Oxford History of Western Music: Richard Taruskin

Contents MUSIC FROM THE EARLIEST NOTATIONS TO THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY
Introduction
Chapter 1 The Curtain Goes Up
“Gregorian” Chant, the First Literate Repertory, and How It Got That Way
Literacy • The Romans and the Franks • The Carolingian Renaissance • The chant comes north • The legend of St.
Gregory • The origins of Gregorian chant • Monastic psalmody • The development of the liturgy • The Mass and its
music • Neumes • Persistence of oral tradition • Psalmody in practice: The Office • Psalmody in practice: The Mass •
Evidence of “oral composition” • Why we will never know how it all began • Beginnings, as far as we know them
Chapter 2 New Styles and Forms
Frankish Additions to the Original Chant Repertory
Longissimae melodiae • Prosa • Sequences • How they were performed • Hymns • Tropes • The Mass Ordinary •
Kyries • The full Franko-Roman Mass • “Old Roman” and other chant dialects • What is art?
Chapter 3 Retheorizing Music
New Frankish Concepts of Musical Organization and Their Effect on Composition
Musica • Tonaries • A new concept of mode • Mode classification in practice • Mode as a guide to composition •
Versus • Liturgical drama • Marian antiphons • Theory and the art of teaching
Chapter 4 Music of Feudalism and Fin’ Amors
The Earliest Literate Secular Repertories: Aquitaine, France, Iberia, Italy, Germany
Binarisms
AQUITAINE
Troubadours • Minstrels • High (Latinate) and low (“popular”) style • Rhythm and Meter • Trobar clus
FRANCE
Trouvères • Social transformation • Adam de la Halle and the formes fixes • The first opera?
GEOGRAPHICAL DIFFUSION
Cantigas • A note on instruments • Laude and related genres • Minnesang • Popularization, then and since •
Meistersinger • Peoples and nations • What is an anachronism? • Philosophy of History
Chapter 5 Polyphony in Practice And Theory
Early Polyphonic Performance Practices and the Twelfth-Century Blossoming of Polyphonic Composition
Another renaissance • “Symphonia” and its modifications • Guido, John, and discant • Polyphony in aquitanian
monastic centers • The Codex Calixtinus
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Chapter 6 Notre Dame de Paris
Parisian Cathedral Music in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries and Its Makers
The cathedral-university complex • Piecing the evidence together • Measured music • Whys and wherefores •
Organum cum alio • Theory or practice? • Conductus at Notre Dame
Chapter 7 Music for an Intellectual and Political Elite
The Thirteenth-Century Motet
A new class • The nascent motet • “Franconian” notation • Confluence of traditions • A new trobar clus? • Tenor
“families” • Color and talea • The art of mélange • The “Petronian” motet
Chapter 8 Business Math, Politics, and Paradise: The Ars Nova
Notational and Stylistic Change in Fourteenth-Century France: Isorhythmic Motets from Machaut to Du Fay
A “new art of music”? • Music from mathematics • Putting it into practice • Representing it • Backlash • Establishing
the prototype: The Roman de Fauvel • Taking a closer look • More elaborate patterning • Isorhythm • Music about
music • Machaut: The occult and the sensuous • Musica ficta • Cadences • Ciconia: The motet as political show • Du
Fay: The motet as mystical summa • A final word from Dante
Chapter 9 Machaut and His Progeny
Machaut’s Songs and Mass; Music at the Papal Court of Avignon; Ars Subtilior
Maintaining the art of courtly song • Redefining (and re-refining) a genre • The top-down style • Cantilena •
Functionally differentiated counterpoint • The luxuriant style • What instrumentalists Did • Machaut’s Mass and its
background • Avignon • Votive formularies • Ci commence la messe de nostre dame • Kyrie • Gloria • Dismissal •
Subtilitas • Canon • Ars Subtilior • Berry and Foix • Outposts • Faux-naïveté
Chapter 10 “A Pleasant Place”: Music of the Trecento
Italian Music of the Fourteenth Century
Vulgar eloquence • Madrigal culture • A new discant style • The “wild bird” songs • Ballata culture • Landini •
Late-century fusion • An important side issue: Periodization
Chapter 11 Island and Mainland
Music in the British Isles through the Early Fifteenth Century and Its Influence on the Continent
The first masterpiece? • Viking harmony • Insular fauna? • Pes motets and rondellus • The Worcester fragments •
Nationalism? • “English descant” • The beginnings of “functional” harmony? • Old Hall and Roy Henry • Fortunes of
war • Dunstable and the “contenance angloise” • Voluptuousness and how to acquire it • Fauxbourdon and faburden
• Du Fay and Binchois
Chapter 12 Emblems and Dynasties
The Cyclic Mass Ordinary Setting
The internationalism of the upper crust • The “Tinctoris generation” • The cyclic Mass • Cantus firmus as trope of
glory • “Caput” and the beginnings of four-part harmony • How controversies arise (and what they reveal) • Patterns
of emulation • The composer as virtuoso • Farther along the emulation chain • The Man at Arms • “Pervading
imitation” • An esthetic paradox (or, The paradox of “esthetics”) • Old and young alike pay tribute
Chapter 13 Middle and Low
The Fifteenth-Century Motet and Chanson; Early Instrumental Music; Music Printing
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547
585
629
691
753
797
835
849
855
865
Hailing Mary • Personal prayer • The English keep things high • The Milanese go lower still • Fun in church? • Love
songs • Instrumental music becomes literate at last • Music becomes a business • “Songs” without words
Chapter 14 Josquin and the Humanists
Josquin des Prez in Fact and Legend; Parody Masses
What legends do • A poet born, not made • Josquin as the spirit of a (later) age • Recycling the legend back into
music • What Josquin was really like • A model masterpiece • Parodies • Facts and myths
Chapter 15 A Perfected Art
Sixteenth-Century Church Music; New Instrumental Genres
All is known • The triad comes of age • “Il eccelentissimo Adriano” and his contemporaries • Gombert • Clemens •
Willaert and the art of transition • The progress of a method Academic art Spatialized form • Alternatives to
perfection • Peeking behind the curtain • Dances old and new
Chapter 16 The End of Perfection
Palestrina, Byrd, and the Final Flowering of Imitative Polyphony
Palestrina and the ecumenical tradition • Besting the Flemings; or, the last of the tenoristas • Parody pairs •
Palestrina and the bishops • Freedom and constraint • Cryogenics • Byrd • Church and state • The first English
cosmopolite • The music of defiance • Musical hermeneutics • The peak (and limit) of stylistic refinement
Chapter 17 Commercial and Literary Music
Vernacular Song Genres in Italy, Germany, and France; Lasso’s Cosmopolitan Career
Music printers and their audience • Vernacular song genres: Italy • Germany: The Tenorlied • The “Parisian” chanson
• Music as description • Lasso: The cosmopolite supreme • The literary revolution and the return of the madrigal •
“Madrigalism” in practice • Paradox and contradiction • Exterior “nature” and interior “affect” • Postscript: The
English madrigal
Music of the Lutheran Church; Venetian Cathedral Music
The challenge • The Lutheran chorale • The response • Augenmusik • “Concerted” music • The art of orchestration is
born • “Songs” for instruments
Chapter 19 Pressure of Radical Humanism
The “Representational” Style and the Basso Continuo; Intermedii; Favole in Musica
The technical, the esthetic, and the ideological • Academies • The representational style • Intermedii • The “monodic
revolution” • Madrigals and arias redux • Favole in musica • Oratorio
Notes
Index
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Oxford History of Western Music: Richard Taruskin
Introduction: The History of What? MUSIC FROM THE EARLIEST NOTATIONS TO THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY
The argument is no other than to inquire and collect out of the records of all time what particular kinds of learning and arts have flourished in what ages and regions of the world, their antiquities, their progresses, their migrations (for sciences migrate like nations) over the different parts of the globe; and again their decays, disappearances, and revivals; [and also] an account of the principal authors, books, schools, successions, academies, societies, colleges, orders—in a word, everything which relates to the state of learning. Above all things, I wish events to be coupled with their causes. All this I would have handled in a historical way, not wasting time, after the manner of critics, in praise and blame, but simply narrating the fact historically, with but slight intermixture of private judgment. For the manner of compiling such a history I particularly advise that the matter and provision of it be not drawn from histories and commentaries alone; but that the principal books written in each century, or perhaps in shorter periods, proceeding in regular order from the earliest ages, be themselves taken into consultation; that so (I do not say by a complete perusal, for that would be an endless labour, but) by tasting them here and there, and observing their argument, style, and method, the Literary Spirit of each age may be charmed as it were from the dead.
—Francis Bacon, de dignitate et augmentis scientiarum libri ix (1623)1
Mutatis mutandis, Bacon’s task was mine. He never lived to complete it; I have—but only by dint of a drastic narrowing of scope. My mutanda are stated in my title (one not chosen but granted; and for that honor I extend my thanks to the Delegates of the Oxford University Press). For “learning and the arts” substitute music. For “the different parts of the globe” substitute Europe, joined in Volume 3 by America. (That is what we still casually mean by “the West,” although the concept is undergoing sometimes curious change: a Soviet music magazine I once subscribed to gave news of the pianist Yevgeny Kissin’s “Western debut”—in Tokyo.) And as for antiquities, they hardly exist for music. (Jacques Chailley’s magnificently titled conspectus, 40,000 ans de musique, got through the first 39,000 years—I exaggerate only slightly—on its first page.2)
Still, as the sheer bulk of this offering attests, a lot was left, because I took seriously Bacon’s stipulations that causes be investigated, that original documents be not only cited but analyzed (for their “argument, style, and method”) and that the approach should be catholic and as near exhaustive as possible, based not on my preferences but on my estimation of what needed to be included in order to satisfy the dual requirement of causal explanation and technical explication. Most books that call themselves histories of Western music, or of any of its traditional “style periods,” are in fact surveys, which cover—and celebrate—the relevant repertoire, but make little effort truly to explain why and how things happened as they did. This set of books is an attempt at a true history.
Paradoxically, that means it does not take “coverage” as its primary task. A lot of famous music goes unmentioned in these pages, and even some famous composers. Inclusion and omission imply no judgment of value here. I never asked myself whether this or that composition or musician was “worth mentioning,” and I hope readers will agree that I have sought neither to advocate nor to denigrate what I did include.
But there is something more fundamental yet to explain, given my claim of catholicity. Coverage of all the musics that have been made in Europe and America is obviously neither the aim of this book nor its achievement. A glance at the table of contents will instantly confirm, to the inevitable disappointment and perhaps consternation of some, that “Western music” here means what it has always meant in general academic histories: it means what is usually called “art music” or “classical music,” and looks suspiciously
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is the sort of thing Eric Hobsbawm calls an “invented tradition,” whereby present interests construct a cohesive past to establish or legitimize present-day institutions or social relations. The hodgepodge of the classical canon—aristocratic and bourgeois music; academic, sacred and secular; music for public concerts, private soirées and dancing—achieves its coherence through its function as the most prestigious musical culture of the twentieth century.3
Why in the world would one want to continue propagating such a hodgepodge in the twenty-first century?
The heterogeneity of the classical canon is undeniable. Indeed, that is one of its main attractions. And while I reject Walser’s conspiracy-theorizing, I definitely sympathize with the social and political implications of his argument, as will be evident (for some—a different some—all too evident) in the many pages that follow. But that very sympathy is what impelled me to subject that impossibly heterogeneous body of music to one more (perhaps the last) comprehensive examination—under a revised definition that supplies the coherence that Walser impugns. All of the genres he mentions, and all of the genres that are treated in this book, are literate genres. That is, they are genres that have been disseminated primarily through the medium of writing. The sheer abundance and the generic heterogeneity of the music so disseminated in “the West” is a truly distinguishing feature—perhaps the West’s signal musical distinction. It is deserving of critical study.
By critical study I mean a study that does not take literacy for granted, or simply tout it as a unique Western achievement, but rather “interrogates” it (as our hermeneutics of suspicion now demands) for its consequences. The first chapter of this book makes a fairly detailed attempt to assess the specific consequences for music of a literate culture, and that theme remains a constant factor—always implicit, often explicit—in every chapter that follows, right up to (and especially) the concluding ones. For it is the basic claim of this multivolumed narrative—its number-one postulate—that the literate tradition of Western music is coherent at least insofar as it has a completed shape. Its beginnings are known and explicable, and its end is now foreseeable (and also explicable). And just as the early chapters are dominated by the interplay of literate and preliterate modes of thinking and transmission (and the middle chapters try to cite enough examples to keep the interplay of literate and nonliterate alive in the reader’s consciousness), so the concluding chapters are dominated by the interplay of literate and postliterate modes, which have been discernable at least since the middle of the twentieth century, and which sent the literate tradition (in the form of a backlash) into its culminating phase.
This is by no means to imply that everything within the covers of these volumes constitutes a single story. I am as suspicious as the next scholar of what we now call metanarratives (or worse, “master narratives”). Indeed, one of the main tasks of this telling will be to account for the rise of our reigning narratives, and show that they too have histories with beginnings and (implicitly) with ends. The main ones, for music, have been, first, an esthetic narrative—recounting the achievement of “art for art’s sake,” or (in the present instance) of “absolute music”—that asserts the autonomy of artworks (often tautologically insulated by adding “insofar as they are artworks”) as an indispensable and retroactive criterion of value and, second, a historical narrative—call it “neo-Hegelian”—that celebrates progressive (or “revolutionary”) emancipation and values artworks according to their contribution to that project. Both are shopworn heirlooms of German romanticism. These romantic tales are “historicized” in volume III, the key volume of the set, for it furnishes our intellectual present with a past. This is done in the fervent belief that no claim of universality can survive situation in intellectual history. Each of the genres that Walser names has its own history, moreover, as do the many that he does not name, and it will be evident to all readers that this narrative devotes as much attention to a congeries of “petits récits”—individual accounts of this and that—as it does to the epic sketched in the foregoing paragraphs. But the overarching trajectory of musical literacy is nevertheless a part of all the stories, and a particularly revealing one.
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*****
The first thing that it reveals is that the history narrated within these covers is the history of elite genres. For until very recent times, and in some ways even up to the present, literacy and its fruits have been the possession—the closely guarded and privileging (even life-saving) possession—of social elites: ecclesiastical, political, military, hereditary, meritocratic, professional, economic, educational, academic, fashionable, even criminal. What else, after all, makes high art high? The casting of the story as the story of the literate culture of music turns it willy-nilly into a social history—a contradictory social history in which progressive broadening of access to literacy and its attendant cultural perquisites (the history, as it has sometimes been called, of the democratization of taste), is accompanied at every turn by a counterthrust that seeks to redefine elite status (and its attendant genres) ever upward. As most comprehensively documented by Pierre Bourdieu, consumption of cultural goods (and music, on Bourdieu’s showing, above all) is one of the primary means of social classification (including self- classification)—hence, social division—and (familiar proverbs notwithstanding) one of the liveliest sites of dispute in Western culture.4 Most broadly, contestations of taste occur across lines of class division, and are easiest to discern between proponents of literate genres and nonliterate ones; but within and among elites they are no less potent, no less heated, and no less decisively influential on the course of events. Taste is one of the sites of contention to which this book gives extensive, and, I would claim, unprecedented coverage, beginning with chapter 4 and lasting to the bitter end.
Indeed, if one had to be nominated, I would single out social contention as embodied in words and deeds—what cultural theorists call “discourse” (and others call “buzz” or “spin”)—as the paramount force driving this narrative. It has many arenas. Perhaps the most conspicuous is that of meaning, an area that was for a long time considered virtually off limits to professional scholarly investigation, since it was naively assumed to be a nonfactual domain inasmuch as music lacks the semantic (or “propositional”) specificity of literature or even painting. But musical meaning is no more confinable to matters of simple semantic paraphrase than any other sort of meaning. Utterances are deemed meaningful (or not) insofar as they trigger associations, and in the absence of association no utterance is intelligible. Meaning in this book is taken to represent the full range of associations encompassed by locutions such as “If that is true, it means that …,” or “that’s what M-O-T-H-E-R means to me,” or, simply, “know what I mean?” It covers implications, consequences, metaphors, emotional attachments, social attitudes, proprietary interests, suggested possibilities, motives, significance (as distinguished from signification)…and simpl e…