Music and the Renaissance

Renaissance, Reformation and Counter-Reformation

Philippe Vendrix

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351557498
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia mondiale

This volume unites a collection of articles which illustrate brilliantly the complexity of European cultural history in the Renaissance. On the one hand, scholars of this period were inspired by classical narratives on the sublime effects of music and, on the other hand, were affected by the profound religious upheavals which destroyed the unity of Western Christianity and, in so doing, opened up new avenues in the world of music. These articles offer as broad a vision as possible of the ways of thinking about music which developed in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

Part I
The Idea of a Musical Renaissance

[1]

MUSIC, HUMANISM, AND THE IDEA OF A ‘REBIRTH’ OF THE ARTS

By REINHARD STROHM

In memory of Hans Strohm (1908–98)

INTRODUCTION

THE following contribution seeks to identify the beginnings of the idea of a musical ‘Renaissance’ by evaluating testimonies of fifteenth-century humanists and musicians. That European music experienced a ‘Renaissance’ comparable to that of literature and the other arts is a proposition both familiar and controversial.¹ It will be argued here that this idea originated as a by-product of humanist reflections on the arts in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries; its anchorage in musical repertoires and discussions is more speculative. The earliest statements apparently suggesting a musical ‘renewal’, those of Martin Le Franc (c.1410–61) and Johannes Tinctoris (c.1435–1511), are well known. The former wrote (in c.1440–2) about a ‘novel practice’ (nouvelle pratique) of music; the latter, writing in 1477, welcomed a ‘new art’ (ars nova) of composition which had originated about forty years earlier, c.1437. Despite their notoriety, these statements have not been convincingly interpreted; their relationship with each other and with their common cultural background remains to be clarified. This background is a well-documented historiographical and philosophical discourse among humanists about the rebirth of Antiquity in eloquence and various arts.² A new appreciation of this discourse may facilitate critical and informed choices between challenging and supporting the Renaissance concept in music.

Nineteenth- and twentieth-century discussions of culture in the Renaissance record what may be called an ‘evolutionist’ view, which regards medieval (particularly fourteenth-century) precedent as a necessary preparation, and a ‘revivalist’ one, which accepts the humanist idea of a more or less sudden rebirth of Antiquity. According to a wide modern consensus, this humanist tendency of thought, whether a product of self-definition or arising from self-deception, was in itself real enough to justify the notion of a historical epoch called the ‘Renaissance’.³ But despite this and other intermediate solutions which have been proposed, the basic conflict between ‘evolutionism’ and ‘revivalism’ has remained unsettled.⁴ It assumes a special significance in the field of music. In the light of the fact that ancient music could not be recovered, can a case be made at all for a ‘rebirth’ of music along with literature and the other arts in the fifteenth century? Has it been made by contemporaries, and if so, how might this affect our understanding of a musical ‘Renaissance’?

References to musica are fairly frequent in the prose writings of Italian humanists. Before the early sixteenth century, however, most of them concern the ancient or academic status of music, its scientific or philosophical significance, or occasionally its modern daily practice as a pleasurable activity. The historiographical trope of the ‘rebirth’ (rinascita) of the arts and letters was at first not applied to music. Those who wrote about the ‘rebirth’ of an art, for example of poetry or of sculpture, assumed a historicizing position towards it, imagining its history as exemplified in memorable achievements or surviving ‘works’. To acknowledge the innovative achievements of composers in the same way, and to consider musical pieces as lasting products commanding the attention, at their own time or later, of listeners or readers, meant awarding music the status of an ars poetica—a work-creating discipline. This conceptual change happened, in fact, in the course of the fifteenth century. A case was made for a ‘renewal’ of the standards of music although no technical comparisons with ancient music were possible; compositional innovation and progress were applauded, and the humanist concept of the ars poetica was applied to musical compositions, leading to the idea of the ‘complete and transmittable (musical) work’—the opus perfectum et absolutum of Listenius.⁵

In order to illustrate this momentous conceptual change, a selection of contemporary writings will be considered: by authors who were primarily concerned with literature and the fine arts (see Appendix, Testimonia 1–12), and by those few who wrote specifically on music (Testimonia 13–17).

First of all, let us hear the testimony of an outsider. In 1408 the French humanist Nicolas de Clamanges (1355?–1437) wrote in a letter to Gontier Col that he accepted the Italian renewal of arts and letters as a model for his own country. Out of patriotism he had attempted to revive Latin eloquence in France:

I have endeavoured to achieve, to some extent, a rebirth of eloquence, which had long been buried in France, and to make it sprout again with new flowers, even if they cannot be compared with the original ones. I wished that France, as it is not inferior to other regions in other achievements, might also have some rhetorical skills, so that it could never be said to be devoid of them, even if it did not equal others.⁶

He added the general consideration:

The arts usually originate in an imperfect state, and are refined little by little through usage and expansion; thus they reach perfection when they have been more precisely elaborated and polished. The first inventor of the art of stone-masonry sculpted in a primitive manner, not with the same elegance of shape as did an Euphranor or Polyclitus.⁷

The first paragraph articulates nothing less than the humanist idea of a ‘rebirth’ of classical letters. It had already been formulated by the Florentines Petrarch, Boccaccio, and Salutati in the fourteenth century. Nicolas de Clamanges, their follower and emulator, uses the Latin verb renasci, ‘to be reborn’, to express exactly what his fellow-countryman Jules Michelet four and a half centuries later was to call ‘la Renaissance’.⁸ Nicolas agrees with the early Italian humanists when choosing eloquentia, the classical art of refined speaking and writing, as the tradition he wishes to revive. In the second paragraph, he suggests a general model of how perfection in art is reached, taking as example the development of Hellenic sculpture. This shows his humanist belief that eloquence and the fine arts have common or analogous histories. Since he confines his potted history of sculpture to Antiquity and does not mention later decline and renewal, his picture of a seamless development of sculpture by constant use and expansion (usu et incremento)⁹ to some extent contrasts with his history of eloquence, which is being ‘reborn’ after having been ‘buried’. Furthermore, Nicolas sees himself as a protagonist on behalf of the civilization of his own country. It is his belief in a bond between the arts that makes him wish to add eloquence to the other achievements of his country. These three ideas—the emphasis on a renewal of classical eloquence, the belief in a common bond between the arts, and the ideal of a national culture—are primary topics of early humanist literature.

Let us consider these issues one by one (see Testimonia (hereafter abbreviated ‘T.’) 1–12).

THE IMAGERY OF DECLINE, REBIRTH, AND SURVIVAL

The notion of an organic rise and decline in culture, associated with imageries of light and dark, the seasons, plant life, and human life, is widely used in history. But it took on a special meaning for Renaissance humanists, who extended it to imply a total rebirth or resurrection of culture, denying the finality of death or darkness.¹⁰ This idea was essentially compatible with Christian dogma and could be regarded as one of the philosophical links between Renaissance humanism and Christianity. The idea of a rebirth was in competition, however, with actual survival: the physical presence of objects surviving from the past, whether of medieval churches and codices or of classical statues and architectural monuments, required interpretation. Although Horace had dismissed the crude longevity of works of the ‘mechanical’ arts with his authorial and authoritative claim ‘Monumentum exegi aere perennius’ (‘I have erected a monument more perennial than bronze’), many Renaissance humanists were interested in the material conditions of survival, including that of manuscripts. A famous letter written in 1416 by Poggio Bracciolini to Guarino da Verona reporting his rediscovery, at St Gall, of precious codices of Valerius Flaccus, Cicero, and Quintilian,¹¹ depicts heartbreaking scenes in which these Latin authors themselves, languishing in exile and left to perish in the monastery’s horrid dungeon, were physically rescued from certain death. This story offered a successful model for narratives of survival and rebirth: barbaric medieval conditions had threatened the afterlives of the ancient monuments and documents. Enea Silvio Piccolomini, in turn, adduces the death-like or inhuman appearance of medieval art as evidence to condemn it (T. 4a), probably inspired by a remark by Filippo Villani on medieval wall-paintings which documents the decline of the arts with physical examples (T. 1).

The idea of a rebirth of classical learning was always connected with issues of personality, fame, and invention. The classical authors themselves had described history in such terms. Particularly influential were Cicero’s considerations of the development of rhetoric in the preface of De oratore (see below) and Quintilia...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Series Preface
• Introduction: Defining the Renaissance in Music
• Part I The Idea of a Musical Renaissance
• Part II Réforme and Contre-Réforme
• Name Index