Musical commonplace books, writing theory, and "silent listening": The polyphonic examples of the Dodecachordon

Musical Quarterly

Volumn 82, Issue 3-4, 1998, Pages 482-516

  Judd, Cristle Collins ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 63549140911     PISSN: 00274631     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/mq/82.3-4.482     Document Type: Article

References (37)

1. There are, of course, "special" publications in which recorded performances are deemed essential to the text - Edward Lowinsky with Bonnie Blackburn, eds., Josquin des Prez: Proceedings of the International Josquin Festival-Conference (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976)
2. and Charles Rosen, The Romantic Generation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), are two contrasted examples that come to mind - as well as the CDs that now regularly accompany textbooks. The promulgation of CD-ROM formats and hypermedia journals like Music Theory On-line and Journal of the Society of Seventeenth-Century Music may transform the way we frame our published discourse about music in the not-too-distant future
3. The summary discussion of commonplace books that follows is deeply indebted to Ann Moss, Printed Commonplace-Books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought (Oxford and New York: Clarendon Press, 1996). I discuss the nature of exemplarity in Renaissance writing generally and the construction of musical exempla extensively in my forthcoming monograph. I am grateful to Kate van Orden for a helpful comment after an earlier presentation of part of this work (AMS, Baltimore, Nov. 1996) that led me to consider the nature of commonplace books and their role in relation to musical thought in connection with some of the manuscript notebooks I was describing. Linda Austern is engaged in a study that considers the style of argument about music in commonplace books and miscellanies in early modern England. She offered several helpful comments and references in discussions following the initial presentation of this paper
4. Johannes Murmellius, Opusculum de discipulorum officiis: quod enchiridion scholasticorum inscribitur (Cologne, 1505), 84
5. Frosch, Rerum musicarum opusculum (Strasbourg: Petrus Schoeffer and Mathias Apiarium, 1532), sig. E
6. cited in Jessie Ann Owens, Composers at Work: The Craft of Musical Composition, 1450-1600 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 190-91. See also Owens's discussion of notebooks, 122-24, and her table 6.1
7. Thus I would make a greater distinction between miscellanies and commonplace books than Owens does when she says: "Composers also used bound manuscripts of different sizes. Some of them were small notebooks that functioned like commonplace books: a kind of workbook for jotting down ideas and working out compositions as well as for copying music." Owens, Composers at Work, 122
8. Erasmus, De duplici copia verborum ac rerum commentarii duo, trans. annotated Betty I. Knott as Copia: Foundations of the Abundant Style, vol. 2 of Collected Works of Erasmus: Literary and Educational Writings (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978). Selected excerpts are reproduced in the appendix
9. Cited here after the translation in Moss, Printed Commonplace-Books, 111. Thus, the notebook provides not only a collection of usable material but an accessible collection because the commonplace heads provide the means of retrieval
10. I do not intend to suggest thereby a direct relationship with De copia, although given his relationship with Erasmus, it is hard to imagine that Glarean was unfamiliar with it. Rather I am taking De copia as a well-known representative of a pervasive humanist pedagogy, a pedagogy particularly reflected in the teaching and writing of northern humanists. Sarah Fuller, "Defending the Dodecachordon: Ideological Currents in Glarean's Modal Theory," Journal of the American Musicological Society 49 (1996): 191-224, highlights the many places within the treatise in which Glarean makes reference to Erasmus
11. As Powers succinctly describes the treatise: "Glarean's Dodecachordon is the product of an extraordinary synthesis of medieval tradition, both practical and theoretical, with Renaissance classicizing humanism, original system building and musical analysis" ("Mode," The New Grove Dictionary of Music [London and New York: Macmillan, 1980] 12:407)
12. See Fuller, "Defending the Dodecachordon," 217, for a listing of the most prominent studies of Glarean's humanism. Fuller has profoundly deepened our understanding of the significance of Glarean's humanist perspective by highlighting three ideological strands implicit in Powers's description: a rational, essentialist strand, a religious strand, and a humanist strand
13. "Die Notenbeispiele in Glarean's Dodekachordon (1547)," Sammelbände der Internationalen Musikgesellschaft 13 (1912): 569-96. A noteworthy exception is Sarah Fuller's recent examination of the plainsong examples in "Defending the Dodecachordon."
14. Clement A. Miller, introduction to Dodecachordon, Musicological Studies and Documents 6 (n.p.: American Institute of Musicology, 1965), 26-34
15. For a close reading of the polyphonic examples as they relate to Glarean's descriptions of the modes, see Frans Wiering, "The Language of the Modes: Studies in the History of Polyphonic Modality" (Ph.D. diss., University of Amsterdam, 1995), 186-95. Wiering's thorough analysis is an excellent examination of the overt relationship of the examples and the text they accompany
16. Glarean described these difficulties in a letter to Damian a Goes in 1539, cited in Clement A. Miller, "The Dodecachordon: Its Origins and Influence on Renaissance Musical Thought," Musica Disciplina 15 (1961): 161
17. Miller, Dodecachordon, 247-48
18. For a slightly different interpretation of Glarean's priorities in including examples, see Wiering, "The Language of the Modes," 186
19. The sole exception is Mouton's eight-voice Nesciens mater, canonically derived from four voices, at the very end of the Dodecachordon, for which Glarean apologizes. Five-voice works like Josquin's Miserere and Stabat mater are cited but not reproduced. Wiering, "The Language of the Modes," 186, comments on these examples
20. 1
21. 2 in MunU 401
22. George Warren Drake ("The First Printed Books of Motets, Petrucci's Motetti A numero Trentare A [Venice, 1502]
23. The library holdings associated with Glarean have been described most recently by lain Fenlon, "Heinrich Glarean's Books," in Music in the German Renaissance: Sources, Styles, and Contexts, ed. John Kmetz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 74-102
24. See, for example, the list accompanying Strunk's translation of Aron's Trattato, in his Source Readings in Music History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1965), 205-18
25. I discuss the role these works play in the organization of examples in my forthcoming monograph. The evidence of commissions is discussed by Miller, Dodecachordon, 30-31
26. For a detailed study of two of the works Glarean commissioned, see Harold Powers, "The Lydian Mode: Gregor Meyer Reads Glarean," forthcoming
27. Indeed, it was in making this distinction that I first began to understand how one might explore the whole question of how a theorist's examples function within the context of printed culture and the material text. See Cristle Collins Judd, "Reading Aron Reading Petrucci," Early Music History 14 (1995): 121-52
28. Besardos is identified as the copyist in Arnold Geering, "Die Vokalmusik in der Schweiz zur Zeit der Reformation," Schweizerisches Jahrbuch für Musikwissenschaft 6 (1933): 36, 92
29. Stanley Boorman, "Early Music Printing: Working for a Specialized Market," in Print and Culture in the Renaissance: Essays on the Advent of Printing in Europe, ed. Gerald P. Tyson and Sylvia S. Wagonheim (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1986), 222. Boorman was addressing a nonmusicological audience, and he may have deliberately simplified his claim. While I would agree that the primary use for such sources was indeed performance, I would like to consider the possibility that format was not as formidable for reading and study as Boorman suggests
30. For an earlier discussion, see Robert Judd, "The Use of Notational Formats at the Keyboard: A Study of Printed Sources of Keyboard Music in Spain and Italy c.1500-1700" (D.Phil. thesis, University of Oxford, 1989). Both are concerned with different kinds of evidence than that presented here but contribute to a larger picture that partbooks could be (and were) read by some segment of the musically literate population
31. Paul Saenger, "Silent Reading: Its Impact on Late Medieval Script and Society," Viator 13 (1982): 367-414
32. Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980) was a formative theory of communities of readers
33. For a more recent and historically-situated interpretation, see Roger Chartier, "Communities of Readers," in The Order of Books: Readers, Authors and Libraries in Europe Between the Fourteenth and Eighteenth Centuries, trans. Lydia Cochrane (Cambridge: Polity Press; Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 1-23
34. On "silent reading" see especially Roger Chartier, "Leisure and Sociability: Reading aloud in Early Modern Europe," trans. Carol Mossmann, in Urban Life in the Renaissance, ed. Susan Zimmerman and Ronald Weismann (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1989), 103-120
35. Robert Darnton, "First Steps toward a History of Reading," Australian Journal of French Studies 23 (1986): 5-30
36. Walter Ong, "Print, Space, And Closure," in Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London and New York: Methuen, 1982)
37. and Saenger, "Silent Reading."