Composers at Work: The Craft of Musical Composition 1450-1600 by Jessie Ann OwensReview by: John MilsomNotes, Second Series, Vol. 54, No. 4 (Jun., 1998), pp. 897-899Published by: Music Library AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/900064 .

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Book Reviews Book Reviews

the concerns she has linked and cross- referenced throughout the book, on her way to the final "moral" in this very morally conscious collection.

Subotnik's focus here is on the ideal of abstract reason-perhaps the defining trait of American self-identity, yet arguably the most problematical and contentious ideal in American social and legal policy. Having outlined the issues at stake in Bloom's plac- ing abstract reason at the pinnacle of his intellectual and moral pyramid, and Lee's disruption of the abstract/specific moral polarity in Do the Right Thing, Subotnik brings music into the equation, suggesting the study of music as a vehicle for the understanding of the cultural specificity and importance of abstract reason to nineteenth- and twentieth-century Western society. Delivering a barrage of questions that could fuel many a graduate course (a brief sample: "Which merits the greatest emphasis [or attention]: a large-scale ar- gument, a cultural style, a personal style, or an individual detail? How can these be distinguished? Can they be distinguished?" [p. 200]), Subotnik takes on Bloom's oppo- sition of abstract reason to the chaos of complete aesthetic relativity:

The true alternative to accepting his sin- gle, abstract conception of reason is to accept a tension between abstract and concrete conceptions of reason, together with the kinds of relationships, ideals, and moral judgments associated with each. (p. 202)

Acknowledging a constant tension, or di- alectic, between abstract and concrete views of cultural ideals would lead to an aware- ness of the inherent "untidiness" of cul- ture; decisions and interpretations should never be easy, and those who make them should be ever aware of their contingency and moral impact. This is where Subotnik is most concerned with the important eth- ical role music-and indeed music schol- arship-can play in society. Subotnik's

the concerns she has linked and cross- referenced throughout the book, on her way to the final "moral" in this very morally conscious collection.

Subotnik's focus here is on the ideal of abstract reason-perhaps the defining trait of American self-identity, yet arguably the most problematical and contentious ideal in American social and legal policy. Having outlined the issues at stake in Bloom's plac- ing abstract reason at the pinnacle of his intellectual and moral pyramid, and Lee's disruption of the abstract/specific moral polarity in Do the Right Thing, Subotnik brings music into the equation, suggesting the study of music as a vehicle for the understanding of the cultural specificity and importance of abstract reason to nineteenth- and twentieth-century Western society. Delivering a barrage of questions that could fuel many a graduate course (a brief sample: "Which merits the greatest emphasis [or attention]: a large-scale ar- gument, a cultural style, a personal style, or an individual detail? How can these be distinguished? Can they be distinguished?" [p. 200]), Subotnik takes on Bloom's oppo- sition of abstract reason to the chaos of complete aesthetic relativity:

The true alternative to accepting his sin- gle, abstract conception of reason is to accept a tension between abstract and concrete conceptions of reason, together with the kinds of relationships, ideals, and moral judgments associated with each. (p. 202)

Acknowledging a constant tension, or di- alectic, between abstract and concrete views of cultural ideals would lead to an aware- ness of the inherent "untidiness" of cul- ture; decisions and interpretations should never be easy, and those who make them should be ever aware of their contingency and moral impact. This is where Subotnik is most concerned with the important eth- ical role music-and indeed music schol- arship-can play in society. Subotnik's

conclusions are certainly indebted to her careful study and consideration of Ador- no's aesthetics/ethics of music; but in her pragmatic grounding in the humus of late- twentieth-century culture she avoids Ador- no's pessimism and self-imposed moral dis- tance. Subotnik's final line of questioning is forward-looking, cautiously optimistic, and (to this reviewer at least) even inspi- rational.

Deconstructive Variations is not a book to be devoured at one sitting. Though Su- botnik's prose is purposefully-and sig- nificantly-more straightforwardly con- structed than in the volume's predecessor Developing Variations, she grapples with complex issues that require the reader to refer frequently to previous arguments and draw deeply from the endnotes. In- deed, while references to previous-and successive-pages and notes are well flagged in the text, it would have been help- ful for the endnotes to carry a heading referring to the page numbers in the main text (e.g., "Notes to pages 31-45"). Su- botnik's arguments are so untiringly linear and methodical that a moment of distrac- tion might cause the reader to miss a con- nection and be compelled to retrace the train of thought back through several para- graphs; especially in the thick of the essay on Chopin, this reader occasionally found a need to backtrack a page or two to gain the necessary momentum to follow Su- botnik in an energetic interpretational step of faith. Subotnik's essays are guaranteed, as a famous fictional Belgian would have said, to tax the little gray cells.

But in the end, the reader's work will pay off: the essays in Deconstructive Variations provide a shining example of recent trends in music scholarship toward poststructur- alism and cultural studies. And perhaps more importantly, they make for gripping reading in their embodiment of Subotnik's ideal of socially engaged music scholarship.

ANDREW DELL'ANTONIO The University of Texas at Austin

conclusions are certainly indebted to her careful study and consideration of Ador- no's aesthetics/ethics of music; but in her pragmatic grounding in the humus of late- twentieth-century culture she avoids Ador- no's pessimism and self-imposed moral dis- tance. Subotnik's final line of questioning is forward-looking, cautiously optimistic, and (to this reviewer at least) even inspi- rational.

Deconstructive Variations is not a book to be devoured at one sitting. Though Su- botnik's prose is purposefully-and sig- nificantly-more straightforwardly con- structed than in the volume's predecessor Developing Variations, she grapples with complex issues that require the reader to refer frequently to previous arguments and draw deeply from the endnotes. In- deed, while references to previous-and successive-pages and notes are well flagged in the text, it would have been help- ful for the endnotes to carry a heading referring to the page numbers in the main text (e.g., "Notes to pages 31-45"). Su- botnik's arguments are so untiringly linear and methodical that a moment of distrac- tion might cause the reader to miss a con- nection and be compelled to retrace the train of thought back through several para- graphs; especially in the thick of the essay on Chopin, this reader occasionally found a need to backtrack a page or two to gain the necessary momentum to follow Su- botnik in an energetic interpretational step of faith. Subotnik's essays are guaranteed, as a famous fictional Belgian would have said, to tax the little gray cells.

But in the end, the reader's work will pay off: the essays in Deconstructive Variations provide a shining example of recent trends in music scholarship toward poststructur- alism and cultural studies. And perhaps more importantly, they make for gripping reading in their embodiment of Subotnik's ideal of socially engaged music scholarship.

ANDREW DELL'ANTONIO The University of Texas at Austin

Composers at Work: The Craft of Musical Composition 1450-1600. By Jessie Ann Owens. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. [xxi, 345 p. ISBN 0-19-509577-4. $50.]

Composers at Work: The Craft of Musical Composition 1450-1600. By Jessie Ann Owens. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. [xxi, 345 p. ISBN 0-19-509577-4. $50.]

Composers at Work justly deserves to be called remarkable, not only because its de- ductive and intellectual achievements are

Composers at Work justly deserves to be called remarkable, not only because its de- ductive and intellectual achievements are

so very great, but also because it opens a field of research that will be unknown to many readers. Unlike the music of later

so very great, but also because it opens a field of research that will be unknown to many readers. Unlike the music of later

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NOTES, June 1998

eras, most fifteenth- and sixteenth-century polyphonic works survive only in their fi- nal, finished state, preserved not in com- posers' autograph scores but rather in cop- ies that served the needs of performers- which is to say, with their constituent voices distributed over the pages of a choirbook, or divided between partbooks, or (for in- strumental music) conflated into tablature. Faced with such impersonal performers' parts, conceptually so distant from (say) the generative sketches of Ludwig van Beethoven or Igor Stravinsky, it is easy for the reader to forget that every motet by Josquin des Prez or mass by Giovanni Pier- luigi da Palestrina also passed through a process of gestation and formation, con- ceivably as turbulent as those of the "Ero- ica" Symphony or The Rite of Spri(g. In this book, Jessie Ann Owens deals precisely with those issues of gestation and forma- tion in Renaissance polyphony. Her subject is the work-in-progress, not the completed composition.

That being said, it is worth making clear what Composers at Work sets out to achieve, and what lies beyond its scope. First and foremost it is a study of musical decision- making in relation to the physical objects that were used by composers of the fif- teenth and sixteenth centuries: the parch- ment, paper, and erasable tablets on which they made their marks. In that regard, the book respects its subtitle by concentrating on the craft, not the art, of producing mu- sical works. It is documentary evidence, not the intrinsic substance and structure of pieces, that is always at the fore. As Owens explains in her postscript (p. 314), it was never her intention in this book to make use of "the vast and rich domain of musical analysis as a technique for accounting for the compositional history of a piece." Be- cause of its specific concern with craft, a chapter may sometimes offer less than its title at first suggests. In particular the very short chapter 4, "Composing without Writ- ing," restrains itself from reaching too many conclusions that the documents sim- ply cannot support. Even the book's title might be taken by some readers to imply more than the book actually sets out to deliver. "Work" for a composer can take a variety of forms, not all of which will nec- essarily or immediately give rise to physical traces. One thinks of Benjamin Britten composing in his mind on his daily walk,

then returning home to notate and refine the results. Both stages count as "work," but only the second of them involves writ- ing. Owens deliberately avoids thorough and extended engagement with the former (or "conceptual") phase of compositional decision-making, and instead pays close at- tention to the mechanics of the latter (or "graphical") one.

The principal conclusion is unexpected. Composers of the later fifteenth and six- teenth centuries were able to devise works of considerable polyphonic complexity without the use of score notation. They could compose straight into parts, whether in partbooks, in choirbook format, or with the voice parts written sequentially on the page. For that reason, their working manu- scripts have not always been correctly iden- tified for what they really are-which is to say, holograph sketches, drafts, or copies that bear traces of the creative act of com- posing new pieces. Score format, seemingly the logical medium for devising polyphony, is in fact encountered so rarely that it must be reckoned the exception rather than the rule. Instead, composers habitually pieced their works together segment by segment, voice by voice, relying partly on aural imag- ination, partly on memory, partly on the visual control of unaligned voice parts, and partly on whatever may have been worked out on erasable tablets. Evidence to support this interpretation is drawn from a wide range of theoretical, pictorial, anecdotal, and musical sources, in particular from the unexpectedly large number of composing manuscripts that Owens has identified, by composers famous or unknown, skilled or inexperienced. Her argument is compel- ling, and it utterly transforms the received view of how Renaissance composers went about their task.

Inevitably, there are shadowy places where Owens's theory cannot shed much useful light. For example, the documents available to her give disappointingly little insight into one of the period's most char- acteristic and complex textures: imitative polyphony. Although Owens considers sev- eral pieces that are loosely imitative (in the sense that short melodic motifs are passed between the voices), none of those pieces is rigorous, dense, or systematic in its ex- ploration of that texture. It is one thing to compose a transparent, semi-imitative four-voice madrigal straight into parts, as

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Book Reviews Book Reviews

we witness in the fascinating examples Owens extracts from a manuscript once owned and used by the Florentine com- poser Francesco Corteccia. It would have been quite another matter to see the same process being used to generate a grand six- voice imitative motet by Josquin, Adrian Willaert, Nicola Gombert, Crist6bal de Mo- rales, Palestrina, or William Byrd, but noth- ing on that scale has yet been found. The absence of such material is strange, unex- plained, and inevitably (to this reader, at least) it brings to mind those erasable tab- lets. Was it precisely for this purpose-the creation of complex textures-that the tab- lets were used? Frustratingly, there is noth- ing that Owens or anyone else can do to answer that question. My own guess-and it can only be a guess-is that extended and intricately overlapping imitative polyphony probably did require some form of score notation in order for the voice parts to be kept fully under control. If so, then eras- able tablets would have been the perfect place for mapping them out. But this is idle speculation. The tablets themselves are mute forever, not merely erased, but almost without exception destroyed.

After reading, enjoying, and admiring this book, inevitably one asks the question, "Where next?" Will this study (as its dust- jacket claims) "change the way we analyze and understand early music"? What ana- lytical implications are in fact opened by Owens's startling discoveries? To this reader, at least, the answers to those ques- tions are not readily forthcoming. Admit- tedly thanks to Owens's painstaking and brilliant evaluation of the evidence, we possess a clearer understanding of the processes by which composers built their pieces, section by section and layer by layer. Nevertheless-and here one thinks again of Britten on his morning walk-there are aspects of musical invention, content, logic and decision making that will always lie be- yond the evidence of a composer's docu- ments, and are best contemplated through

we witness in the fascinating examples Owens extracts from a manuscript once owned and used by the Florentine com- poser Francesco Corteccia. It would have been quite another matter to see the same process being used to generate a grand six- voice imitative motet by Josquin, Adrian Willaert, Nicola Gombert, Crist6bal de Mo- rales, Palestrina, or William Byrd, but noth- ing on that scale has yet been found. The absence of such material is strange, unex- plained, and inevitably (to this reader, at least) it brings to mind those erasable tab- lets. Was it precisely for this purpose-the creation of complex textures-that the tab- lets were used? Frustratingly, there is noth- ing that Owens or anyone else can do to answer that question. My own guess-and it can only be a guess-is that extended and intricately overlapping imitative polyphony probably did require some form of score notation in order for the voice parts to be kept fully under control. If so, then eras- able tablets would have been the perfect place for mapping them out. But this is idle speculation. The tablets themselves are mute forever, not merely erased, but almost without exception destroyed.

After reading, enjoying, and admiring this book, inevitably one asks the question, "Where next?" Will this study (as its dust- jacket claims) "change the way we analyze and understand early music"? What ana- lytical implications are in fact opened by Owens's startling discoveries? To this reader, at least, the answers to those ques- tions are not readily forthcoming. Admit- tedly thanks to Owens's painstaking and brilliant evaluation of the evidence, we possess a clearer understanding of the processes by which composers built their pieces, section by section and layer by layer. Nevertheless-and here one thinks again of Britten on his morning walk-there are aspects of musical invention, content, logic and decision making that will always lie be- yond the evidence of a composer's docu- ments, and are best contemplated through

the analysis of the music itself. As a study of technical procedure, Composers at Work is a triumph, and it must be required reading for anyone with an interest in Renaissance polyphony. At the same time, I suspect that it will prove to be a self-contained piece of work, not a key that opens up new and unsuspected fields of research into the in- ternal workings of fifteenth- and sixteenth- century music.

The book is beautifully produced. In order to cope with the large number of photographic reproductions, it is printed throughout on glossy paper, and as a result the quality of reproduction is consistently high. Music examples are provided, and the book's tables and bibliography will be useful to all who work on the nature and history of autograph music manuscripts. Since Owens wrote her research, further work has been done on the composing manuscripts of Derrick Gerarde, and, as a result, it can now be stated with confidence that plates 7.1 and 7.2 (and consequently music example 7.1) are not Gerarde's work, but rather the efforts of a less experienced musician working in England probably in the 1560s. In no way, however, does this reattribution affect the thrust of Owens's argument.

Also newly located under a pastedown in one of Gerarde's partbooks is a previously unknown example of a composing draft, the format of which conforms closely to Owens's paradigm: a piece written out in unaligned voice parts on a single sheet, rich in breves and without words, but clearly meant to be texted. Already the tally of composers' autographs is growing, pre- cisely as Owens knew it would. But her book will not suffer because of this. Only an autograph of unusual and exceptional kind is likely ever to pose a serious chal- lenge to Owens's now classic image of the Renaissance composer at work.

JOHN MILSOM

Middlebury College

the analysis of the music itself. As a study of technical procedure, Composers at Work is a triumph, and it must be required reading for anyone with an interest in Renaissance polyphony. At the same time, I suspect that it will prove to be a self-contained piece of work, not a key that opens up new and unsuspected fields of research into the in- ternal workings of fifteenth- and sixteenth- century music.

The book is beautifully produced. In order to cope with the large number of photographic reproductions, it is printed throughout on glossy paper, and as a result the quality of reproduction is consistently high. Music examples are provided, and the book's tables and bibliography will be useful to all who work on the nature and history of autograph music manuscripts. Since Owens wrote her research, further work has been done on the composing manuscripts of Derrick Gerarde, and, as a result, it can now be stated with confidence that plates 7.1 and 7.2 (and consequently music example 7.1) are not Gerarde's work, but rather the efforts of a less experienced musician working in England probably in the 1560s. In no way, however, does this reattribution affect the thrust of Owens's argument.

Also newly located under a pastedown in one of Gerarde's partbooks is a previously unknown example of a composing draft, the format of which conforms closely to Owens's paradigm: a piece written out in unaligned voice parts on a single sheet, rich in breves and without words, but clearly meant to be texted. Already the tally of composers' autographs is growing, pre- cisely as Owens knew it would. But her book will not suffer because of this. Only an autograph of unusual and exceptional kind is likely ever to pose a serious chal- lenge to Owens's now classic image of the Renaissance composer at work.

JOHN MILSOM

Middlebury College

Africa. Edited by Ruth M. Stone. (The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music, 1.) New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1998. [xv, 851 p. + 1 compact disc. ISBN 0-8240-6035-0. $125.]

Africa. Edited by Ruth M. Stone. (The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music, 1.) New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1998. [xv, 851 p. + 1 compact disc. ISBN 0-8240-6035-0. $125.]

Attempts have been made to write about Africa, or large divisions of it, as a homo- geneous whole, as a locale unified in its

Attempts have been made to write about Africa, or large divisions of it, as a homo- geneous whole, as a locale unified in its

cultural traits and their functions. Such an approach stems in part from an intellectual need to delimit boundaries discursively,

cultural traits and their functions. Such an approach stems in part from an intellectual need to delimit boundaries discursively,

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