music and the reformation in england, 1549-1660by peter le huray

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Music and the Reformation in England, 1549-1660 by Peter Le Huray Review by: Robert Donington Journal of the American Musicological Society, Vol. 22, No. 2 (Summer, 1969), pp. 296-297 Published by: University of California Press on behalf of the American Musicological Society Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/830481 . Accessed: 17/06/2014 20:41 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. . University of California Press and American Musicological Society are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Journal of the American Musicological Society. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 194.29.185.216 on Tue, 17 Jun 2014 20:41:13 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

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Music and the Reformation in England, 1549-1660 by Peter Le HurayReview by: Robert DoningtonJournal of the American Musicological Society, Vol. 22, No. 2 (Summer, 1969), pp. 296-297Published by: University of California Press on behalf of the American Musicological SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/830481 .

Accessed: 17/06/2014 20:41

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

University of California Press and American Musicological Society are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize,preserve and extend access to Journal of the American Musicological Society.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 194.29.185.216 on Tue, 17 Jun 2014 20:41:13 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

296 JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN MUSICOLOGICAL SOCIETY

and his interpretations at times suspect, he did, after all, uncover vast amounts of material that scholars can now inter-

pret with greater precision. Considering his importance and the fact that the stream of his publications has all but ceased, one cannot help being moved

by this book. Here is all Farmer's en- thusiasm and extravagance collected into a single smashing volume. Like a Berlioz finale, it is a gigantic peroration, an

apotheosis of his prodigious scholarship. ELLA ZONIS

University of Chicago

Peter Le Huray. Music and the Ref- ormation in England, 1549-1 66o. New York: Oxford University Press, 1967 (Studies in Church Mu- sic, ed. Erik Routley). viii, 454 PP. HERE IS A SUBJECT of great interest and

importance, no definitive study of which exists; and though this book is still not

quite that, it makes a valuable contribu- tion, and for what it is can be much recommended.

The story of reformed English church music is one of those difficult stories where it is hard to know how far back to go, and how far to assume that the reader already knows the background, or if he does not know it, had better find out elsewhere. The book starts with rather a good sketch of the aspects of the English Reformation itself which

mainly affected music. Quite a lot of

history is taken for granted, and the milestones could perhaps have been set

up a little more deliberately; on the other hand, some very good supporting quotations are adduced, not all of them as familiar as, for example, Cranmer's much quoted letter to Henry VIII on music for his translated Processional. A number of tables appear in which factual information is usefully condensed. Both tables and quotations continue on the same useful scale throughout the book. The text itself is tightly packed with similar informative detail.

Nothing is narrated of the difficult

years of reaction under Mary, but the Elizabethan settlement is taken up at once. The references to foreign history are here a little obscure-again it is the dilemma of what to leave out; but it is of doubtful value to the reader dropping hints which there is not room to follow

up. The many small details concerning individual musicians and their personal complaints and misdemeanors are often

helpful in filling out a human picture, but occasionally out of proportion to so condensed a narrative. There is perhaps a touch of "thesis-style" in this reluc- tance to waste any titbit of good re- search material once found.

A special study of the Chapel Royal follows, where the detail, though minute, is relevant and welcome. The manner of

giving references is not always quite up to thesis standard, by the way; just occasionally there is no reference; page numbers are sometimes omitted; dates but not places of publication are stated in the Bibliography, where some sources are given, very oddly, under the names not of their authors but of modern edi- tors. These are small matters, however, and so is the fashionable misdistribution

by which footnotes are not footnotes, but at the back of the chapter (one

finger committed), and when found do not give the information, but send you by the author's name to the Bibliography (another finger), where you find not the information but a cross-reference to the editor's name, by which time the

finger which was keeping your original place has slipped out. Does this really make for that smooth and easy reading intended by banishing footnotes from their proper place at the bottom of each

page? The moral is, of course, to think what the reader has to do to follow these complex operations fifty or sixty times in every chapter.

And thinking what the reader is going to experience is the only remedy for

"thesis-style" as well. The reader wants a perfectly clear and sufficient account of what happened, and when, and to what. Only as a support to this clear and sufficient account can he assimilate the

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REVIEWS 297

evidence on which the author based it and by which he hopes to confirm it and illuminate it. Whenever the evi- dence, arranged with skill, can itself be made to carry on the narrative, this method has much to be said for it; but even with skill, this will not always do. I believe the author here could have stood back a little further from his re- search material, and perhaps even for a few years longer, until he could see better how to make his story as simple as his scholarship is deep.

The story goes on with a chapter called 'Some Performance Problems' which seems prematurely placed until we find that it begins not with perform- ance but with sources for the music, very well set out, and leading quite naturally to questions of accidentals (here loosely referred to, and without definition, as musica ficta). One of the most fascinat-

ing of the tables gives variant accidentals in some sources of Tallis and Byrd, with the interesting suggestion that accidentals are seldom added though often left out in the later sources; but then the whole difficult topic gets dropped. Underlay, too, gets excellent illustration, and a little more but not much more general discussion: Zarlino is sketchily sum- marized on the point (here is one of the cases of a missing reference). Organs and organ accompaniments, pitch and

transposition get informative mention and some good illumination; but the

chapter as a whole is just long enough to be tantalizing, not long enough or

broadly based enough to be of more than sporadic value. One conclusion seems to me contrary to evidence: that restraint in voice-production is histori-

cally correct or musically appropriate. There are too many contemporary de-

scriptions of "bel canto" technique from Maffei onwards (Delle lettere

.... Naples, I562, letter i, pp. 5-81) for this view any longer to be plausible. Nor do I think that free ornamentation made so late an appearance in England as is here

suggested. The chapter on "Trends and Influ-

ences" is rather amateur music history

redeemed by flashes of individual in-

sight. From there on, the book gets into much sharper focus as it concentrates more upon the actual English church music which is its central subject. The treatment is organized by composers rather than by forms, and there is no- where a very concise explanation of just what kinds of music comprise the rep- ertory. The reader who does not al-

ready possess this information will have to work quite hard to dig it out; the reader who does, or who acquires it elsewhere, will be rewarded here by a

large number of crucial facts and illumi-

nating suggestions, well worked out with the aid of musical examples, and carried with commendable persistence through all the great names and many lesser ones down to the restoration of Charles II in i66o. It is a well-chosen point of termination, beyond which new influ- ences transformed the great tradition of English church music so thoughtfully traced from its sources by Le Huray.

ROBERT DONINGTON

University of Iowa

Rey M. Longyear. Schiller and Mu- sic (University of North Carolina Studies in the Germanic Languages and Literature No. 54). Chapel Hill, North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 1966. 201 pp. PROFESSOR LONGYEAR'S book is a welcome addition to the growing body of modem

interdisciplinary studies. I think it no

exaggeration to claim that older investi-

gations of music's relationship to other arts are among the chief casualities of our present information explosion. More material about everything connected with music, art, and literature is now available than before, and, as a consequence, many very respectable writings by earlier scholars are completely outdated. All

history must of necessity be revised con-

tinually as new information comes into focus. Nowhere, however, is there greater need for continual revision than in the realm of interdisciplinary studies, and

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