Essays on Renaissance Music in Honour of David Fallows: Bon jour, bon mois et bonne estrenne (review)

Abstract

(MOSTLY) EARLY MUSICS Essays on Renaissance Music in Honour of David Fallows: Bon jour, bon mois et bonne estrenne. Edited by Fabrice Fitch and Jacobijn Kiel. (Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Music, 11.) Woodbridge, U.K.: Boydell Press, 2011. [xx, 424 p. ISBN 9781843836193. $95.] Music examples, scores, facsimiles, illustrations, inventories, tables, bibliography, indexes. To celebrate prodigious, indispensable achievements of consummate British scholar, musicologist, and teacher David Fallows on occasion of his sixty-fifth birthday in 2010, three generations of colleagues, friends, mentees, and former students have assembled sterling offering of thirty-eight significant essays on of fifteenth through early seventeenth centuries (and tad beyond). Lauded by Bonnie J. Blackburn, Jane Alden, and Christopher Page as the doyen of fifteenthcentury English secular (p. 44), a continuing source of inspiration and guidance (p. 33), and one for whom music has always been about life of others, as well as his own (p. 8), Fallows can bask in well-deserved admiration, gratitude, and affection radiating throughout this Festschrift. Good cheer (mixed with occasional mild spice of disputes between friends) resonates throughout this volume as well, from subtitle paraphrasing Guillaume Du Fay's rondeau for New Year's, Bon jour, bon mois, bon an et bonne estraine, evoking holiday best wishes (conveniently close to honoree's December 20 birthday) that include good gift (although why this special festive present hearkening back to medieval times has later French spelling estrenne, modern etrenne, goes unexplained) to subtle allusions in article titles and elsewhere (e.g., Alden's Ung Petit cadeau, Dagmar Hoffmann-Axthelm's David musicus, and fortuitous number of sixtyfive titles in Warwick Edwards's hand-list, pp. 202-6), direct addresses to Fallows, and photo graphs ranging from boyhood to seasoned professional still happily reveling in his pursuits. The volume's list of Fallows's principle publications dating from 1973 to 2010 presents formidable array of stellar monographs, critical and facsimile editions, catalogs, articles, and reviews, attesting to magnitude, scope, and lasting importance of his work, much of it stemming from his long career since 1976 on faculty of University of Manchester (now as emeritus). Absent are his 1978 dissertation under Philip Brett from University of Cali - fornia, Berkeley (Robert Morton's Songs: A Study of Styles in Mid-Fifteenth Century) and projects yet to come. Among these is an edition in Musica Britannica, Secular Polyphony, 1380-1480, cited by Black burn (p. 47) as appearing in 2011; although pretty much ready, . . . definitely forthcoming and labour of many years, it will not actually be in press, according to series editor Julian Rushton, until probably . . . 2014 or even 2015 (e-mail to author dated 11 May 2012; see also http://www .musicabritannica.org.uk/volumes.html [accessed 2 June 2012]). Experts and tyros alike can readily grasp Fallows's core scholarship issued in thirty-five journal and book articles between 1976 and 2009 by consulting Ashgate's two retrospective compilations issued in its Vari orum Collected Studies series: Songs and Musicians in Fifteenth Century (Aldershot, U.K., 1996); and Composers and Their Songs, 1400-1521 (Farnham, U.K., 2010). Quite fittingly, magisterial command of repertory and its sources in Fallows's award-winning A Catalogue of Polyphonic Songs, 1415-1480 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999; supplemented by his ongoing list of corrections, adjustments, and additions through 3 March 2010 at http://personalpages .manchester.ac.uk/staff/david.fallows /appendix.pdf [accessed 2 June 2012]) casts its readily acknowledged, pervasive authority over entire proceedings. By broadly organizing volume's contents around sources and archives, of Du Fay (1397? …