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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 November 2019
While there have been growing calls for historians to listen to the past, there are also significant barriers to integrating music in particular into broader historical practice. This article reflects on both the gains and difficulties of this integration, moving from an interrogation of the category of music to three case studies. These concern musical terms, compositional practices and cultures from the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries, revisiting some key debates in musicology: first, the highly charged language of sweetness deployed in the fifteenth century; second, connections discerned in nineteenth-century music history between medieval polyphony and contemporary attitudes towards time and authority; and, third, debate over the anti-Jewish implications of Handel's music, which we approach through his Dixit Dominus and a history of psalm interpretation stretching back to late antiquity. Through these case studies, we suggest the contribution of music to necessarily interdisciplinary fields including the study of temporality and emotions, but also explore how a historical hermeneutic with a long pedigree – ‘diversity of times’ (diversitas temporum) – might help to reframe arguments about musical interpretation. The article concludes by arguing that the very difficulty and slipperiness of music as a source can encourage properly reflective historical practice.
Gladstone Prize Winner
1 A number of general works now address these trends, including Charles Burnett, Michael Fend and Penelope Gouk (eds.), The Second Sense: Studies in Hearing and Musical Judgement from Antiquity to the Seventeenth Century (1991); Erlmann, Veit (ed.), Hearing Cultures: Essays on Sound, Listening, and Modernity (Oxford, 2004)Google Scholar; Smith, Mark M. (ed.), Hearing History: A Reader (Athens, GA, 2004)Google Scholar; Fulcher, Jane F. (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the New Cultural History of Music (New York, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Pinch, Trevor J. and Bijsterveld, Karin (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies (New York, 2012)Google Scholar; Bull, Michael and Back, Les (eds.), The Auditory Culture Reader, 2nd rev. edn (Oxford, 2015)Google Scholar. Important individual studies include Corbin, Alain, Village Bells: Sound and Meaning in the Nineteenth-Century French Countryside (New York, 1998)Google Scholar; Thompson, Emily Ann, The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900–1933 (Cambridge, MA, 2002)Google Scholar; Sterne, Jonathan, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham, NC, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Erlmann, Veit, Reason and Resonance: A History of Modern Aurality (New York, 2010)Google Scholar; Dillon, Emma, The Sense of Sound: Musical Meaning in France, 1260–1330 (New York, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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8 For technical debates, see Fallows, Henry V and the Earliest English Carols, 72–83.
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24 Even the ‘technical language’ of thirds and sixths must be modified by historicisations of temperament. See, for example, Covey-Crump, Rogers, ‘Pythagoras at the Forge: Tuning in Early Music,’ in Companion to Medieval and Renaissance Music, ed. Knighton, Tess and Fallows, David (1992), 317–26Google Scholar.
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28 This is an attempt to navigate between historicist ‘authenticity’ and fatalistic diagnoses of history's impossibility. On this debate in relation to ‘historically informed’ performance, see Taruskin, Richard, Text and Act: Essays on Music and Performance (Oxford, 1995)Google Scholar; Kivy, Peter, Authenticities: Philosophical Reflections on Musical Performance (Ithaca, 1995)Google Scholar; Butt, John, Playing with History: The Historical Approach to Musical Performance (Cambridge, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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30 Ambros, Geschichte der Musik, III, 8.
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32 Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Mus. ms. 3224.
33 Translation adapted from Holford-Strevens, Leofranc, ‘Du Fay the Poet? Problems in the Texts of His Motets’, Early Music History, 16 (1997), 151–2CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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36 Planchart, Guillaume Du Fay, II, 603–10.
37 See Summa Theologiae 1.1.10, 1.10.2.4, 1.14.13; Compendium Theologiae, ch. 133. For further discussion, see Champion, Fullness of Time, 71–2.
38 A speculative extension of this argument could be made to Iuvenis qui puellam. Charles Warren has argued that the fermata originally had a referential function: the dot signifies the notated note; the arc signified the improvisatory material elaborated around it (on debates surrounding this interpretation, see n. 37 above). The fermata, then, could be seen as embodying visually the same temporal schemas which are heard in the music: the fermata is a diagram of diachronic improvisation around points of authoritative and rich harmonic stasis. Warren, ‘Punctus Organi and Cantus Coronatus’, 132, 135–6.
39 Bowie, Andrew, Music, Philosophy, and Modernity (Cambridge, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, advocates approaching music as way of thinking, rather than simply an object (and problem) for verbal thought.
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44 Ibid., 272.
45 All translations in the Vetus Latina database use torrens. Modern translations often use ‘brook’ instead of ‘torrent’ here – ‘brook’ originally denoting a strongly rushing stream.
46 Augustine, Psalms 99–120, 284. See also Augustine's commentary on Psalm 123/124: ‘As long as this world flows on, with its succession of births and deaths, it is a torrent, and from it arise persecutions. Our head drank from it first, he of whom it is said in another psalm, He drank from the torrent beside the way.’ Jerome (c. 340–420) had earlier related drinking from the torrent to Christ's passion. ‘Commentarioli in Psalmum CVIIII’, in S. Hieronymi Presbyteri Opera 1.1 [CCSL 72] (Turnhout, 1959), 232; ‘Tractatus de Psalmo CVIIII’, in S. Hieronymi Presbyteri Opera 2 [CCSL 78] (Turnhout, 1958), 227–30. Hereafter Jerome, Tractatus. See also Marrow, James H., Passion Iconography in Northern European Art of the Late Middle Ages and Early Renaissance (Kortrijk, 1979), 104Google Scholar; Berliner, Rudolf, ‘Die Cedronbrücke als Station des Passionsweges Christi’, in Rudolph Berliner (1886–1967): ‘The Freedom of Medieval Art’ und andere Studien zum christlichen Bild, ed. Suckale, Robert (Berlin, 2003), 24Google Scholar.
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50 ‘Expositio in Psalmum CIX’, in Magni Aurelii Cassiodori Senatoris Opera 2.2 [CCSL 98] (Turnhout, 1958), 1012.
51 Fasciculus Mirre, Leiden, Bibliotheek der Rijksuniversiteit, Ms. Lett. 357, f. 113v, cited in Marrow, Passion Iconography, 106–7.
52 Ibid., 106. To Marrow's example – Bob Jones University Gallery, Greenville (inv. no. P64.336) – should be added Musée des Beaux-Arts, Tourcoing (inv. no. D335, dated 1630), and an example in a private collection (1639). The scene also appears in a betrayal image. See Härting, Ursula, Frans Francken der Jüngere (1581–1642): Die Gemälde mit kritischem Oeuvrekatalog (Freren, 1989), 281–2Google Scholar.
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55 Except at measures 23–25 for the tenors, for tessitura reasons; the first entry is a leap of a fourth.
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65 On musicians for the Carmelite Feasts, see Riepe, Händel vor dem Fernrohr, 237–8.
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