Music in Print and Beyond: Hildegard von Bingen to the Beatles.
Krummel, D.W
Music in Print and Beyond: Hildegard von Bingen to the Beatles.
Edited by Craig A. Monson and Roberta Montemorra Marvin. (Eastman
studies in music, v.105) Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press,
2013. [viii, 327 p. ISBN: 978-1-58-046416-1. $90.00].
This is a good book in need of a better title. Its twelve essays
are not about music in print (i.e., not out-of-print); and they rarely
address any futuristic beyond. Rather, their strength is in the
scholarly insight with which they examine the past: the beneath, in
other words, as it explains the before, and a before that rarely has to
do with printing. The essays deal with our conception of the past, based
on hand-written as much as printed evidence, and manifest not only in
printed scholarship but also on recorded and live performance practices
and settings.
Kate Van Orden begins with the only essay specifically on printing.
Roman letter typography displaced gothic for the written word as early
as 1500, but for two centuries music printers stuck with heavy, squarish
gothic diamondshaped-note fonts. Several round-note fonts are known,
most notably one by the master Franco-Flemish punch cutter Robert
Granjon. It has character, perhaps too much for the conservative
performers of the day. The note heads have a nice italic diagonal
orientation, but the stems are heavy, and the type, never used in books
in wide demand, was soon abandoned. Round notes would not prevail until
around 1700, when engravers looked to music manuscript models to serve
the performers of the day.
The music world and its performing editions changed drastically at
this time, notably at first in England, with new settings, new
patronage, new kinds of performers. Ellen Harris describes a nice range
of specific performance settings, and argues for the importance of
manuscript copies and of subscription publishing.
Two essays analyze the music of master composers. The firm of C. F.
Peters has enjoyed a two-hundred-year history, thanks to Max Abraham and
the Hinrichsen family. But Peters himself was on the scene for just over
thirteen years, and they were not happy ones. His dim tastes are
documented in the fit he threw when Beethoven fulfilled a commission,
not with another great symphony but with the lovely keyboard bagatelles.
Lewis Lockwood delights in elucidating the saga. Is there a subtle
xenophobic context in Schumann's setting of Heine's
"Abends am Strand"? Performers may choose to downplay it, and
audiences may miss it; Susan Youens examines the historical background
and the evidence of the music itself.
Two essays discuss scholarly battles between prominent scholars.
The contrast is provocative. The largely forgotten one between the
sixteenth-century theorists Giovanni del Lago, Giovanni Spataro, and
Pietro Aaron was fought in print and probably read only by a small
audience of specialists. Bonnie Blackburn uncovers and explains what was
going on. In contrast, the 1965 battle between Edward Lowinsky and
Joseph Kerman was fought in a public forum over ethical issues, and it
left the larger musicology world in shock. Bonnie Gordon's take on
the underlying factors makes sense, but she also recognizes the deep
feelings that will and perhaps always ought to haunt and redefine the
cutting edge of musical scholarship.
Other essays are by Craig Monson on the role of music in Italian
Renaissance convents; Roberta Montemorra Marin on the patriotism behind
Verdi's pedagogical ideas; and Gabriella Cruz on how fado
(literally, destiny, or fate) was distorted by a repressive Portuguese
government in its manipulation of the media. Joseph Auner's essay,
the most future-oriented in the book, considers the obsolescence of
electronic music because of updated technologies. In the final essay,
Honey Meconi documents the long and fascinating publishing history of
the music of Hildegard of Bingen, one of today's icons of musical
faith.
Collectively, these twelve essays make up a lovely tribute to Jane
Bernstein, a former president of the American Musicological Society,
whose scholarship began in the early printing house of Scotto and
extended to cover the larger world of music publishing in Venice, which
by 1600 was the most prolific in Europe. All of the essays in this
festschrift tantalizingly anticipate major works or promising
scholarship to come, whether by the present contributors or by others. I
do not think Jane Bernstein was the Dissertationsmutter of any of the
contributors, but she should still be very proud of her friends.
D. W. Krummel
University of Illinois, Urbana
