Editing Music in Early Modern Germany

Abstract

This excellent book combines the philologist's method, offering up page after page of archival discovery and textual insight, with a cultural historian's grasp of the various reception discourses of the new scholarship on early modern Europe. Hammond's historical point of view itself is strikingly fresh for the discipline of musicology. Only very recently have some music historians begun to join their colleagues from the related disciplines in considering the years between about 1400 and 1700 in the longue durée terms of a unitary ‘early modern’ period. Further, the interdisciplinarity so richly evident in Hammond's work testifies to the fruitfulness of the cooperative trend over the past twenty years among Renaissance, Reformation and baroque historians, not least among them Anthony Grafton, whose Princeton seminar on the highly ramified early modern print culture inspired the author to her present investigation. One of the principal challenges of the new early modern scholarship has been to the great dates and events—the before-and-after watersheds—that have constituted the positivistic markers of historiography since the nineteenth century. In the field of musical editing, 1850 has long held such canonical status. As late as the tenth printing of The New Harvard Dictionary of Music (2001) and The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Second Edition (2001), 1850—the founding of the Bach Gesellschaft and origin of the critical edition—continued to serve as the date only after which one could claim that ‘musicologists have produced an enormous quantity of distinguished editions’ (Grove 7, p. 886). Randel's volume dedicates a single paragraph to the history of editions before 1850 (pp. 264f.); Sadie's gives one column (p. 896) to pre-1850 editions, which were allegedly useful ‘less for their content than as illustrations of the history of music scholarship’. Hammond's book, distinguished in both style and content, may be taken as an implicit argument, not for rejecting outright, but for revising through greater historical appreciation the disciplinary certainty that authentic musical editions began only in the mid-nineteenth century. Stated another way, Hammond's analysis, which applies Peter Burke's bricolage model of diffusion (meaning in this case: early modern northern European editors of anthologies of Italian madrigals and canzonettas operated pragmatically, choosing and adaptating according to criteria predicated on utility—an unpardonable sin in the minds of the Romantics), finds much about German editorial practice in the seminal years between Friedrich Lindner's Gemma musicalis I–III (1588–90) and Martin Rinckart's Triumphi de Dorothea (1619) that is worthy of being called ‘critical’ in its own right. For this achievement alone, Editing Music in Early Modern Germany deserves special recognition.