JMRA Collections: Ways of Writing About Pre-modern Musicians
Lisa Colton and Brianna Dolce
As musicologists invested in understanding not only the music produced before 1600, but also the musicians at the heart of that creative activity, we have curated this special issue to showcase ways of talking about musicians in the premodern era. The origin of articles in the meetings of the RMA mean that certain countries, repertories, objects of study, and methodological approaches were foregrounded; in particular, English musicians outnumber those of other nationalities by a considerable distance.
Early volumes of the PRMA paid little attention to musicians themselves, even though Sergison’s study of the training of church musicians argued that ‘the musical culture of the nation must always be a question of degree, according to the aims, abilities, and opportunities of individuals’.[1] Musicians were regularly treated as a general category, responsible for producing works that reflected national styles, interests, and religious activities; Lacy’s contribution on Irish music, for example, focused mainly on instrument technology, style, national character, scales, and melodies, rather than on composers or performers.[2] Biography played a relatively minor role in the journal during its early years, and the biographies of medieval and early modern musicians were a subset of those articles. The first early musician to whom a whole article was dedicated was Palestrina, interest in whom was stimulated by his role in the history of counterpoint.[3] A paper on Tallis was delivered to the RMA by Terry, but he did not supply it to Council, and it remains unpublished.[4] In the early decades of the twentieth century, a series of articles presented composer biographies of other figures: John Wilbye (1914), Thomas Weelkes (1915), John Merbecke (1918), John Dunstable (1920), and Orlando Gibbons (1924). Further articles explored anonymous and attributed works by musicians that were connected with possible ‘schools’ of composition, a convenient notion in which, for example, William Byrd’s influence might be seen as of primary importance within an Elizabethan National School of Virginal music.[5] The prevailing anonymity of English music before 1400 led to a similar case being made for the influence of Worcester on scribal and compositional activities elsewhere in England.[6]
The topics of many of these early contributions to PRMA, both those with a nationalist bent and otherwise, were not always benign. In addition to the significant number of contributions pertaining to early English music, other early volumes considered premodern music in other national centres, as well, including the Wallonian portion of Belgium (1900), Hungary (1902), and Spain (1906). The evidence of regional or national schools of activity was frequently based on a degree of nationalist or even racial stereotyping. One such example was Cohen’s 1892 contribution, ‘Ancient Musical Traditions of the Synagogue’, which set up an examination of Jewish religious practices with a series of claims about the disproportionately high number of Jewish orchestral musicians, set against the relatively small number of Jews within the overall population. The author, himself a rabbi, was keen to articulate the ways in which Jewish communities maintained a strong musical identity of their own, as might be distinguished from the musical traditions of their non-Jewish neighbours in the countries where they resided. However, in order to do so, Cohen pursued a problematic ideology (one typical of his time), in which he attempted to remove from consideration any music – medieval or modern – that might show influence of non-Jewish groups, including modern Christians and medieval Muslims, seeking instead a culturally consistent Jewish repertoire. His interest in the oldest examples of Synagogue music excluded the traditional music of Sephardic Jews, Iberian communities whose life in southern Spain had led to rich musical encounters with musicians of different faiths before – following the expulsion of 1492 – they were forced to migrate, including resettlement in North Africa.[7] A similar process of exclusion, also in the Iberian peninsula, is at play in De Lafontaine’s 1906 article, ‘Spanish Music’, in which the author glosses over and generalizes about ‘Arabic influence’ and ‘gipsy music’, all the while giving a thorough account of the entire history of Spanish music, including naming various specific musicians and composers.[8] More recent accounts have tended to focus on decentring individual musicians and emphasizing both plurality of style and porosity of boundaries. While this may seem a relatively recent phenomenon, we argue that it is amply demonstrated only three years later than Cohen’s contribution, in the work of Brownlow. It is for this reason that we have included Brownlow’s article here, and have selected it over work that foregrounds and values one individual, gender, or ethnically determined group in over others.
By the mid-twentieth century, the majority of contributions to the journal on the topic of early music concerned musicians’ biographies, particularly those who operated within the sphere of a particular composer. Baillie’s 1956 article on musicians in early modern London marked a turning point, contributing to a more collective understanding of musicians and their careers in the premodern period. Following Baillie, articles on late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century female musicians in Venice (1962), musicians employed by the English royal household (1963), and minstrels involved in the performance of religious music in England (1970) picked up the theme of collectivity. These studies valued an approach that relied heavily on archival and documentary evidence, which can also be seen in more recent contributions to the journal. Additionally, the volumes of the last thirty years suggest that scholars of premodern music have relied on other approaches (such as reconstructing lost works based on descriptions of performance, or using individual treatises as a window onto the medieval musical world) that centre the performer or listener, rather than the composer.
We have chosen to showcase six contributions that focus especially on the careers of musicians themselves, rather than on the styles of their works or the sources through which their music was disseminated. We feature work that considers networks of musicians, collectively engaged in creative activity through their association with a common patron, institution, or manuscript source, or with a common type of music making. These are not ‘schools’ of composers, led by a male genius (whether named or anonymous), but groups of professional artists, joined in a common endeavour. The articles are paired according to the following themes: how to narrate a history of musicians before 1400; types of musical profession during the late medieval and early modern periods; and specific groups or collections of musicians, and their networks of patronage.
The contributions of Ian Bent and Christopher Page exemplify different approaches to identifying musicians and delineating types of musical individuals pre-1400. In his study of the English Chapel Royal, Bent consults a wide range of source materials, including payment records, chronicles, and sources of liturgical chant, arguing that there were likely singers employed in the English royal household by the mid-twelfth century. In spending less time locating the identities of particular musicians, Bent betrays the limits of working with witnesses to musical life in the high medieval period by locating circumstantial evidence of music making (and thereby musicians). By contrast, Christopher Page takes a single theoretical treatise, the Tractatulus de differentiis et gradibus cantorum, as a window onto the musical fabric of northern Europe circa 1400. In consulting a single treatise, which outlines not only the different types of musicians (from amateur to professional) but also the importance of female musicians, Page demonstrates the breadth of possibility in later medieval sources, and places performers as a collective above theorists.
While Page's Tractatulus differentiates between musicians of varying skills, articles by Hugh Baillie and Helen Green shed light on specific types of musical professionals in the long fifteenth century: liturgical and civic musicians. Taking London as a case study, Baillie discusses how musicians, particularly parish clerks, self-organized in the period before the Reformation. Baillie elucidates the networks within which professional liturgical musicians operated, and uncovers not only their professional responsibilities, but also their influence on English theatre and drama. Focusing on early modern Germany, Green outlines the diverse roles and duties held by brass instrumentalists, which ranged from defending cities to representing civic interests through entertainment. Like Baillie, Green argues that the influence of these musicians extended far past their daily musical activities, showing how they interacted with political and social life, as well.
The final two articles featured in this special issue, authored by Jane Brownlow (1895) and Lynn Hulse (1991), consider specific collectives of musicians in early modern Italy and England. Brownlow's article explores early modern Florentine intellectuals, including not only musicians and poets such as Bardi, Galilei, Caccini, and Peri, but also a host of other artists. Importantly – and, arguably, well ahead of her time – Brownlow’s account steers the discussion away crediting the invention of opera to a particular genius, and instead strongly advocates for recognition of the collective enterprise of this circle of musicians, painters, actors, and others in achieving that outcome: ‘the world of the Bardi Coterie was,’ she argues, ‘emphatically a work of combination’.[9] Similarly, Hulse emphasizes the significance of Robert Cecil's patronage of household musicians, and ways in which they played a significant part in the life of the household. Cecil's most substantial contribution to music history, Hulse argues, was ‘providing security [ ... ] to experiment with the latest musical styles’, the result of which was a secure platform for composers to share their most innovative work with others.[10] Both essays remind us of the general historical importance of financial investment in arts and culture by individuals and institutions.
[1] W. de M. Sergison, ‘The Higher Training of Church Musicians and Choirs’, PRMA, 13 (1886), 17–39 (p. 17).
[2] F. St. John Lacy, ‘Notes on Irish Music’, PRMA, 16 (1889), 171–98.
[3] Henry Davey, ‘Giovanni Pierluigi, Da Palestrina,’ PRMA, 25 (1898), 47–69.
[4] R. R. Terry, ‘Side-Lights on Tallis,’ PRMA, 28 (1901), 139, reports only its delivery.
[5] Margaret H. Glyn, ‘The National School of Virginal Music in Elizabethan Times’, PRMA, 43 (1916), 29–49.
[6] Dom Anselm Hughes, ‘Worcester Harmony of the Fourteenth Century’, PRMA, 51 (1924), 15–37.
[7] Francis L. Cohen, ‘Ancient Musical Traditions of the Synagogue’, PRMA, 19 (1892), 137.
[8] Henry Cart De Lafontaine, ‘Spanish Music’, PRMA, 33 (1906), 27-43.
[9] Jane M. E. Brownlow, ‘The Bardi Coterie’, PRMA, 22 (1895), 111-127 (p. 124). The same issue included John Stainer’s examination of Oxford, Bodleian Library MS 213, in which he lists some sixty or so composers whose works are found in that manuscript;, ‘A Fifteenth-Century Manuscript Book of Vocal Musi in the Bodleian Library, Oxford’, PRMA, 22 (1895), 1–22.
[10] Lynn Hulse, ‘The Musical Patronage of Robert Cecil, First Earl of Salisbury (1563-1612)’, JRMA, 116 (1991), 22-40 (p. 40).