Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

The Pursuit of Musick: Musical Life in Original Writings & Art c. 1200–1770 by Andrew Parrott (review)

2024; Baldwin Wallace University; Volume: 55; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/bach.2024.a924431

2767-4843

Steven E. Plank,

Diverse Musicological Studies

Reviewed by: The Pursuit of Musick: Musical Life in Original Writings & Art c. 1200–1770 by Andrew Parrott Steven E. Plank (bio) Andrew Parrott. The Pursuit of Musick: Musical Life in Original Writings & Art c. 1200–1770 (London: Clink Street Publishing, 2022). 544 pp. The study of music history owes a significant debt to the scholars who have compiled anthologies of primary source materials. Such volumes enjoy a long history, beginning as early as the eighteenth century with Martin Gerbert's Scriptores ecclesiastici de musica sacra potissium. Familiarly in our own day, class reading lists often include works like Piero Weiss and Richard Taruskin's Music in the Western World: A History in Documents (1984; 2008), Ruth Halle Rowen's Music Through Sources and Documents (1979), or Carol MacClintock's Readings in the History of Music in Performance (1979).1 Pride of place has tended to be given to Oliver Strunk's formidable Source Readings in Music History (1950), considerably expanded and revised by Leo Treitler and a team of subeditors in 1998, a revision that not only broadened the range of sources, but also confirmed anew the utility and value of such volumes.2 Andrew Parrott's mammoth and handsomely produced The Pursuit of Musick is an impressive addition to this tradition, distinctive in the vastness of its contents, but no less so in its nature. Strunk in his classic volume set out "to make conveniently accessible to the teacher or student of the history of music those things which he must eventually read," and the excerpts in his anthology are generally substantial and curated with more than a faint tinge of canonicity—these are those things which must eventually be read.3 The excerpts from Plato, Aristotle, Boethius, Johannes Tinctoris, Gioseffo Zarlino, Giulio Caccini, and Johann Joachim Quantz, among many others, give the impression of having been pruned from a rather high limb in the paleographic arbor. Whether they seem this way because Strunk has framed them as "what everybody must read," or if in fact their [End Page 118] intrinsic quality is of the essence, does little to alter that impression of canonicity. Parrott's The Pursuit of Musick, on the other hand, gives a different impression. A number of the canonical voices are here, to be sure, but one senses little hierarchy. Rather, the short excerpts are more democratically compiled. This well represents a more realistic view of the range of historical voices, but it also speaks, I suspect, to Parrott as a collector as much as a curator. The volume is carefully organized and structured, to be sure, but it also has the congeniality of a personal commonplace book or even that dresser drawer where the avid collector stashes away the scraps of paper bearing memorable quotations for use "one of these days." Strunk's volume is that convenient place where one goes to consult those things that one knows must surely be there; Parrott's tome, rewardingly, is a place for the serendipity of discovery. Susan Sontag observes that "the course of modern history having already sapped the traditions and shattered the living wholes in which precious objects once found their place, the collector may now in good conscience go about excavating the choicer, more emblematic fragments."4 The Pursuit of Musick is one such brilliant excavation. Parrott organizes his work into three large sections: "Music and Society," "Music and Ideas," and "Music and Performance," and each of these sections contains an impressively vast number of text excerpts and high-quality reproductions of visual art. The texts are all in English, with translations either made anew or drawn from historical sources; the challenges of obscure early vocabulary are eased with editorial footnotes, and original texts of non-English works are available on an associated website.5 Brief thematic introductions are provided by Hugh Griffith, a frequent collaborator in Parrott's endeavors. The collection of examples again may seem to resist hierarchy, but in this broad collecting of material Parrott has been far from capricious, as shown in a characteristic care to offer opposing views—St. Augustine, Martin Luther, Girolamo Savonarola, and Johann Mattheson all sit side by side in voicing the diversity of opinion...