Palestrina for All: Unwrapping, Singing, Celebrating by Jonathan Boswell

Abstract

Reviewed by: Palestrina for All: Unwrapping, Singing, Celebrating by Jonathan Boswell Aaron James Jonathan Boswell Palestrina for All: Unwrapping, Singing, Celebrating s.l.: Jonathan Boswell, 2018 x + 165 pages. Paperback. $7.49 Almost two decades into the twenty-first century, Palestrina retains his place as one of the most beloved and widely performed composers of sacred choral music. The past five years have seen important new recordings of his music by The Sixteen, the Yale Schola Cantorum, and New York Polyphony, not to mention Palestrina's own Sistine Chapel Choir. Despite the global popularity of Palestrina's music, however, there are surprisingly few books suitable for non-specialist readers hoping to learn more about the composer's life and music. Even the English-language academic literature on Palestrina is astonishingly small: there has been no general monograph on the composer since 1971.1 Jonathan Boswell's Palestrina for All thus aims to fill an important niche in the Palestrina literature, discussing the music in a way that is accessible to a broad audience of interested readers. Writing accessibly about Renaissance music is difficult. The traditional life-and-works study, so familiar from studies of later composers, is ill-suited to composers like Palestrina, whose music can rarely be dated with any great precision and whose works do not in any case invite easy autobiographical interpretations. Boswell wisely restricts most discussion of Palestrina's life and career to chapter 2, avoiding getting bogged down in the minutiae of sixteenth-century music printing practices and ecclesiastical payment records. The following chapters treat different portions of Palestrina's output: a brief discussion of the madrigals, offertories, [End Page 71] and Magnificats leads into a longer discussion of Palestrina's motets, while the most extensive discussion is devoted to his settings of the Mass Ordinary. Here, individual chapters discuss the composer's characteristic approach to particular movements of the Mass: Kyrie¸ Gloria, Credo, Sanctus-Benedictus, and Agnus Dei. Boswell's initial chapters encourage the reader to listen to the "total sound" of Palestrina, cultivating a "relaxed, free-wheeling sort of listening experience" (29) rather than one mediated by musico-analytic language. The later chapters, however, assume a non-trivial amount of musical expertise, including the ability to read a six-part choral score and follow the author's motivic analysis; the ideal reader would probably be a choral singer with some previous experience of Palestrina's music. Such readers would be best placed to appreciate Boswell's eloquent evocation of the "graceful cordiality and friendship" (75) that characterizes Palestrina's counterpoint, a quality that can be heard by perceptive listeners but is most powerfully experienced by the performers themselves. Boswell's best insights, here and elsewhere, stem from his own experience singing Palestrina's music, helping novice choral singers to understand what makes these works perpetually interesting. One memorable passage describes the experience of singing Palestrina from the perspective of soprano, alto, tenor, and bass singers, describing how each experiences the musical texture in a different way (see 119–120). This sort of evocative and non-technical musical description is what one would expect in a book titled Palestrina for All, and the author's accounts of Palestrina's music are frequently vivid and thought-provoking. The book tends to become diffuse and confusing, however, when it ventures into larger and more abstract questions of musical style and contrapuntal procedure in Palestrina. At several junctures in the text, Boswell turns to quantitative analysis to back up his observations about Palestrina's style, presenting the reader with tables of "Development of Melodic Leads" (87), "Percentage Shares of Invocations Among Parts" (90) and "Voice Part Redeployment" (58). This last table is especially confusing. The author states that "the frequency of [End Page 72] redeployment of voice parts" is a characteristic feature of Palestrina's style, but this non-standard term is never defined, nor is any example of a "voice part redeployment" given. Instead, the reader is presented with a table of "Redeployment Rates in 15 Mass Settings," containing average numbers of measures between "redeployments" in the author's chosen corpus of Masses—information that is difficult for the reader to interpret, because the term "redeployment...