Review: Materialities: Books, Readers, and the Chanson in Sixteenth-Century Europe, by Kate van Orden

Abstract

Materialities: Books, Readers, and the Chanson in Sixteenth-Century Europe , by Kate van Orden. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. xix, 320 pp. Materialities begins with a deceptively simple question: what, exactly, is a book of music? Regarded from the perspective of your local music library, the answer might seem straightforward. But Kate van Orden quickly persuades us that the answer is not so simple, at least not once we pause to consider the complexity of these objects and the equally complex story of how they were used. Scholars have often regarded the advent of music printing in the sixteenth century from the standpoint of the grand history of the masterwork, and thus have highlighted the ways in which printing inaugurated (in both aesthetic and legal senses) a trajectory that allowed composers to project their best intentions for their works. This fascinating new book resists that notion, and brings us to understand the transformative roles played by the new musical medium of its day and the complex habits of mind and body enacted around it. The study is arranged in two parts, each devoted to the stories of Renaissance music books and their uses, and each animated by a central set of theoretical concerns. The first half is concerned with matter (the books themselves), and the second with habits of body and mind, in this case the ways musical readers of many callings engaged these texts, from schoolroom to dinner table. We begin with the very stuff …