In this book Blake Wilson has set out to do what for many musicologists would seem an insurmountable task: writing about a musical practice for which no musical notation survives. Thankfully, his readers are in capable hands. For decades Wilson's work has engaged the vexing issue of oral Renaissance musical traditions, most significantly Florentine laude of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, a repertory of texts for which the musical rubrics are stated (cantasi come) but not written down in musical notation.
The premise of the book can be summarized as follows: in Italy, from the fourteenth century to the second half of the fifteenth, vernacular and Latin poetry sung to the accompaniment of a string instrument was the domain of canterini, a pseudo mercantile class of performers who sang (often in an improvisational manner) lyric and epic verse both publicly and privately. The second half of the fifteenth century witnessed a transformation of this practice, where singing to the lyre (cantare ad lyram) flourished among professional and nonprofessional singers in humanist court circles until the middle of the sixteenth century.
The book, as the author advises, should be read in dialogue with recent scholarship on many of the topics explored in the monograph, most significantly that of Brian Richardson, Luca degl'Innocenti, and Elena Abramov-van Rink. What sets Wilson's book apart from these studies is how he imagines the history of canterino to cantare ad lyrum as a singular “broad cultural practice,” one marked by an “Italian tradition of instrumentally accompanied solo singing characterized by a strong degree of orality” (7). The overarching focus of the book is Renaissance Florence, with cursory excursions to Ferrara, Urbino, Naples, and Rome in order to account for the highly eminent practitioners of cantare ad lyram, Serafino Aquilano, Benet Gareth (Il Cariteo), and Raffaele Brandolino.
Of the new research presented in the book, some of the most fascinating is found in chapter 3, where the author elaborates on the significance of memorization (modeled after Cicero and Quintilian) in the art of the Florentine canterini. One memory treatise in particular, attributed to Niccolò “Cieco” d'Arezzo (ca. 1435), appears to have circulated among the canterini who performed in Piazza San Martino, which points to the widespread adoption of Niccolò's memorization techniques in fifteenth-century Florence. Chapter 3 is a noteworthy addition to early modern memory studies, closest in character to the work of Mary Carruthers and Anna Maria Busse-Berger.
As the author admits, “a book that tries to do much invariably leaves much undone” (11). Even so, there are some issues under discussion that could benefit from further investigation. Improvisation is the most urgent of these, as reference to the practice (cantare all'improvviso) or to a class of performers (improvvisatori—a term rarely encountered in primary sources) appears on nearly every page of the book. Unfortunately, it is never fully addressed what improvisation is, and more importantly, what it is not. This leads the author to contradictory observations about the forms of improvisational practice, starting in the introduction, where it is noted that lyrical poems such as the sonetto and strambotto resisted improvisation due to their “relatively fixed form” (6). Yet in the analysis of Cariteo's strambotti in chapter 6, readers are told that the form was the “preferred lyric medium for poetic improvisation and singing” (316). Moreover, there is little attempt to distinguish between acts of improvising and observing such performances. This turns out to be a crucial oversight, as the accounts that describe improvised performance vary considerably depending on who is writing about it. Many observational accounts, for example, emphasize the timing and location of the performance (all'improvviso [from out of nowhere]), rather than focus on the improvisational methodologies of the singer.
But this does not purport to be a book about improvisation in early modern Italy; rather, it is about an archetypical figure with an incredibly rich literary and musical heritage that spans over three hundred years. To write so extensively on such a broad topic in the format of a single-author monograph is a remarkable feat. This book will undoubtedly become a standard reference work for the figure of the oral poet in Renaissance Italy for many years to come.
