Both from the Ears and Mind

Thinking about Music in Early Modern England

Linda Phyllis Austern

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780226704678
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Música

Both from the Ears and Mind offers a bold new understanding of the intellectual and cultural position of music in Tudor and Stuart England. Linda Phyllis Austern brings to life the kinds of educated writings and debates that surrounded musical performance, and the remarkable ways in which English people understood music to inform other endeavors, from astrology and self-care to divinity and poetics. Music was considered both art and science, and discussions of music and musical terminology provided points of contact between otherwise discrete fields of human learning. This book demonstrates how knowledge of music permitted individuals to both reveal and conceal membership in specific social, intellectual, and ideological communities. Attending to materials that go beyond music's conventional limits, these chapters probe the role of music in commonplace books, health-maintenance and marriage manuals, rhetorical and theological treatises, and mathematical dictionaries. Ultimately, Austern illustrates how music was an indispensable frame of reference that became central to the fabric of life during a time of tremendous intellectual, social, and technological change.

CHAPTER ONE

Praise, Blame, and Persuasion

“Of Musicke by Way of Disputation”

In 1589, London printer Thomas East published six separate parts in broadsheet of a song titled “A gratification unto Master John Case, for his learned booke, lately made in the praise of Musicke” (fig. 1.1, bassus part). The poet Thomas Watson, the leading English translator of Italian madrigal verse, provided the text. William Byrd, joint holder of the patent under which the piece was printed at a time of tremendous activity in the English music trade, contributed the music. This charming part-song has received scant attention from modern scholars. Only two of its original broadsheets remain along with a copy of a third; the poem also survives in a manuscript verse miscellany.1 In fact, this “Gratification” has garnered most comment in the context of the long-standing controversy surrounding authorship of the anonymous 1586 treatise The Praise of Musicke, for which the man to whom Watson addressed his poem was once a leading contender.2 The learned Oxford physician, Aristotelian philosopher, and former chorister John Case certainly praised music in his Apologia musices of 1588 and, to a lesser extent, in his Sphaera civitatis of the same year. Careful consideration has cast doubt on his authorship of the vernacular Praise, although Byrd and other contemporaries may have promulgated the presumption. All three treatises were printed and sold by Oxford bookseller Joseph Barnes, with whose ventures East had no professional connection.3 Byrd, Watson, and East’s collaborative product deserves another look in light of the rhetorical and dialectical engagement with music it shares with these three treatises and with a wide range of other items across media and communities of discourse. This “Gratification” is more than a tribute to a single author for a work in a contrasting genre and print format, or even a multimedia advertisement for an independently produced book. It is not simply a paean to music, which alone would connect it to an ancient tradition made modern at a time of renewed interest in the powers of the art. It is a means through which three men with vested interest in the mass-market music business could profit from an increasingly widespread debate about the art and its place in contemporary English society. Its format as the cheapest and most ephemeral print commodity, often associated with timeliness and broad appeal, may relate to the perceived topicality and commercial potential of praising music in any medium.

Figure 1.1 William Byrd, “A gratification unto Master John Case,” bassus. The Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, MS Don.a.3 (3).

Reconstructed by Philip Brett from its three surviving parts, Byrd’s setting of Watson’s text is typical of English part-song from the late sixteenth century. It is through-composed and pays careful, but not unusual, attention to the accentuation and meaning of its words. It is predominantly syllabic with the limited vocal ranges that appeal to many sorts of singers, and it is polyphonic with ever-changing texture to retain interest and continuous motion. The song’s rhythms mostly follow the idiosyncratic speech patterns of the English language. Here and there, the composer makes clever use of such conventional devices as melisma, word-painting, suspension, and passing-tone dissonance. For example, alternating treble statements hover purposefully “above the rest” of the lower voices (mm. 6–15). The cited “Scithian” is truly “barbarous” from an aesthetic and compositional perspective (mm. 26–35). Each sphere turns gently in its own musical space (mm. 48–52), and the very name of “Marsia[s]” wants musical skill through its expression of that most dissonant harmonic interval, the tritone (m. 75).4 Perhaps more importantly, notes and words together draw attention to the suitability of music as a topic for the formal rhetorical exercise of praise and for location of the art between discourse and embodied practice. Especially in combination with Byrd’s notes, Watson’s text convinces the listener (or performer) of the correctness of his argument; to counter it literally opens an interlocutor to the charge of senseless barbarism. By drawing attention to a longer prose work through its own reiteration of a few well-known Western anecdotes on music and by the first-person immediacy of each singer’s individual voice, the piece invites personal engagement not only with Case’s “learned booke” but also with its topic. Byrd’s clever madrigalisms may also remind the listener that the combination of word, music, and especially wit were believed to engage the senses and activate the passions that bridged the faculties of sensation and intellect.

Like countless other learned Elizabethans, Byrd, Case, Watson, and the author of The Praise of Musicke were thoroughly steeped in a tradition of formulaic argument about music as familiar to the literate classes as their own schoolbooks. It was as old as other rhetorical traditions they revered. It was also as fresh and urgent as the social and religious changes that influenced current musical practice. This stylized topical verbal exercise reached from learned Latin treatises through vernacular sermons to emblem books to text-only broadsides to conduct manuals to at least one set of manuscript music partbooks.5 Written or spoken for any purpose and on any subject, words suggested not only sonority but also conviction for a culture still steeped in oral/aural learning. “Wordes are voyces framed with hart and toung, uttering the thoughtes of the mynde,” explains an early vernacular Art of Reason.6 Whether intended to be set to notes or to stand alone, words about music added an intellectual dimension to the art. They distanced it from sensory pleasure and manual labor. They also brought it into closer contact with the pristine arts of contemplation, the ancient privileging of musical discernment above performance, and the three liberal arts of verbal persuasion: grammar, dialectic, and especially rhetoric. Boethius’s authoritative De institutione musica, which remained the standard academic text on music through the early modern era, had not only divided (higher) speculative music from (lower) practical music. It also ranked practitioners, privileging those who had the capacity to judge performance above those who played, sang, or composed.7 Argument about music was both a preparative to such judgment and a way to dispose listeners favorably to specific performance practices and compositional styles. Such argument was also a way to frame embodied skill with classical erudition and bridge the increasingly anachronistic gap between speculative and practical participation in music.

In a much-neglected passage, Byrd’s most famous pupil, Thomas Morley, presents musical disputation ahead of sight singing in his Plaine and Easie Introduction to Practicall Musicke, which remained in continuous use from 1597 until after 1771. In the opening dialogue, Polymathes asks his friend Philomathes to “repeat some of the discourses which [he] had yester night at master Sophobulus his banket.” The latter replies not only that the topic of the symposium had been music but that one “wise and learned guest” had “fall[en] to discourse of Musicke,” at which point others joined in debate. It was only after this formal disputation that the host’s wife presented guests with partbooks from which to sing.8 Lodovico da Canossa, the great champion of music in the most widely circulating and influential conduct manual of the early modern period—Baldassarre Castiglione’s Il libro del cortegiano—not only outlines familiar arguments in support of music before prescribing a practical program for the ideal courtier; he also methodically confutes Gasparo Pallavicino’s carefully articulated case against such training.9 The 1598 English-language version of Aristotle’s Politics titles book 8, chapter 5, “Of Musicke by way of disputation, and how children should learn it.” This brings the reader into the ancient philosopher’s recommended program of musical training only after properly debating the merits of the topic, exactly what we see in Castiglione’s and Morley’s dialogues.10 London’s Gresham College required from its foundation in 1597 that “The solemn musick lecture is to be read twice every week, in the manner following, viz., the theoretique part for half an hour, or thereabouts; and the practique by concent of voice or of instruments, for the rest of the hour.”11 In such ways, the ancient liberal-arts tradition of music became an intellectual preparative to performance and aural judgment. The truly learned individual was expected to move between them.

Praise and Dispraise (of Music): Discourse, Dialectic, Disputation

Watson’s text, Case’s Apologia, and The Praise of Musicke all belong to an ancient encomiastic tradition in which speakers (or writers) first emphasized the importance of music as a subject for the listener’s (or reader’s) attention and then praised its essence, significance, and effects. It was a topical subgenre of the classical encomium, a hybrid of overlapping rhetorical genres intended to defend any person or topic the speaker deemed worthy of attention. “Praise nothing that is not commendable, nor dispraise aught that is praise worthy,” commands Edwardian and Elizabethan Gentleman of the Chapel Thomas Palfryeman (d. 1589) on the authority of Marcus Aurelius. In practice, the encomium often merged with the exordium, another laudatory genre in which the speaker disposes the audience favorably to the given topic. The encomium also overlapped with other rhetorical genres, most notably the Latin genus demonstrativum, which includes subcategories of both praise and blame.12 Music was only one potential focus of the generic rhetorical attack or defense; Watson’s verse reminds us that the choice of topic was open when he leaves “others [to] praise what seemes them best.” Music became an especially popular subject for praise and dispraise in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England when the art drew fire for its use in such contested venues as church, theater, and alehouse and in such increasingly controversial practices as May games and Morris dance. The musical focus of this kind of literary exercise, and conversely its influence on the circulation of music itself, has only begun to receive the scholarly attention it deserves.13 Representative examples crossed media into visual imagery and performable music and range in length from single broadsheets such as the parts of “A Gratification” to the 152 octavo-size pages plus prefatory material of The Praise of Music. The adhortation and dehortation of music also came to engage a wider range of linguistic skills than rhetoric alone, especially as interlocutors “by way of disputation” made use of dialectical methods.

Formal works in praise of music overlap with those that enumerate the powers of the art or describe its ancient significance. Both rely on a common stock of stories detailing past marvels and daily use in Greco-Roman, biblical, and early Christian cultures. However, they belong to fundamentally distinct literary genres. From antiquity through the early modern era, commendations of music usually began with a history of the subject followed by an enumeration of current, often deplorable, conditions that have opened it to attack. They grabbed the reader’s or listener’s attention by deploying familiar anecdotes about the powers and importance of music and its proper practice. Many formal commendations are structured as responses to real or imagined detractors who denounce music in general or criticize some aspect of its current use, such as Watson’s statement that Case blamed “the senceles foole, & Barbarous Scithian, of our dayes” (emphasis mine) for any ill repute music had acquired by the late 1580s. Castiglione’s earlier Counte (Lewis of Canossa) takes the opposite rhetorical approach when he cuts off L(ord) Gaspar’s harsh critique of the art’s recreational use among noblemen in Thomas Hoby’s English translation of Il libro del cortegiano. “Speake it not,” he says firmly before promising to “enter into a large sea of the praise of Musicke, and call to rehearsal how much it hath always bene renowmed emong the[m] of old time.”14 Aristotle explains of the most ancient form of encomium that “Praise is the expression in words of the eminence of a man’s good qualities. . . . To praise a man is in one respect akin to urging a course of action.”15 Perhaps more importantly, he proclaims that “we must also take into account the nature of our particular audience when making a speech of praise.”16 The same became true of music. To praise or blame music was to urge a course of action by a specific audience left with the imperative to accept the speaker’s argument.

The impassioned Praise of Musicke and Case’s more detached Apologia musices, though written from contrasting viewpoints and for different audiences, are roughly contemporaneous book-length prose examples not only of the specifically musical encomium but the general literary form. Neither is a practical treatise for the would-be musician nor a summation of knowledge for the historian-critic. Neither is a work of philosophy or theology nor a comprehensive tract for students of the quadrivium of numerical arts that included music. However, both books acknowledge these facets of music, plus many others, in the sort of rhetorical collation dating back at least as far as Quintilian and with deeper roots in ancient Greek controversies.17 The vernacular Praise sets out from its title page to reiterate the civil and especially ecclesiastical importance of music by citing arguments borrowed from a wide range of classical and early Christian writers plus the sixteenth-century English humanist Sir Thomas Elyot. The work sparkles with anecdotes from ancient myth and zoology. In the finest Reformation tradition, the author also pays homage to biblical authority whenever possible and appropriate...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. Praise, Blame, and Persuasion: “Of Musicke by Way of Disputation”
• 2. Debating Godly Music: Sober and Lawful Christian Use
• 3. Harmony, Number, and Proportion
• 4. To Please the Ear and Satisfy the Mind
• 5. “Comfortable . . . in Sicknes and in Health”: Music to Temper Self and Surroundings
• Plates
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index