humanism in italian renaissance musical thoughtby claude v. palisca

Humanism in Italian Renaissance Musical Thought by Claude V. PaliscaReview by: Barbara R. HanningJournal of the American Musicological Society, Vol. 40, No. 2 (Summer, 1987), pp. 337-343Published by: University of California Press on behalf of the American Musicological SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/831520 .

Accessed: 12/06/2014 21:34

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

University of California Press and American Musicological Society are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize,preserve and extend access to Journal of the American Musicological Society.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 195.34.79.223 on Thu, 12 Jun 2014 21:34:18 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=ucal

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=amusoc

http://www.jstor.org/stable/831520?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


REVIEWS

Claude V. Palisca. Humanism in Italian Renaissance Musical Thought. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1985. xiii, 471 pp.

Humanism in Italian Renaissance Musical Thought by Claude Palisca is the climax of scholarly labors pursued over more than twenty-five years. Yet it is not just a retrospective study summarizing the research of Palisca and others. It is a pioneering work that both confirms old connections between humanism and Italian Renaissance musical thought through fresh documen- tation and suggests new ways of thinking about the musical Renaissance as a whole. While Palisca acknowledges his debt to Lowinsky, Pirrotta, Schrade, Walker, and others, he is concerned here almost entirely with primary sources. As he modestly states in his preface, "this book aims to document the debt that Renaissance musical thought owes to ancient, particularly Greek, musical thought and to trace its path of transmission in Italy." In fact, by means of original and insightful juxtaposition and explication of his sources, he advances our understanding and appreciation of musical humanism to a degree that, given the lack of musical examples from antiquity, might have been thought impossible to achieve, and thereby transforms our conception of the Renaissance in music.

After two introductory chapters, to be further explored later, the book falls roughly into two halves, which differ somewhat in procedure. The first half, chapters 3 through 7, presents the early humanists or translators of classical texts-Pietro d'Abano, Giorgio Valla, Carlo Valgulio, Giovanni Francesco Burana, Nicol6 Leoniceno, Giovanni Battista Augio, and Antonio Gogava--devoting a separate section to each individual. The second half, chapters 8 through 14, is organized not by individual author but by topic, tracing through several generations of Italian music theorists the transmission and modification of ancient learning about particular subjects-celestial harmony, musical science and acoustics, the modes, music and language, poetics, and dramatic music. Unlike the first half, which presents authors and translators some of whom have never been studied before, the second half treats familiar figures. But Gaffurio, Spataro, Fogliano, Zarlino, Salinas, Mei, Galilei, and others are considered here in a new, carefully documented, historical perspective, clarifying their relationship to both classical sources and contemporary writers and determining the degree to which they advanced new solutions to ancient problems. Thus Zarlino, for example, appears as a sub-heading in three different chapters in the second half, as his teachings on cosmic and human music, on the nature of sound and consonance, and on the modes are placed in the context of those of his predecessors and contemporaries.

Among the music theorists who were prominent in Renaissance Italy, only Gaffurio (in addition to being included with sub-headings in three of the chapters that deal with specific topics) receives a single chapter (chapter 9)



338 JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN MUSICOLOGICAL SOCIETY

devoted entirely to his writings. Although Palisca does not explain his reasons for departing from the general plan of the book in order to concentrate on a single figure in this second half, it becomes clear that his purpose-to reconstruct and evaluate Gaffurio's grasp and transmission of classical authors-could not have been efficiently accomplished within the chapters organized by topic. Since Gaffurio, despite his ignorance of Greek, "was the [fifteenth-century music theorist] most assiduous in seeking out classical sources" (p. 191), Palisca entitles his chapter "Gaffurio as a Humanist," thus linking him to the figures discussed in the first half of the book, some of whom supplied Gaffurio with Latin translations at his request. Also, because he was the first Italian music theorist (as opposed to the general scholars and translators) to synthesize and pass on to Zarlino and others the known corpus of ancient musical thought, Palisca takes pains to present him to us in a way that would not have been possible or even desirable in the case of the other music theorists.

Less clear is the rationale for placing the Gaffurio chapter after chapter 8- the first to focus on a topic (music of the spheres) rather than an individual author, and one which in fact opens by quoting from Gaffurio's De harmonia. The ensuing references in chapter 8 to Gaffurio's many works would have been easier to follow had the reader been provided here with a list of his writings and their dates. Such a list is provided in chapter 9, the Gaffurio chapter. Had this preceded the eighth it would also have formed a logical culmination for the first half of the book, since many of the Renaissance authors and translators presented there-Burana, Leoniceno, Ficino, d'Abano-either had worked at Gaffurio's behest or had independently made ancient Greek authors accessible to him via Latin translations.

The roster of music theorists included in the latter part of the book deserves some comment. Many are authors whom Palisca himself has resurrected or about whom he has previously written-Erasmus, Benedetti, Zarlino, Mei, Galilei, Bardi. Glareanus is mentioned only in passing, presumably because he was not Italian and did not have access to the ancient sources located in Italy. Tinctoris, on the other hand, although a North- erner, wrote his counterpoint treatise in Naples, undoubtedly at the request of his Italian patron or the circle associated with the Neapolitan court. He is therefore admitted into the brotherhood of Italian humanists along with the Spaniards Ramos de Pareja and Salinas, who also spent time in Italy. Among those whose work Palisca discusses, only Erasmus of Horitz, one of the participants in the Boethian revival, cannot be proved to have lived in Italy, although his treatise was dedicated to Cardinal Domenico Grimani.

No review could possibly do justice to the abundant material presented in each chapter of this book. The introductory two chapters, however, merit special mention because of the importance of their material for every historian and student of music theory. In the first, Palisca tackles the fundamental question of the nature of the Italian musical Renaissance. Adopting a revisionist position vis-a-vis those music historians who, in his view, have overlooked certain manifestations of the Renaissance in music "because their stated objective has been a history of musical style," he argues that "style is only the audible surface of a musical culture, the essence of which must be sought beneath" (pp. 4-5). Therefore, even though a common view holds that Renaissance music was originally a northern phenomenon,



REVIEWS 339 Palisca maintains that the style actually received its first impetus in Italy, as it had in literature and the visual arts. He attributes the origins of an inadequate concept of a musical Renaissance to Heinrich Besseler, who, following Jacob Burckhardt, stressed the notion of secular individualism at the expense of other factors. Rejecting Leo Schrade's definition of Renais- sance as a rebirth independent of any revival of antiquity, Palisca allies himself with Paul Oscar Kristeller's view, which emphasizes "classical humanism" as "the most characteristic and pervasive intellectual current of that period" (p. 6).1 "Humanism" throughout Palisca's study refers specifi- cally to the learning or cultural impulse rooted in a revival of classical letters; and a "musical humanist" is one who draws on ancient Greek and Latin sources in an individualistic and critical spirit and employs them as a basis for his own writing on music. Thus Palisca tacitly dinstinguishes between "the early translators" of his chapter 6 (Burana, Leoniceno, and Augio), who worked at the request of authors like Gaffurio-a humanist by virtue of his determination to incorporate ancient learning into his own teachings-and "the earliest musical humanists" of his chapters 3-5 (d'Abano, Valla, and Valgulio), who not only knew Greek and translated ancient treatises themselves but then proceeded to interpret and comment on them in their own original works about music.

Insisting on the revival of classical learning as a touchstone for the musical Renaissance, Palisca holds that the movement began in Italy where, particularly with the establishment in Mantua in 1424 of Vittorino da Feltre's curriculum, music first came of age as an intellectual discipline. Italian patrons spurred the development by collecting ancient manuscripts, by subsidizing both translation and copying of the manuscripts, and eventually by paying for the printing of both the translations and the new treatises inspired by them.

These new treatises embraced not only speculative music but counterpoint, composition, and performance as well. In pointing this out, Palisca modifies the common view that Renaissance musical style, transmitted by northern composers to Italy, was merely cultivated and codified there in its received form. He maintains rather that "the very process of devising rules" led the Italian-based theorist Tinctoris-often adduced as an important link between north and south-to refine and purify the art of such awkward northern practices as fauxbourdon, uncontrolled dissonance, and linear angularity. In this Tinctoris was influenced by his Neapolitan patron, King Ferrante I, or more precisely, by the many classical treatises in his library. Other Italian composer-teachers and scholars such as Del Lago, Spataro, Aron, and, in another realm, Bembo, in their turn influenced Italianized masters such as Willaert. Palisca's challenge to "the myth that counterpoint was primarily a Netherlandish phenomenon" (p. io), convincing as far as it goes, might have been strengthened by discussing Josquin's relationship to his Italian patrons. Indeed, Josquin seems slighted in Palisca's more

SSee Kristeller, Studies in Renaissance Thought and Letters (Rome, 1956), p. I2; also Jacob Burckhardt, Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien (Basel, I860); Heinrich Besseler, "Das Renais- sanceproblem in der Musik," Archiv fiir Musikwissenschaft 22 (1966): I-Io; and Leo Schrade, "Renaissance: the Historical Conception of an Epoch," Kongress-Bericht der Internationale Gesell- schaftfiir Musikwissenschaft, Utrecht 1952 (Amsterdam, 1953), PP. 19-32.




macrocosmic scheme. Nevertheless, the broad cultural perspective is well taken and bears frequent repetition in the modern classroom where the history of music is too often reduced to an examination of cadential formulas. In Palisca's view, "Renaissance music is not a set of compositional techniques but a complex of social conditions, intellectual states of mind, attitudes, aspirations, habits of performers, artistic support systems, intracultural communication, and many other such ingredients, which add up to a thriving matrix of musical energy" (pp. 5-6).

The remainder of chapter I is devoted to an overview of the fundamental issues that were raised by the renewal of musical learning in Italy and the changes that gradually resulted from it: the resurgence of interest in the nature of the modes, the regulation of counterpoint and the control of dissonance, the revival of rhetoric and the relation between text and music, the transformation of theories about cosmic and human music, and the emancipation of harmony from numerical theory. Chapter 2 continues to delineate the broad picture by tracing the rediscovery and acquisition of the ancient sources, summarizing the state of knowledge about Greek music theory at the end of the Middle Ages, and assessing the impact of the revelations flowing from each freshly discovered or newly analyzed manu- script. After describing the important library holdings of the assiduous Renaissance collectors, and identifying their users, Palisca concludes that, while almost the entire corpus of ancient writings on music had been recovered by the mid-fifteenth century, the abundance of such sources by the mid-sixteenth century meant that "in Rome, Venice, Florence, and perhaps Urbino and Milan, it was possible for a scholar to locate at least one copy of any of the principal Greek music treatises" (p. 35). He explains the problematic lag-"not as great as it has been thought"-between literary and musical humanism by noting that, whereas the early humanist movement was based in the study of Greek and Latin verbal texts, few musical examples survived; the study of theoretical music was neglected in the university, since music was traditionally a subdivision of mathematics within the quadrivium, and no university chair in mathematics existed in fourteenth-century Italy (pp. 23-24). Then, too, the revival of Euclid's geometry, which was to revolutionize the calculation of intervals of the vibrating string, was not accomplished until the late fifteenth century. Piecing together an enormous array of facts, Palisca also re-evaluates the nature of Boethius' work on music and demonstrates in what respects his picture of the Greek tonal system was misunderstood by medieval authors and later subjected to modification by the progressively enlightened Renaissance theorists.

The rest of the book copiously documents the process of rediscovery, reclamation, and reinterpretation of the past outlined in brief in these two more general, introductory chapters. This is accomplished by extracting, quoting, translating, and interpreting hundreds of passages from the original sources, all of which are imbedded in a connective tissue of history and criticism that makes of the work much more than an anthology of Italian musical humanism. To select from the body of original sources which passages to isolate, reorder, and anthologize was in itself a considerable feat. By shaping a new and organic whole around these passages-one which conveys the sweeping development as well as the debated details of Italian



REVIEWS 34I

Renaissance musical thought over two centuries-Palisca has created a model work of historical musicology.

In presenting these ancient and Renaissance thinkers to the modern reader, he adopted throughout both parts of the book a combination of paraphrase and translation. As he says in his preface, "since none of them wrote in English, I wanted to let the reader experience the power of their own words. . ." (p. xii). That simple goal occasions perhaps the most impressive and ambitious aspect of the study: its philological scope and complexity. Each of the chronological layers in the transmission of the relevant texts had to be uncovered and explored with the precision of an archaeologist. Although each layer is not placed before the reader in every case, the levels at which Palisca has examined each example, when possible and appropriate, may be summarized as follows: i) original Greek source, 2) Latin and/or Italian translation(s), 3) rendition into modern English, 4) paraphrase and commentary, 5) comparison with other editions/translations.

The initial stage of Palisca's philological task involves uncovering the first stratum, i.e., locating the particular Greek source that a certain Renaissance translator or author probably used. After evaluating its accuracy and completeness, he proceeds to the second level: a commentary on the Latin translation from the original Greek. Here he discusses such matters as the fidelity and felicity of the translation and the degree to which the ancient concepts were correctly understood, glossed, and transmitted by a Renais- sance author. Also at this level, Palisca compares all extant translations from the same period of a particular source. For example, in evaluating Leoniceno's and Augio's translations of Ptolemy's Harmonics, he finds Augio's more modern, clearer, and more accurate, although he notes that both scholars obscure Ptolemy's explanation of the location and medial function of mese (p. I23ff.). That is, Palisca sees translation as more than a necessary tool; he subjects it to intense scrutiny in order to judge how well a particular example performed its function as an "essential bridge between the Greek theoretical heritage and late Renaissance musical thought."

At the third level Palisca renders the Latin (or, for the later authors, the Italian) text into English, in some cases conveying the style as well as the sense of the original. For example, in order to suggest the awkwardness of Leoniceno's Latin translation of Ptolemy, Palisca's English retains the Latin word order, thereby achieving "a certain loss of idiomatic quality." The translations appear in parallel columns with the original text, corresponding line for line whenever possible. The translations themselves, about which Palisca consulted various experts graciously acknowledged in his preface, are generally readable, sometimes even charming.2 (Only twice in the roughly

2 A good example is the learned Carlo Valgulio's retort to an anonymous opponent of music: "Who would have ever thought that he could discover a man who is so boorish, savage, and grim or so stupid, dull, and vile that he hates musical songs, whether issuing from the human voice or instruments, .... Nothing in the human species exists that is more joyful and sweet, nothing that is more blessed" (p. ioi). "If, with the help and resources of music, we attain a motion of our souls similar to the celestial revolutions, we shall maintain constancy and we shall enjoy happiness and an almost heavenly grace. . . Therefore anyone who loves peace, tranquility, harmony, and happiness in himself and within the household walls and in the city must have, cultivate, venerate, and embrace music with all effort and zeal and with it musicians too" (pp. o03-4).




200 passages rendered into English was I struck by an incongruous wording: on p. 55 the Latin tinitus is translated as "jingle," which is more ambiguous in its associations for the modern reader than "ringing" [used elsewhere]; and on p. 231 paniculae might be more appropriately translated as "swellings" or even "panicles" rather than "breadbaskets," which makes no sense in the anatomical context in which it occurs).

Although this primary material constitutes approximately one quarter of the volume (excluding the first two, introductory chapters), it is not relegated to a series of appendices but is wisely imbedded in a commentary that elucidates the context and content of each of the quoted sources. With the authority of one who has successfully penetrated the mysteries of an erudite vocabulary, Palisca frequently glosses and paraphrases the literal English translation of technical passages in order to render them more readily comprehensible to a reader less familiar with the terminology. A case in point is that of modal theory. Sorting out the discrepancies between the medieval, Renaissance, and modern interpretations of the ancient modes is no mean feat and Palisca generally succeeds admirably in making intelligible to the modern student the intricacies of the several stages of their transmission, probably the most difficult subject in the volume.3 The task, then, expertly accomplished, of paraphrasing and explicating those passages selected for translation, constitutes the fourth level of the study.

The philological dimension of Palisca's work expands to virtuosic propor- tions at the fifth level of linguistic criticism, as he frequently glosses and interprets the meaning of a word or the transmission of a concept in light of more recent scholarship. For instance, the standard modern English translation of an excerpt from the Aristotelian De audibilibus is found to be less accurate than the Renaissance Latin translation in rendering the Aristotelian concept of sound (pp. 146-47). Occasionally Palisca reconsiders the prevail- ing assessment of a particular humanist's transmission of a classical source. Especially enlightening is the discussion in chapter 7 of Gogava's translation of Aristoxenus' Harmonic Elements, harshly criticized by most subsequent scholars. Palisca re-evaluates its merits, not according to modern philological standards, but in terms of the state of scholarship in Gogava's time and the usefulness of the translation to its intended mid-sixteenth-century readers. To this end, Palisca compares four translations of a series of crucial passages: those of Gogava (into Latin, 1562), Meibom (also into Latin, 1652), Macran (into English, 1902), and da Rios (into Italian, 1954), and determines that Gogava's translation was not only reliable on most substantive points but that it successfully communicated Aristoxenus' distinctive general philosophy as well (p. i48ff.).

Many different types of criticism-philological, historical, theoretical- were involved in the making of this impressive work. The information that we can glean from it is similarly multi-faceted and wide-ranging. We learn not only that Zarlino and Gaffurio were advocates of the existence of celestial

One rare exception is a passage dealing with Mei's conception of Ptolemy's octave species. After struggling for some time to reconcile Mei's diagram on p. 311 with Palisca's explanation of it on p. 3 1 2, I concluded that some typos or other inaccuracies in the transmission of the diagram (which incorrectly labels nete diezeugmenon as nete hyperbolaion and has b-fa and b-mi misleadingly placed) as well as in Palisca's discussion were responsible for my confusion.



REVIEWS 343

harmony while Tinctoris, Salinas, and Benedetti were among its detractors, but also that the survival of this concept into the late Renaissance "as myth and metaphor" testify to its continued importance as a vital theme rather than merely as a symbol of reverence for antiquity; we learn not only why Gaffurio called the fourth a consonance in contradiction to fifteenth-century practice, but also how advances in the physical sciences led to new evaluations of consonances and tunings that supported the claims of just intonation; we learn not only about Mei's theory of tonic accent in language, but also about the roles of mimesis and poetic furor in developing theories of the affections and dramatic music. Finally-and here is the heart of the matter and the ultimate goal of Palisca's philological labors-we learn to appreciate the extent to which the great Italian theorists understood, absorbed, and transmitted the body of ancient Greek musical thought to their patrons and pupils, among whom were the stylistic innovators of succeeding generations.

BARBARA R. HANNING The City College and Graduate School

C.U.N.Y.

Howard H. Cox, ed., The Calov Bible of J. S. Bach. Studies in Musicology, no. 92. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1985. x, 460 pp. Robin A. Leaver, ed., J. S. Bach and Scripture: Glosses from the Calov Bible Commentary. St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1985. 191 pp. Jaroslav Pelikan. Bach Among the Theologians. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1986. xiv, 158 pp.

AMONG THE BRANCHES OF BACH SCHOLARSHIP that have intensified most in the last decade is that of theology in its varied relationships to the composer's work. Interest in theological aspects of Bach's work is not new, of course, although it is, by and large, a twentieth-century phenomenon. Documented interest in Bach's artistic significance from the eighteenth century concerns his instrumental works almost exclusively, and it was primarily as a composer of instrumental music-and keyboard music in particular-that he was revered until the early nineteenth century. Mendelssohn's revival of the St. Matthew Passion, the nineteenth-century biographies culminating in Spitta's monumental study, and the publication of the Bach-Gesellschaft edition certainly made the enormous significance of the church works known, but there was little investigation of these works from the standpoint of their theological content until much later. It was the work of Friedrich Smend that laid much of the groundwork for theological Bach studies, even if many details of his work now demand criticism.' Several of his studies

1 Friedrich Smend, Bach-Studien: Gesammelte Reden und Aufsatze. Ed. Christoph Wolff. Kassel, 1969.



humanism in italian renaissance musical thoughtby claude v. palisca

Documents