Musicology and Fifteenth-Century Music

Abstract

hat are we to make of a century of such political chaos? Usurpapation and murder among the petty tyrants of the Italian city states, an internecine conflict between the Burgundians and the French royal house, war between France and England, and ultimately a civil war in England that vitiated the monarchy until the advent of the Tudors: these events form the bleak narrative of the fifteenth century. By all logic it should have been a period of eclipse for music as well as the other arts, a period of lesser productivity measured on both a quantitative and qualitative scale. But it was not. Music of high artistic value continued to be created. Musical institutions (the chapels and cathedral choirs) continued to flourish, suppressed at one locale only to re-emerge there or to be reformed elsewhere. And musicians moved from one court or church to another, transferring fidelity along the way, with an ease we find surprising but which evidently caused them little chagrin. It is perhaps because of this paradox the inverse relation between political stability and artistic productivity that the fifteenth century has held a special fascination for music historians. Indeed, the fifteenth century has been well served by the discipline of musicology, and American scholarship has of late been at the forefront of research in the music of the emerging Renaissance. To such native pioneers as Oliver Strunk and Charles Warren Fox were added in 1939-40 emigres of particular energy and intellectual force, men such as Manfred Bukofzer, Otto Gombosi, and Edward Lowinsky, whose writing and teaching set standards and revealed avenues of inquiry heretofore unknown on this continent. But perhaps no scholar had a greater personal impact on the historiography of the music of the early Renaissance than did Gustave Reese. Personifying a felicitous blend of boyish enthusiasm, teutonic assiduity, and the highest personal integrity, Reese, with the help of his doctoral students at New York University, accomplished much of the necessary preliminary research in fifteenth-century music. Manuscripts were identified, their contents catalogued and correlated, editions were prepared both of individual sources and composers, and artifact and artist were placed in their appropriate historical context in his encyclopedic Music in the Renaissance. In the few short years since Reese's passing, the study of individual