In Harmony Framed: Musical Humanism, Thomas Campion, and the Two Daniels.

Hill, John Walter

In his Observations in the Art of English Poesie (1602), Thomas Campion, physician, poet, and composer, disparages rhyme and promotes quantitative meter in English verse based on models of Roman antiquity. The response came in the Defence of Ryme (1603), in which Samuel Daniel denies quantity in English verse (admitting only accent) and defends the literary culture of the Middle Ages, the millstone that Campion would hang around the neck of rhyme. Although Campion's English lyric poetry, for the most part, is rhymed, it is often classical in reference and inspiration, to a great extent rejecting the medieval tradition of courtly love in favor of sensuality and eroticism. Samuel Daniel's poetry, principally the sonnets of his Delia, continue the Petrarchan and earlier traditions of unrequited love. In his lute songs, Campion favors a simple, chordal accompaniment to a vocal line that projects the poetry largely through the control of declamation. Although Samuel Daniel did not compose songs, his brother John did (often setting Samuel's poetry), and his songs have contrapuntally textured lute accompaniments and rely heavily on pictorial word painting for their music-text relation. It would seem, therefore, that in all three realms - criticism, poetry, and music - Campion participates in the classicizing tendencies associated with Renaissance humanism, whereas Samuel and John Daniel remain loyal to traditions that can be traced back to the Middle Ages.

Erik Ryding argues these points most convincingly with respect to the poetry of Campion and Samuel Daniel, taking into account exceptions to his general observations and criticizing specific passages with erudition and sensitivity. The two treatises require no elaborate interpretation. But to connect Campion's Observations with his rhymed English verse requires the mediation of the concept "humanism," which does not adhere to his poetry as easily as to his tract. The main difficulty comes with the connections to music.

There were, admittedly, some curious and isolated attempts in Germany, Italy, and England to compose music in which the rhythm adhered strictly to the quantity of the syllables being sung. Most of these are musical settings of Latin poetry. In France, however, there are a good handful of part-songs demonstrating musique mesuree a l'antique (by Claude Le Jeune and others), which set quantitative French verse by Pierre de Ronsard and others associated with the Pleiade and the academy of Jean-Antoine de Baif. Ryding explores these activities, peripheral to the mainstream of music, in detail. But Campion left only one song in this style, characterized by a mechanical limitation to only two note lengths and rhythmic patterns that defy regular musical meters. Ryding is not the first to associate the rest of Campion's (declamatory) songs to the newly emerged chordally accompanied solo song of Italy (monody), a genre that its first major exponent, Giulio Caccini, wished to connect with Giovanni Bardi's camerata fiorentina, its discussions of Greek music, and its attempts to reform modern music on the model of Greek antiquity. But Campion's songs are not as much like Caccini's as Ryding would like them to be. (The style and history of the English declamatory lute song are delineated in Ian Spink, English Song: Dowland to Purcell [1974], which Ryding does not cite.) And Italian monody of ca. 1600 is not really the product of late humanism but rather of an unwritten tradition that was just then emerging into notation - this is shown most extensively by Nino Pirrotta, Music and Theatre from Poliziano to Monteverdi (1982), another crucial work that Ryding does not cite.

Ryding's thesis is a fine conceit even if not supported by a completely rigorous argument.

John Walter Hill UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS, URBANA