male falsettists on the top line and probably single or at most double voices on the lower lines. There are at the moment a few ensembles, worldwide, performing in this way, but not enough to make any impact on the market. And there still seems to be no recording of this music using the only fully and securely documented ensemble of the fifteenth century, namely, the ensemble established by the music-loving and composing Duke Charles the Bold of Burgundy, soon after he succeeded to the duchy in 1467: on the top line (discantus), six high men; on the contra and bassus, two men each; and on the tenor, three men.

The arrival of the CD, a medium that was extraordinarily cheap to manufacture, gave a major new stimulus to the recording industry and led to a large number of new recordings. In the case of fifteenth-century music, many of the older LPs were simply reissued as CDs, so there was no need for new recordings of, say, the complete songs of Ockeghem or Du Fay; and the new vocal groups responded to the need for new recordings by putting an inevitable emphasis on the sacred repertory. But the CD was also a medium that changed the expected length of a disc from perhaps forty minutes to eighty. Theoretically, that change could have favored shorter secular pieces, since the CD had the massive advantage of making individual tracks instantly, accurately, and safely accessible. But the recording companies had the perennial problem of how to market a disc, and the favored response was to base a disc around one or two major compositions by a single composer.

As a result, the focus went toward the longer works and particularly the cyclic masses — after all, the major components of the output of most composers from the second half of the century. Gently over the next years, all the masses of Ockeghem and Josquin became available in multiple recordings, as well as most of the masses of Obrecht and a fair number by Isaac. Brumel and Agricola soon followed. One result of this was that energetic students of early music could now have as vital an aural knowledge of these pieces as their colleagues in nineteenth-century music had of the symphonies and quartets of Beethoven.

This led inevitably to considerable work on allusions between one work and another — between composers and within the work of any particular composer. This in its turn meant that one of the major developments in the understanding of that repertory was in a more refined chronology of the music. Certainly it was clear to all researchers that if we had as little information about the nineteenth century as we do about the fifteenth century we would be in serious danger of dating certain works wrongly by up to fifty years; but all the same, the new aural knowledge of the repertory prompted the common sense and made it easier to see certain deficiencies in the received pattern of relationships between works and composers. The most serious of these concerned the work of the major figure in the last years of the century, Josquin Desprez, who had since 1956 been considered to have been born in about 1440: only in 1998 did it become clear that this date was at least ten years too early and that as a result the dates of almost all music from the later fifteenth century needed new scrutiny.

This development resulted in new research on the details of imitation and of dissonance technique as they evolved throughout the century. For most of the twentieth century it was a widely held orthodoxy that the contrapuntal techniques of the late sixteenth century could be codified and taught, but that anything earlier was far too irregular for such analysis. Now the growing aural knowledge of a wide repertory began to induce researchers to explore a more detailed understanding of counterpoint and formal process in works from the fifteenth century.

A parallel development is that the CD recording became in itself a contribution to scholarship. This is not special to the music of the fifteenth century, of course. Throughout the classical-music industry there seems to have been an increased collaboration between scholars and performers (or between performers and their scholarly pursuits). The relaxed space limits of the CD booklet have resulted in many recordings being accompanied by essays and expositions that not only meet the highest academic standards, but actually make scholarly contributions that are not replicated in the academic press. While for fifteenth-century music this has not been as extensive as in recordings of Bach or Monteverdi, there are many major contributions in this area. Unfortunately the vagaries of CD identification and reissuing have meant that this is an extremely hard area for the scholar to control, and as a result much of this material is neither cited nor considered. One task for the future will be to resolve this problem.

Source Study and the Arrival of the Digital Image Replacing the Microfilm

This section must be much shorter than originally planned, for a very simple reason. Although within the past few years most manuscripts of fifteenth-century polyphony have become available online, often in excellent digital images, there is as yet very little evidence of how this has changed attitudes or scholarship. Much major musicological effort in the years between 1945 and 1980 was put into manuscript studies, most particularly inventories of their contents with detailed listings of parallel sources for each piece. One of the standard topics for a doctoral dissertation on fifteenth-century music was to take a manuscript and give it the full treatment. These were also the years in which the larger research libraries assembled collections of microfilms that made it possible to check all the sources for a particular piece. Oddly enough, little of this study brought with it any sociological or broader economic reflection, partly because the sheer effort of assembling that information was quite enough for a single three-year project.

As this became less fashionable, certain other kinds of manuscript study gained pace, particularly the matter of scribal identification — a topic that yielded its richest profits in the study of the early sixteenth-century workshop associated with the scribe, singer, and part-time political agent Petrus van den Hoven, who went under the stage name of Alamire. It is no exaggeration to say that Alamire studies provided (and still provides) material for a small industry among musicologists. But for the moment we must look forward with interest to ways in which this astonishing new facility will change attitudes to the music of the fifteenth century.

Introduction

When I was invited to reflect in these pages on recent trends in the study of sixteenth-century music, one of my first thoughts was, “recent trends or recent crises?” Few fields of historical research are insulated from what has been declared the crisis of the humanities, and personally, I find it difficult to write about research trends without also addressing the current contexts within which we conduct our research, writing, and teaching. Many readers will be aware of the major studies carried out by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and Harvard University that came out in the summer of 2013, both of which charted the declining number of students majoring in the humanities at American universities. A flurry of op-eds ensued in the popular press that seemed to confirm fears that the future of higher education in the United States would be dominated by the STEM fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, though more reasoned interpretations of the data argued that the humanities are holding strong.Footnote ⁴¹ At the level of research funding, the verdict is still out on whether the US House of Representatives Committee on Appropriations will adopt proposals that the budgets of the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities be slashed by 49 percent or even eliminated, cuts that would represent a double hit to music.Footnote ⁴² Meanwhile, the very form in which humanists have disseminated research and thinking since the sixteenth century — the printed book — is threatened by digital technologies that some argue will alter the nature of scholarship itself.Footnote ⁴³

Within the humanities, scholars studying more distant pasts are further alarmed by the perceived irrelevance of history to society and what that shift portends for the status of historical research and the professional opportunities keyed to it. To take just one example close to my academic home, the breadth requirements at Harvard University now include the ominous stipulation that college students take at least one course “that engages substantially with the Study of the Past” (that last phrase is not only capitalized, but highlighted on the website as well), one small sign that curricular battles are being fought to ensure that students leave college with some familiarity with history tout court — any history. This external pressure on historians may account in some measure for the relaxation of partisan infighting over the designations Renaissance versus early modern as scholars band together to retain studies of this time period under any name. These academic worries almost make me grateful for the street cred of the Renaissance, still so splendidly popular outside the academy, as witnessed by television dramas with per-episode budgets of four to five million dollars, such as Neil Jordan’s The Borgias on Showtime, with Jeremy Irons as Pope Alexander VI and breathtaking shots of the Vatican and papal chapel, the whole underscored with almost appropriate music.

Research into sixteenth-century music does not progress in a vacuum sealed off from the reactions of the students we teach, wranglings over the faculty positions that help sustain fields of inquiry, and the roles being recast for the humanities in the university. But my intention in this essay is not to amplify the current cries of alarm. Rather, I’d like to take this opportunity to explore the transformations in our discipline that have emerged not just during or in spite of these crises, but because of them.

To begin, let us backtrack twenty years to a crisis within musicology itself, one that came at the end of a precipitous sixteen-year slide in the number of PhDs granted in musicology, which between 1977 and 1994 dropped by 60 percent.Footnote ⁴⁴ Back in 1992, I was holed up studying for my special field exams in sixteenth-century music at the University of Chicago. My most meaningful contact with the outside world came that fall, when Margaret Bent visited campus and offered to meet one-on-one with each of the graduate students in early music. I will never forget her generosity to us, the youngest of scholars, and the thrill of that first encounter with a woman whose intellectual courage is a model of scholarly enterprise. She had just taken up a legendary position as Senior Research Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford — the first woman to do so in the history of that institution — and achieved superstar status in the study of medieval and Renaissance music, which had been locked in a losing battle with the nineteenth century for domination of the field of musicology as a whole. Here was a scholar working with phenomenal historical compass, president of the American Musicological Society from 1984 to 1986, and a woman who knew much more about what my career might become than I did myself. We shook hands as the door to the conference room swung shut and sat down at facing sides of the table. Then she leaned in toward me, caught me squarely in her piercing gaze, and asked: “Are you going to leave the Renaissance too?”

This meeting impressed me deeply on many levels, but it comes back to me now because twenty years along I’m wondering how we got through those earlier crises. Back in 1992, I was just trying to get into the Renaissance, but even then it was clear that the Renaissance would prove quite transformed by the time I got tenure ten years later (if we want to take tenure as a sign of getting in). Professor Bent posed her question at a time when the falling number of PhD students was compounded by a sea change in musicology that drew scholars away from the discipline’s strengths in medieval and Renaissance studies and toward later repertoires. Across musicology, feminist theory, New Historicism, cultural anthropology, and other new critical approaches pulled energy away from the archival research, source studies, and stylistic histories that had been definitive of sixteenth-century music studies. With paleography and transcription classes falling by the wayside in graduate curricula bursting to accommodate a quickly shifting methodological terrain, it looked as though quantities of music would languish unavailable in modern editions, and even some basics, like how to analyze the tonal structures of Renaissance polyphony, would remain unresolved. And as the Renaissance defined by textual criticism, literacy, and elite culture lost ground, the prestige of Renaissance studies went with it.

But many of the scholars who entered the field at that earlier moment of crisis were attracted not by (dimming) prestige but by the opportunities emerging from the creative destruction underway. As a result, many current trends share a strongly unorthodox approach to method, subject matter, and execution, an unorthodoxy that we should probably accept as part and parcel of a field whose limits now reach well beyond the Renaissance to social and cultural zones operating at some remove from the humanistic strains of literary, philosophical, legal, sculptural, architectural, and textual production most commonly associated with the era. And why not? Music making did not necessarily require any textual support at all, despite the sophistication with which polyphony was notated at the time, and fine performers were not necessarily musically literate. One exciting recent swerve thus finds scholars studying the improvisatory practices of early musicians, which has brought some striking shifts of perspective. Others are studying singers and their careers (as opposed to composers) and music in the New World — another pair of subjects that take music as something performed and heard but not necessarily written down. Finally, dynamic digital editions stand poised to help music escape the stasis of the printed page and let informed users create their own performance scores. In what follows, I consider these key developments in depth; for the most part I have limited my purview to book-length studies published since 2007 or large-scale undertakings of a collective nature, with apologies in advance for omissions. I should note at the outset that the “trends” subject I have been asked to address does impose a certain attention to novelty, but let this not be mistaken for a prejudice against the many fine studies that each year deepen our understanding of key composers and their music, excavate riches from princely archives, and bring music to light in badly needed modern editions. Here, for better or for worse, I simply try to capture the spirit of our times, marked as they are by multiculturalism, identity politics, and new media for composing, sharing, and performing music.

Improvisation and Mental Counterpoint

Leading research into improvisatory practices is a team of scholars assembled by Philippe Canguilhem, whose project works at the very margins of musical notation to enlarge our understanding of the world of music making that lay beyond it in the sixteenth century. Titled FABRICA (Faux-BouRdon, Improvisation et Contrepoint mentAl), this project at the University of Toulouse has been tackling the potentially vast subject of improvised polyphony by studying treatises and written examples of descant and fauxbourdon in collaboration with ethnomusicologists and ensembles specializing in extempore performances of imitative counterpoint in as many as four and five parts.Footnote ⁴⁵

FABRICA’s results are profoundly destabilizing, for they illuminate the gray area between written composition and oral improvisation, showing that the extemporaneous polyphonic inventions of musicians rivaled the most valued compositions of the day: practices such as “singing on the book” and “mental counterpoint” might range widely from simple ornamentation a 2 or the rote addition of voices to contrapuntally exquisite elaborations of a chant melody in four parts. A key witness to these practices is the manuscript treatise of the Portuguese composer Vicente Lusitano, Del arte del contrapunto, ca. 1550, which describes increasingly intricate forms of extemporizing polyphony, from contrapunto suelto (adding one voice to a chant melody) to contrapunto conçertado (adding multiple voices), as well as la conpostura (composition). Whereas composition in this progression might seem to represent an improvement over flawed improvisatory practices, Canguilhem shows, by contrast, that Lusitano sees composition functioning variously: for those who had mastered counterpoint, composition liberated the creative process from the constraints imposed by singing prepared counterpoint, whereas for students, composition was a didactic aid by which they could perfect their ability to perform mentally prepared counterpoint on the fly. Indeed, the treatise concludes with instructions for how to perform some remarkable feats extempore, such as improvising a new part on a mensural melody while simultaneously using hand signals to show two other singers what notes to sing in order to produce four-voice polyphony.Footnote ⁴⁶

Now out in a beautiful new edition paired with Lusitano’s printed Introdutione facilissima of 1553 and accompanying recordings by the ensemble Les Sacqueboutiers,Footnote ⁴⁷ the publication of Lusitano’s treatises stands to verify a number of suppositions made by earlier scholars. It also provides an unexpected corrective to scholarly preoccupation with compositional genius, provoking us to consider that the written polyphonic compositions we regularly study might be based on ways of singing together that required no texts at all.

Spanish repertoires have proven fertile ground for studies that foreground improvisatory formulas and memory as fundaments of polyphonic music making. Giuseppe Fiorentino’s study of the folía shows this bass pattern to come along with a series of implied fabordón procedures that are rife in four-voice ensaladas and villancicos, while the essays on the villancico and related genres edited by Tess Knighton and Álvaro Torrente likewise continually delve into the performance practices of “hombres y mugeres que no saben de música” (“men and women who are not skilled in music”), to quote the 1565 treatise of Tomás de Santa Maria.Footnote ⁴⁸ But fauxbourdon a 4 apparently knew no borders in the sixteenth century, for I can verify that numerous four-voice homophonic chansons of the voix de ville variety also turn out to be nothing more than written-out fauxbourdon harmonizations, the famous setting of Mellin de Saint-Gelais’s “Puisque vivre en servitude” among them.Footnote ⁴⁹ I imagine that analysis of homophonic frottole will bear similar results.

What all of this means is that we can now look for specific, improvisable contrapuntal structures in a whole stratum of secular polyphony that many of us have always believed is close to the so-called unwritten tradition. Indeed, it raises a question of genuine historiographic significance: is the work before you a composition or just a transcription of a common practice? Motets and masses are implicated here as well, for it only takes a perspectival shift to see how compositional commonplaces, such as stretto fugues, standard imitative techniques, and canons,Footnote ⁵⁰ related to the improvisatory abilities composers would have brought to their imagining of relationships among voices.Footnote ⁵¹ Stay tuned for publications along these lines, and in the meantime, we should probably all be studying how to improvise, for which I recommend Peter Schubert’s wonderful short courses on extemporizing canons in two and three voices, and Barnabé Janin’s instructions for learning to “sing on the book.”Footnote ⁵² Finally, look to see studies of mental counterpoint reaching out to methodologies drawn from the history of science and cognitive perception.Footnote ⁵³

Histories of Singers, Singing, and Acoustics

Just as the recent studies of mental counterpoint invite us to readjust the balance accorded to written compositions in our histories, they pose the question: who should we put at the center of our histories of music — authors or performers? Framed this way, we might see a number of performer-oriented studies as aligned with the research into improvisation described above. The largest joint effort is the one behind the new database created under the direction of Philippe Vendrix and David Fiala, the Prosopographie des Chantres de la Renaissance. As currently projected, it will include over 2,000 entries for singers active during the sixteenth century, with detailed information about biographical basics, voice type, compositions (if any), and employment histories, replete with references to primary and secondary source materials. Bringing together original archival research and collating a century of published studies on the papal chapel, princely and royal courts, and churches of Western Europe, the Prosopographie gives scholars access to a wealth of data concerning the migratory patterns of singers and the constitution of individual chapels over an expanse of time. It shows this part of the music business to be international and peripatetic, and balances the better-known biographies of composers such as Josquin des Prez, Adrian Willaert, and Orlando di Lasso with those of superstar singers such as Estienne Le Roy and the many fine singers of polyphony who filled the rosters of chapels across the Continent, some of whom also happened to write down a little polyphony on the side.

Certainly the database relies on biographies of composers and institutional studies, which are standard genres for the field and ones in which fine work is still being conducted.Footnote ⁵⁴ But the Prosopographie is distinctive for its annaliste scale and its selection of a subject — singers rather than composers — that digs down to the considerable ranks of otherwise unknown professional musicians. It invites one to pose questions about music making that move music history away from big names and elite institutions to the more broadly social. The next step will be to recover the even more elusive history of instrumentalists and think collectively about the instrumental skills of the musicians we already know, like Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, who played the lute.

The groundswell of interest in performers has already born fruit in more focused studies that concentrate on zones where the documentation is rich enough to support sustained inquiry. Here are a few standouts. Young Choristers, 650–1700, edited by Susan Boynton and Eric Rice, brings together essays mining ecclesiastical archives relating to choral training in convents, monasteries, and church schools from England and Cambrai to Siena, Rome, and Seville. Nuns Behaving Badly, by Craig Monson, uses Inquisition records to channel the voices of musically inclined nuns who fell afoul of Church authorities for making incantations to materialize some missing viols, sneaking out of the convent to go to the opera, and other missteps just as fantastic. The strangeness of these stories is heightened by Monson’s unique prose style, which employs dialogue from the interrogations of these women more or less verbatim. One last extraordinarily colorful history is Richard Wistreich’s musical biography of Giulio Cesare Brancaccio, man-at-arms, bravura bass, and sophisticated Italian courtier whose military career took him on missions from Naples to France. Wistreich — himself an accomplished bass — weaves together a phenomenal array of sources (letters, music in manuscript and print, dedications, accounts of performances, and Brancaccio’s own publications) to reconstruct the musical life of a man who sang at a professional level with the famous ladies of Ferrara and who had a three-octave range, but by far preferred to be known for his prowess as a military strategist.

One reason so many of these histories had yet to be written is because music was but one part of their subjects’ lives. In the writing of these books, their authors slice through history in a new way, tracking music through Inquisition documents and across fields of battle. These histories circle outward from hothouse environments like those of court and cloister to understand the flow of music through cities and of musical personnel into and out of performing ensembles. In so doing, they reject the anonymity of traditional institutional histories and use the surprises of biography to develop integrated accounts of music and society. Here it is worth mentioning that some very different tacks are generating equally exciting institutional histories of a contrasting sort. Led by Deborah Howard and Laura Moretti, the Center for Acoustical and Musical Experiments in Renaissance Architecture (CAMERA) based at Cambridge has been using cool-headed acoustic analysis to understand the evolving relationships between musical style and architecture in the buildings that were the institutional homes of early modern musicians. Analytics include on-site measurements, computerized modeling of acoustics and the sonic effect of decorative elements such as carved choir stalls, and choral experiments like those conducted in twelve Venetian churches that finished with questionnaires for audience and singers.Footnote ⁵⁵ Another result of the project is a set of essays on rooms for music in France and Italy, including a study of the acoustics of Andrea Palladio’s Teatro Olimpico in Vicenza.Footnote ⁵⁶

Musicology and Difference: New World Encounters

The historical importance of the discovery of the New World has made sixteenth-century studies a natural site for scholarship on Europe’s ideological encounter with ethnic difference, but most of the European musical sources pertaining to America tend to date from the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries, when — for instance — we find Jean-Baptiste Lully casting players as American Indians in his stage works and, on the other side of the Atlantic, Italian chapelmasters in Durango and Mexico City writing galant-style arias for services at their cathedrals in New Spain. The sixteenth-century texts we do have tend to be accounts of various sorts, things like Michel de Montaigne’s likening of “cannibal” songs to the folksongs of Gascogny, or the transcriptions of native Brazilian songs provided in Jean de Léry’s breathtaking folio publications of his voyages to the Americas. These sources have been favorites of historians of the colonial era and its literature, but their musical offerings are slight. Moreover, attending to them poses a number of theoretical challenges, not least of which is reading through the Western ideologies sedimented in them. The documentary record of New World musics comes largely from the hands of Europeans, and any responsible interpretation of it needs to address questions of hegemony and alterity, thus provoking postcolonial critiques of the historiography of Western art music. Launching those critiques exposes, in turn, the limits that have been imposed on histories of music by colonial thinking.

Four recent studies tangle directly with music during the age of discovery, and although all of them cast their historical net broadly, their engagement with the problem of colonialism makes them important for sixteenth-century studies. Olivia Bloechl’s Native American Song at the Frontiers of Early Modern Music trains its lens on the colonizers at home, concentrating primarily on French and English representations of the New World. Following an introduction that outlines a new postcolonial historiography for music, the heart of the book opens with two chapters analyzing how the culture shocks of New World encounters interlocked with social disturbances at home. Chapter 2 revisits Jean de Léry’s well-studied accounts of Native Americans, but rather than reading them through the polarity of colonizer and colonized, Bloechl shows how Léry’s description channels a deeply Huguenot perspective that likens the singing of the Brazilian Tupinambas to the magic-infused hocus-pocus of Catholic ritual, suggesting that French Catholics were just as badly in need of conversion as heathens in America. Chapter 3, “The Voice of Possession,” shows the kinship between Old World fears of demonic song and the spiritual possession travelers attributed to New World singing, revealing the tensions surrounding witchcraft in a Christian Europe continually threatened by alternative beliefs from within.

Whereas Native American Song studies early modern Europe, Geoffrey Baker’s Imposing Harmony presents an astonishing history of musical institutions in the Andean city of Cuzco, the historic capital of the Inca empire that was remade by the conquistadors into a cathedral city on the Spanish model. Histories of music in Iberia and Latin America routinely concentrate on cathedral archives, but Baker’s desire to understand the entire soundscape of the city and the social status of its musicians led him to reconstruct what he could of Cuzco’s parish churches, confraternities, and the biographies of its singers and players.Footnote ⁵⁷ Imposing Harmony thus recovers the outlines of a colonial diocese where Corpus Christi celebrations climaxed in multiple parish processions featuring indigenous dances, and traditional songs in Quechua were repurposed to honor Saint Ignatius Loyola and the Jesuit missionaries. Andean musicians occupied top positions at the cathedral and performed on European instruments, but also played native flutes and conch shells in civic fiestas that were “dynamic, multifaceted, polycultural events.”Footnote ⁵⁸ Undoing some Peruvian histories that posited the development of a mestizo culture, Baker deftly balances indigenous histories with the obliterating wealth of criollo documentation thanks to a sharp reframing of what counts in a music history: practices or works, the performance or the performed.

David Irving’s Colonial Counterpoint follows the Spanish to the Philippines, the destination of a transpacific galleon route between Acapulco and Manila and a hub of Spanish enterprise in Southeast Asia. Chinese traders had long been present in Manila, but following 1571, the Chinese population in the city burgeoned along with the Spanish interest in Chinese spices, porcelain, and other goods; alongside the Chinese, Japanese Christians migrated to Catholic Manila for religious reasons; and “an entire cross-section of Mexican society — Spanish criollos, indigenous Mexicans, mestizos, and Africans — migrated west across the Pacific.”Footnote ⁵⁹ Irving thus sees Manila as one point of origin for the globalization of music, what he calls “the missing link in the concatenation of mercantile, political, and intellectual enterprises that characterized the emergence of a global consciousness and global networks in the early modern period.”Footnote ⁶⁰ He unearths records of African slaves who made up an instrumental ensemble at the Jesuit Church in Manila and of Japanese dances performed there on Corpus Christi. Nonetheless, most of the musical evidence that can be recovered from colonial Manila witnesses the global reach of Spanish Catholicism, its strong impact on Filipino genres, and a multiethnic society marked by firmly drawn cultural boundaries.

In The Singing of the New World, Gary Tomlinson tackles an extremely challenging series of European sources preserving early reactions to Aztec (Mexica), Tupinamba, and Inca song, pairing them with the interpretation of indigenous documents and archaeological materials dating from the time of Cortés. Tomlinson’s study is not a history of indigenous song per se, but a history of cultural encounter that exposes the ideologies of Western historiography itself. Written with the utmost intelligence and respect for his Indian subjects, The Singing of the New World exemplifies how we might read the traces of others that history has excluded. While Aztec song presents degrees of loss and inaccessibility that most scholars of European music rarely confront, the beauty of Tomlinson’s study is its relevance to all musics of the past. More directly than any other recent study of sixteenth-century music, The Singing of the New World invites the field to push outward from the knowable and strive to defamiliarize all readings of past musics; to question the relationships between past and present, other and self; and in that act of questioning, to embrace musical difference without claiming to know it. Thus the false binaries laid bare by the studies of singers and improvised polyphony cited above — written versus unwritten, polyphony versus monophony, composer versus performer — are joined by another set with tenacious historiographical ramifications: civilized versus primitive and lettered versus unlettered. Reading The Singing of the New World is one way to test the boundaries that have been imposed on research by the deeper histories of our discipline.

Taken together, these studies redraw the map by which musicologists usually plot their research trajectories, circumscribing cultural terrains well beyond Western Europe. Here we should also note the new territories opening up to the east and around the Mediterranean. The Europe that once ended at the Iron Curtain will now need to include music in Bohemia, Silesia, Moravia, and the Ottoman Empire, and as scholars begin to take stock of the profound multiculturalism of cities like Prague and Rome, I believe we will see more attention paid to the role of vernacular songs in projecting ethnic identity at this time of great cultural mobility. Emily Wilbourne’s provocative study of Jewish and African characters in Italian commedia dell’arte scenarios has already staked out what rereadings of the madrigal repertoire might contribute to the history of ethnic encounters within Europe itself, and it seems natural that the post-European Global History of Music project just launched by Reinhard Strohm and the Balzan Foundation will be pushing farther in this direction as it seeks to understand Western music as part of a larger whole.

Digital Music Recognition and Dynamic Editions

Given my enthusiasm for the new critical agendas cited above and the complex relationships they are staging between scholars and the history of the discipline, it may seem unlikely that this review would round out with a section on the editing of sixteenth-century music. Editing music is foundational to our research and — fortunately — excellent editions do keep rolling off the presses, but it has been some forty years since editing early music prompted much philosophical discussion. Back in 1973, when H. Colin Slim’s edition of the Newberry partbooks was reviewed in the London Times Literary Supplement, it unleashed months of legendary mudslinging that had the English reviewer slamming American editions for “computerized efficiency” lacking musical intuition and Howard Mayer Brown declaring anti-intellectualism to be so complete on London’s side of the pond that “the serious musical scholar in Britain is a creature as rare as the dodo bird.”Footnote ⁶¹ Joseph Kerman took the opportunity of that dustup to reaffirm the antipositivist stance around which so many would rally with the publication of his Contemplating Music, which brought the discipline right up to the crisis of the early 1990s I mentioned earlier. In that debate, the study and editing of Renaissance manuscripts represented the worst of an old musicology portrayed as mired in textual spadework, low-level problem solving, and transcription rather than interpretation. Decades along from these battles, ironically, the efficiency of computers stands poised to revolutionize the technology of music editing, open up the process to Wikipedia-style crowdsourcing, and allow for the fluid exchange of musical solutions to editing problems.

Good critical editions have always aimed to assist smart performers; most editors hope performers will make use of the options presented in the commentaries appended to the edited scores. But for those short on time or the stamina to trawl through the cryptographic tables of variants and decode alternative interpretations, paper editions have always been cumbersome to use to full advantage. In cases like the New Josquin Edition discussed by David Fallows, editors are replacing the old-style critical notes that read like raw HTML with user-friendly prose. Digital critical editions, by contrast, can present alternate readings via visualization tools that allow users to view the variant passages in question simply by clicking on the score. Two projects lead the way in deploying this new technology: the Marenzio Online Digital Edition, a digital edition of Luca Marenzio’s Italian madrigals and canzonettas, and Les Chansonniers de Nicolas Duchemin, a digital edition of sixteen chanson anthologies printed in Paris by Nicolas Du Chemin between 1549 and 1568.

It is no exaggeration to say that the Marenzio Online Digital Edition, directed by Mauro Calcagno and Giuseppe Gerbino, is reinventing the nature of critical editions. A key element of their innovations is the development of an optical recognition application for early music prints, part of the software application called Aruspix, created by Laurent Pugin. Like OCR (optical character recognition), which accelerates data entry and is the first step toward rendering scanned texts searchable, the Marenzio edition begins by transcribing sixteenth-century prints of Marenzio’s music using special OMR (optical music recognition) software. Additional tools allow editors to collate the sources digitally and users to visualize variant readings simply by clicking on individual notes, which bring up scans of the original sources. The Du Chemin edition is also launching a digital critical commentary with many of the same features. Ultimately, these tools will allow scholars to produce critical editions more rapidly as well as to investigate stop-press corrections, manuscript corrections made in printed sources, and variants among editions or manuscripts. As the various stalled paper editions of Marenzio witness, there is still a huge amount of music awaiting modern critical edition: widespread deployment of OMR will soon mark a revolution in the quantity of sixteenth-century music available in quality editions. The next big step forward will come with the standardization of music encoding, which ultimately will allow scholars to Google a tune, rhythm, harmonic progression, or contrapuntal relationship among voices of a polyphonic piece. This sort of analysis is the object of the Josquin Research Project, in which a database of music by Josquin and his contemporaries can be searched by strings of pitches, interval successions, or rhythms and analyzed by range, parallel intervals, and dissonances. The scores have no critical commentary and lack texts, but the project exemplifies the analytic capabilities that will come across the board now that the Music Encoding Initiative (MEI) is gaining traction. This nonproprietary standard will allow digital music notation to be searched, retrieved, displayed, and exchanged across a variety of platforms.

For all that we may yearn for click-the-mouse access to thousands of pieces, the greatest single obstacle to the study of sixteenth-century music remains that presented by the material form in which most music circulated at that time — partbooks. Individual voice parts were printed or copied out into separate booklets. Then, as now, parts often went missing, but whereas these days the first violinist who has lost her part to a string quartet can read off the score, in the sixteenth century there were no scores to effectively preserve all the parts together. Considerable amounts of music thus survive incomplete, with one or more parts permanently lost; most of these works have remained further lost to view because editors naturally concentrate their efforts on bringing to light music for which all the parts survive. Enter Richard Freedman and a team of scholars at the Centre d’Études Supérieures de la Renaissance at the Université François Rabelais in Tours, France, who have turned the problem of missing parts into the foundation of a collaborative editing project titled the Lost Voices: Du Chemin. Running parallel to the Du Chemin chansonniers project mentioned above, the Lost Voices project reconstructs the missing contratenor and bassus parts for the last five books of Du Chemin’s sixteen-book Livre de chansons nouvelles series, about eighty chansons in total. The editors began by establishing a highly useful “thesaurus” of musical conventions to guide the composition of the missing parts that hashes out contemporary norms of cadences, interval patterns, textures, and conventions of text setting, some of them derived from Lusitano and other manuals for singers. A team of graduate students then set to work reconstructing the missing voices using the thesaurus, with intentional duplication of efforts in order to produce reconstructions that could be compared to one another and elicit discussion of style and conventions. When completely launched, the dynamic edition will allow users quick access to multiple versions in score, MP3s, text and translation, and facsimiles of the original parts that survive; ultimately the project aims to facilitate collaborative editions where users can contribute new reconstructions, annotate and comment on the chansons, and link to relevant research. Another project on Tudor partbooks has recently received funding.

These projects represent more than the latest evolution in editing, for they grapple with music’s ephemerality as a textual form. Lost Voices recovers the quickly forgotten losses that receive only passing mention in modern editions, whereas the Marenzio Edition heightens users’ awareness of misprints, multiple editions, stop-press corrections, manuscript emendations, and the profusion of print. Both unsettle sedimented concepts of the work and authorial agency, remaking music into a dynamic object that resists the static fixity of paper editions and allows users to visualize the interventions of printers and performers. These digital projects help us see how badly suited music has always been to capture in the form of books designed for verbal texts. At the same time, the new sociabilities established by the collaborative editing of the Lost Voices project allow us to reflect on the sense of unboundedness that attended the production of those original prints and their release into growing economies of piracy, knockoff editions, and fakery.

The Future

It is probably not accidental that these fear-inducing historical transformations — the discovery of America, the development of commercial printing — have proven greenfields for recent research. In their risk-taking choices of subject matter, critical theory, prose style, and online format, the books, studies, and projects cited above channel the excitement of a Renaissance that did not just revive a classical past, but also ushered in the age of modernity. Their boundary pushing has expanded the field to include the hypothetical, improvised, and non-European, even while they build on long-standing areas of scholarly enterprise, such as textual criticism, biography, and institutional history.

The hardest task facing anyone asked to weigh disciplinary trends against each other in a review such as this is not, I think, the business of the venture capitalist gauging which innovations will pay off big. Look not here for tips on how to invest your scholarly energy. University environments may seem corporate and the Renaissance as blue chip as ever, but academic payoffs come in meaningfulness, not in dollars and cents. Here, I suspect, lies the spirit that ties many of these studies together: as they open up histories to once-marginal, small, or anonymous subjects and release control of research to teams, digital tools, networks, and even crowds of contributors, they promote a shift away from static, hierarchical, authority-imposing, knowledge-defining products to openended solutions and dynamic, evolutionary quests to access and share information, almost as though testing the tradeoffs between permanence and things experimental, timely, or always in the process of becoming. And that is highly musical.