Knowledge Building in Early Modern English Music

Katie Bank

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9780367519704
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000169676
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historiography
• Index: History

Knowledge Building in Early Modern English Music is a rich, interdisciplinary investigation into the role of music and musical culture in the development of metaphysical thought in late sixteenth-, early seventeenth-century England. The book considers how music presented questions about the relationships between the mind, body, passions, and the soul, drawing out examples of domestic music that explicitly address topics of human consciousness, such as dreams, love, and sensing. Early seventeenth-century metaphysical thought is said to pave the way for the Enlightenment Self. Yet studies of the music's role in natural philosophy has been primarily limited to symbolic functions in philosophical treatises, virtually ignoring music making's substantial contribution to this watershed period. Contrary to prevailing narratives, the author shows why music making did not only reflect impending change in philosophical thought but contributed to its formation. The book demonstrates how recreational song such as the English madrigal confronted assumptions about reality and representation and the role of dialogue in cultural production, and other ideas linked to changes in how knowledge was built. Focusing on music by John Dowland, Martin Peerson, Thomas Weelkes, and William Byrd, this study revises historiography by reflecting on the experience of music and how music contributed to the way early modern awareness was shaped.

1
Historiography and the English ‘madrigal’

This study of English recreational music makes a few adjustments to the way this repertoire has been studied in the past. As Nicholas Cook has observed, most histories of music are really histories of composition, and many studies of this repertoire have followed suit.¹ This chapter lays out some of the historiographical reasons why musicology and literary studies have approached this song repertoire in the way they have. It also makes suggestions for how these modes of study could be expanded to bring fresh perspectives on the music and its social context. Through a survey of this music’s historiography, I present an argument for why taking a broad view of this music through its social context of use proves a fruitful and refreshing mode for inquiry. It is inevitable that any historiography will on occasion seem hypocritical. It is always a challenge to balance the occasionally arbitrary but practical divisions necessary to rein in the scope of a study with an awareness of a larger historical picture. I necessarily use some of the terms and categories that I am criticising in this chapter. I try to use qualifying ‘scare quotes’ as little as possible and hope I will be forgiven for the occasional transgression in the name of practicality.

Though this chapter is rather different in character from the rest of the book, I felt it was a necessary detour. This monograph makes an interdisciplinary argument for how recreational musical practices reflected and helped shape changes in the approach to knowledge and self-awareness in the early seventeenth century. One might say this is no small claim. Yet as this idea goes against many commonly held stereotypes about this body of music, a large part of my intervention rests on an attention to and revision of how this music has been studied.²

The chapter begins with an extended case study on the concepts of ‘grave’ and ‘light’ music. I examine how these terms were used in regard to music by figures like composer and theorist Thomas Morley. I then outline a few suggestions for what intellectual traditions might have influenced this early modern usage. The difference between early modern and present-day use of ‘grave’ and ‘light’ opens a discussion of the historiography of recreational vernacular song and how the historiography has greatly influenced current perceptions and analyses of this music.

The term ‘light music’ is thrown around liberally within discussions of English multi-voiced song repertoire by both contemporaries and modern scholars. English music books and anthologies, both contemporary and modern, will divide discussions of song into sections based on categories such as ‘serious’ or ‘grave’ and ‘light’. Still, there exists a subtle but meaningful difference in the way these terms are approached by modern scholars from how they were used by early moderns. I introduce the issue as a means to demonstrate how historiography has affected perceptions of this music in ways that distract historians from more fully accessing contemporary meaning. I will not try to provide a definitive or comprehensive early modern understanding of the terms ‘grave’ and ‘light’ but rather will raise the ideas a) that contemporary meaning was more complex than our current understanding of those terms allows; and b) that there are multiple areas that might prove rewarding for further investigation, using Thomas Morley’s categorisations of grave and light music as a starting point.

1.1 Grave and light

Near the end of Thomas Morley’s influential dialogic didactic treatise on music theory and composition, A Plaine and easie introduction to practicall musicke (1597), henceforth known as PEIPM, Morley arranged Italianate music types along a prose scale from the most ‘grave’ to the most ‘light’, describing the features of each song type as he went. Through this, the Master, as the teacher is called, reveals to his students (and us) that each song type contains varying levels of gravity and lightness rather than being just one kind or the other. ‘Grave’ and ‘light’ were common antitheses in this period, but Morley’s description highlights a particular quality of art and music and possibly is one of the first examples of it used this way in English.³ While the word ‘grave’ has lost favour in present day, music is still often described or organised as ‘serious’ and ‘light’ music. In modern understanding, ‘light’ is used in a somewhat pejorative way to describe music that is enjoyable but without serious artistic or intellectual value. There is an association between ‘light’ and ‘unthinking’ or ‘not ponderous’.⁴ Though Morley is dismissive of forms like drinking songs, I argue there is more to understand about Morley’s designations than first meets the eye. Though the binary of gravity and lightness was well established before the early modern period, the antithesis of gravity and lightness as adjectives to describe a quality of art or music is less well understood (see Table 1.1).

Table 1.1 Thomas Morley’s ‘spectrum’ from grave to light

With a ditty (text):	Master’s description:
Motets	‘grave and sober’
Madrigals	‘the best kind [of light music]’
Canzonets	‘the second degree of gravity in this light music’
Neapolitans	‘different from [canzonets] in nothing but name’
Villanelle	‘the last degree of gravity (if they have any at all)’
Balletts	‘another kind more light than [villanelle]’
Vinate	‘the slightest kind of music (if they deserve the name of music)’
Giustinianas	‘a kind of songs (which I had almost forgotten)’
Pastourelles & Passamezzos with ditties	‘songs which the Italians make . . . which it would be both tedious and superfluous to delate unto you in words’
Without a ditty (instrumental):
Fantasies	‘the most principal and chiefest kind of music which is made without a ditty’
Pavans	‘The next in gravity and goodness’
Galliards (Saltarelli)	‘a lighter and more stirring kind of dancing than the Pavan’
Almans	‘a more heavy dance than [the galliard], (fitly representing the nature of the people whose name it carrieth)’
French Branles
Voltes	‘Like unto [Branle] (but more light)’
Cour antes
Country dances
Other dances (Hornpipes, Jigs, and so on)

Morley’s contemporary, Charles Butler, believed the primary use for music was for God, and its secondary use was for man.⁵ In line with this, Morley wrote the gravest of musical forms is the motet. The Master describes the motet as ‘properly a song made for the church’ that is ‘the chiefest both for art and utility’.⁶ The motet is ‘grave and sober music’.⁷ Next in line is the madrigal, the gravest of the ‘light’ forms, where ‘use showeth that it is a kind of music made upon songs and sonnets such as Petrarch and many poets of our time have excelled in’.⁸ Given part of what made the motet gravest was its ‘art’, it makes sense that part of the madrigal’s relative gravity is due to the complexity of its composition.⁹ After the motet, the madrigal is the ‘most artificial’, meaning the most contrapuntally complex with the most voice parts. Canzonets, on the other hand, are ‘little short songs (wherein little art can be showed, being made in strains, the beginning of which is some point lightly touched and every strain repeated except the middle) which is, in composition of the music, a counterfeit of the Madrigal’.¹⁰ Morley does not discuss textual topic, once again primarily referring to compositional texture. In fact, he does not mention poetic form or content at all. For example, the canzonet’s strophic poetic structure was integral to the Italian form, yet this aspect is not mentioned by the Master. From there, he continues down the list of vocal forms to the lightest, becoming more dismissive as he discusses rare regional Italian forms like Vinate.¹¹ Then Morley outlines a similar spectrum of instrumental forms, ignoring native mixed genres like the consort song or lute ayre altogether. The gravest of Morley’s instrumental forms are Fantasies, followed by Pavans and then Galliards. Yet for composer Anthony Holborne, Galliards are the most ‘graue and iudicious’ instrumental pieces within his 1597 didactic collection. These graver pieces are

being of another stampe, [that] doe carry their naturall partes tyed together in a different nature, with some reasonable good cordes and bindinges after a more heedful manner of composition, which in the first obiect to thine eye and finger by superficiall passage, may amate and withhould they forwardnesse, because they will appeare more seuere and painfull then do lie in common custome.¹²

This suggests Holborne also looked to compositional texture in defining gravity. There is something about the approach to composition of this graver music that is of a ‘different nature’ and also harder to play. By paring ‘grave’ with ‘iudicious’, Holborne also hints that ‘grave’ implies a sensible or intellectual approach to composition.

Morley’s Master takes a derogatory stance towards the lightest of genres, yet in Morley’s own publications he was primarily concerned with the mid to light genres. To what extent the Master is Morley or a stock character is an area for further debate. In some ways, the Master is an archetype of a finicky teacher whose teachings are sometimes at odds with common practice. Case in point, the Master laments the low demand for grave motets, stating that the lack of demand has led many composers away from writing for the church. The Master explains that in tending to the Italian music fad, composers are compelled ‘to put on another humour and follow that kind whereunto they have neither been brought up nor…do perfectly understand the nature of it’, aside from what can be learned from looking at foreign copies.¹³ This passage has sometimes been taken as a caveat ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Historiography and the English ‘madrigal’
• 2 The music of sense perception
• 3 Music and myth: confronting representations and realities
• 4 Dialogues of knowledge
• 5 Conclusion
• Appendix I: additional song and poem texts
• Appendix II: Thomas Weelkes: ‘Ha ha’ (1608)
• Appendix III: Weelkes: ‘Thule, the period of Cosmographie’ and ‘The Andalusian Merchant’ (1601)
• Index