Music of the Renaissance: Imagination and Reality of a Cultural Practice - Hardcover

Lütteken, Laurenz

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0520297903 ISBN 13: 9780520297906

Verlag: University of California Press, 2019

Inhaltsangabe

Where previous accounts of the Renaissance have not fully acknowledged the role that music played in this decisive period of cultural history, Laurenz Lütteken merges historical music analysis with the analysis of the other arts to provide a richer context for the emergence and evolution of creative cultures across civilizations. This fascinating panorama foregrounds music as a substantial component of the era and considers musical works and practices in a wider cultural-historical context. Among the topics surveyed are music's relationship to antiquity, the position of music within systems of the arts, the emergence of the concept of the musical work, as well as music's relationship to the theory and practice of painting, literature, and architecture. What becomes clear is that the Renaissance gave rise to many musical concepts and practices that persist to this day, whether the figure of the composer, musical institutions, and modes of musical writing and memory. 

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Laurenz Lütteken is Professor of Musicology at the University of Zurich. He is is general editor of MGG Online and the author of Richard Strauss: Musik der Moderne and Mozart: Leben und Musik im Zeitalter der Aufklärung. 

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"This brilliant study is centrally concerned with the question of what the term 'Renaissance' means with regard to music history. Laurenz Lütteken approaches this question by examining the emergence of the musical artwork in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. His main argument throughout the book is that around 1,400 educated Europeans began to relate to musical compositions in a fundamentally new way. Remarkably interdisciplinary, this book is addressing questions that art historians and literary historians have been asking for a number of decades. It is one of the most exciting studies I have come across in a long time."—Anna Maria Busse Berger, Distinguished Professor of Music, UC Davis

"In this book, Lütteken explores the multiple dimensions of music as a cultural practice in the Renaissance. His panoramic portrait is based on a highly informed view of this vast subject and explores a wide range of important issues. Readers interested in any aspect of Renaissance culture—its music, art, literature, or history—will find this book provocative and valuable."—Lewis Lockwood, Fanny Peabody Research Professor of Music, Harvard University

“Each serious performance of music of late medieval and Renaissance times will benefit enormously from the insights offered by Laurenz Lütteken in this book. Understanding the relationships between the visual arts, literature, society, and music in this period of turbulent cultural development is the only successful way to recreate the conceivable sounding reality of musical artworks, whose depth and significance have for a long time been underestimated or misunderstood.”—Kees Boeke, musician

 

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"This brilliant study is centrally concerned with the question of what the term 'Renaissance' means with regard to music history. Laurenz Lütteken approaches this question by examining the emergence of the musical artwork in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. His main argument throughout the book is that around 1,400 educated Europeans began to relate to musical compositions in a fundamentally new way. Remarkably interdisciplinary, this book is addressing questions that art historians and literary historians have been asking for a number of decades. It is one of the most exciting studies I have come across in a long time."—Anna Maria Busse Berger, Distinguished Professor of Music, UC Davis

"In this book, Lütteken explores the multiple dimensions of music as a cultural practice in the Renaissance. His panoramic portrait is based on a highly informed view of this vast subject and explores a wide range of important issues. Readers interested in any aspect of Renaissance culture—its music, art, literature, or history—will find this book provocative and valuable."—Lewis Lockwood, Fanny Peabody Research Professor of Music, Harvard University

“Each serious performance of music of late medieval and Renaissance times will benefit enormously from the insights offered by Laurenz Lütteken in this book. Understanding the relationships between the visual arts, literature, society, and music in this period of turbulent cultural development is the only successful way to recreate the conceivable sounding reality of musical artworks, whose depth and significance have for a long time been underestimated or misunderstood.”—Kees Boeke, musician

 

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Music of the Renaissance

Imagination and Reality of a Cultural Practice

By Laurenz Lütteken, James Steichen

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Copyright © 2019 The Regents of the University of California
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-520-29790-6

Contents

Foreword by Christopher Reynolds, 
Preface, 
Chapter 1 • The Era and Its Terms, 
Chapter 2 • Social Reality and Cultural Interaction, 
Chapter 3 • Text and Texts, 
Chapter 4 • Forms of Perception, 
Chapter 5 • Memoria, 
Glossary, 
Notes, 
Bibliography, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

The Era and Its Terms

AN ERA WITHOUT MUSIC

The emergence of the concept of the musical work fundamentally changed the ways in which human beings form relationships and interact with music. This change was one of the most salient moments of the fifteenth century. To be sure, a great deal of artful music, much of it transmitted through written means, existed for many centuries prior to this period. But these earlier forms of music were of a different character, closely related to rites, ceremonies, or occasions that shaped their form, and were often preserved in records at considerable historical remove from the moment of their creation. Without a doubt, notable traces of these developments can be discerned in fourteenth-century music, whether in its new forms of notation (themselves dependent upon thirteenth-century innovations), distinct modes of written transmission, or a new and more sensitive system of genres in which secular multivoice songs were especially prominent. Nevertheless, the conceptualization of music as an unchanging and self-contained work was clearly a product of the fifteenth century. This concept did not arise through any distinct foundational act, however, but was rather the end result of lengthy and complex processes that played out across multiple spheres of cultural activity and production, sometimes in isolation but just as often in tandem, among them writing and literacy, authorship and professionalization, historicity and historical memory, the position of music in the nascent system of the arts, and more. These activities redefined and sometimes expanded the parameters of what music could be, even as they were not always concerned with music alone. This fundamental change took place within the era most commonly referred to — thanks in no small part to the writings of Jacob Burckhardt — as the "Renaissance." But Burkhardt's account almost completely excluded music from its inquiries, except to discuss it as a locus of sociological activity, and thereby introduced doubts and uncertainties about the relationship between this period and its music. Nietzsche subsequently seemed to validate this exclusion, ascribing to music a certain intractable chronological belatedness. In a similar manner, Heinrich Besseler, building upon the work of Martin Heidegger and aware of the atrocities of the twentieth century, could not resist using the philosopher's concept of negative ontology to ascribe an intense pathos to the fifteenth century, characterizing it as an era in which a "humanization" of music took place. At the same time, he was a harsh and unrelenting critic of the larger term "Renaissance" and regarded its use in music history as misguided.

As a result, ever since Burckhardt's 1860 Die Cultur der Renaissance in Italien (The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy) matters have become ever more muddled. An era called the "Renaissance" exists, however one wishes to define it, and without which even the intentionally destabilizing interventions of postmodern cultural historiography, often operating by negative definition, would be unthinkable. But music in this era finds itself consigned to the margins of history, and even its liminal presence remains quite precarious. In the twentieth century little changed on this front in spite of unprecedented growth in research into both the "Renaissance" and music. Amid the many inquiries that have questioned the underlying structural power of historical eras — often heralded with loud and gleefully deconstructive fanfare — the problematic position of music has yet to be taken up and questioned. In fact, the assumption that music brought little if nothing to bear on the wider history of the period remains a perversely consistent feature of "Renaissance" historiography. If music did exist in the "Renaissance," it figures in it as a mere accident of history, at best a diffuse efflorescence of the social order that is historiographically meaningful as it relates to a certain subset of creative elites (as it is treated in Peter Burke's 1972 Culture and Society in Renaissance Italy, for example). Indeed, the history of the "Renaissance" has remained oddly content to adopt the contradictory position of being if not a history entirely without music, then a history at a certain remove from music. As a result the history of music, whether belated or not, has existed as a history apart from the "Renaissance." In Gustave Reese's landmark 1954 Music of the Renaissance, Burckhardt's name is not mentioned once, and in several other surveys of the period (many conceived of as handbooks), this conceptual problem is solved by consigning it to an introductory paragraph and gesturing to a history that exists alongside the "Renaissance." Only a few authors, notably Ludwig Finscher in his 1989–90 Die Musik des 15. und 16. Jahrhundert (Music of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries), have explicitly brought Burckhardt's viewpoint to the foreground, and even then only to corroborate his misgivings.

In significant ways, these challenges that the Renaissance has presented for music history remain unexplored, especially where the musical work concept is concerned. The era has been the subject of innumerable studies from a diverse array of cultural-historical disciplines and methodologies, including history, literary studies, and art history. (I understand "cultural history" not in the sense of any specialized or innovative methodology, but rather grounded on the simple and perhaps quaint premise that the activities that people undertake together in any given time and place must somehow relate to one another.) Music history, by contrast, has for the most part seemed content to confine itself in recent years to artistic or stylistic studies that only tangentially gesture to relevant external sociohistorical factors. And the decisive change that the musical work concept brought about — the most significant development since the emergence of notation — and the expansion of musical consciousness that it ushered in remain strangely decoupled from its wider context. An inquiry into the role of the work concept as it applies to music by no means forecloses other related inquiries, whether into the quality and production of music, its presence in writing versus performance, its meaning as a cognitive, emotional, or scholarly practice, or the changing meaning of non-notated or "nonartistic" music in the social, mental, and emotional activities of humans. But the existence of the musical work concept suddenly gives these questions, with which music is intimately concerned, a new and meaningful perspective.

In recent research such a notion has been met with considerable skepticism, with interest in the work concept regarded as elite, elevated, and detached from reality. But in fact the work concept granted musical practices a new dimension in the broadest possible sense, including areas that might seem...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of California Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2019
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0520297903
• ISBN 13: 9780520297906
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 240
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Buchbär; info@buchbaer.de; ; Weberstr. 67; Osnabrück; 49084; Deutschland