The Rise of European Music: 1380-1500.

Caldwell, John

Reinhard Strohm, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). xv + 720 pp ISBN 0-521-41745-7. 60.00[pounds].

This is a formidable book, a reflection of its author's colossal expertise in fifteenth-century music, and a challenge to the perseverance of the reader. When I confessed to a pupil that I was reading it but slowly, the answer was that I would eventually hear it all in essays and discussions. I doubt if I shall, but its value to undergraduates and other serious persons could hardly be overstated. Most of all, however, it should appeal to readers who want a deeper understanding of the interaction between music and late medieval life. There is plenty of technical detail, but there is also a full appreciation of how music functioned in society (including, of course, ecclesiastical society).

From this point of view the most rewarding part of the book is the third, entitled `The common traditions'. The first of its two chapters, `Music in the life of the institutions', covers not only the Church, making an important distinction between `choir music' and `chapel music', but also schools, universities, monasteries, and secular usage both public and private. In the second chapter we read of those aspects that are so often overlooked in `straight-line' histories: plainchant, the Latin cantio and simple polyphony, vernacular song, solo and ensemble instrumental music. Not that these general issues are neglected in the remaining parts, which are chronologically focused: `The age of the great Schism', `The age of Dufay and Dunstable' and `Europe after 1450': in them we can learn variously of the significance of the Council of Constance to music and musicians, the collecting of music, the patronage of the Habsburgs, and the geographical links exemplified by the travels of musicians and the distribution of their compositions. Perhaps the only valid topic not treated in its own right is the history of musical theory in the period, though quotations from theorists are frequently used to illuminate the practice of the time.

The book is also strong in musical analysis. The author's method is to take a relatively small number of representative works and to analyse them in depth with the aid of extensive quotations. Only very rarely are these to be found in the usual anthologies; often they are obscure or virtually unknown pieces, while in other cases new light is thrown on more familiar compositions. The effect in the former case is to deepen one's understanding of the normal, where so often historians of music have tended to draw attention to the exceptional.

It would be hard, in any case, to emerge from a reading of this book without an enhanced understanding of and admiration for the musical heritage of the fifteenth century. Its scope is so very wide, and by good fortune there is enough of the more humdrum side of it left to us to enable us to reconstruct it as a convincing whole. Reinhard Strohm is exceptionally well equipped to convey this wholeness through his command of geographical, linguistic and institutional diversity, even if his book is here and there a little provocative or cursory. The title itself is a minor provocation (in what sense can music be said to `rise'?), and the repertory enshrined in the Eton College choirbook (copied c. 1500) is given rather short shrift in the chapter on Briush music in the final part of the book. But it has to be added that the integration of British musical history within a survey of European dimensions is in itself one of the most attractive features of a volume that is bound to be regarded as uniquely authoritative.