Both from the Ears and Mind: Thinking about Music in Early Modern England

Both from the Ears & Mind

Both from the Ears & Mind

Thinking about Music in Early Modern England

Linda Phyllis Austern

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2020 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2020

Printed in the United States of America

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-70159-2 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-70467-8 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226704678.001.0001

This book has been supported by the Martin Picker Fund of the American Musicological Society, funded in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Austern, Linda Phyllis, 1957– author.

Title: Both from the ears and mind : thinking about music in early modern England / Linda Phyllis Austern.

Description: Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019045110 | ISBN 9780226701592 (cloth) | ISBN 9780226704678 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Music—England—16th century—History and criticism. | Music—England—17th century—History and criticism.

Classification: LCC ML286.2 .A98 2020 | DDC 780.942/0903—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019045110

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

For Tony, who helps me keep everything in perspective

Contents

Introduction

1. Praise, Blame, and Persuasion: Of Musicke by Way of Disputation

Praise and Dispraise (of Music): Discourse, Dialectic, Disputation

Knowledge of Music by Witt and Understanding

Reading as Creative Process: Toward Places of Invention

Constructing Arguments

Materials for Discourse

2. Debating Godly Music: Sober and Lawful Christian Use

Musica, serva Dei: (Textual) Places for God’s Handmaid

Music to the Praise and Glory of God: A Methodicall Gathering Together of Authorities

Anxieties of Aurality and Homonymies of Love

Codetta: The Prosecution Rests

3. Harmony, Number, and Proportion

Art and Science Abstracted from Bodies

Between Sense and Intellect: Music as Conceptual Tool

The Worlds Musicke

A Simbolisme between the Elements: (Re)appropriation across Domains

Profound Contemplation of Secret Things: Magic, Occult Doctrines, and Music

Hidden Harmonies of Earth and Heaven: Alchemy and Astrology

Divine Consent: Holy Matrimony as Harmony

4. To Please the Ear and Satisfy the Mind

Explaining Musical Experience

Sound, Soul, and Sense

To Captivate the Mind: Music and Interior Process

5. Comfortable . . . in Sicknes and in Health: Music to Temper Self and Surroundings

Music and Medicine

Music to Preserve the Health

Music and the Humors: Balancing the Self

Beyond Black Bile: Sorrow, Grief, and Musical Remediation

Plates

Acknowledgments

Notes

Selected Bibliography

Index

Introduction

Patience exceedeth knowledge, & musick begetteth patience.¹

In 1597, six landmarks of early modern English music first appeared from London printer Peter Short, among them John Dowland’s First Booke of Songes or Ayres, Antony Holborne’s The Cittharn Schoole, and Thomas Morley’s Plaine and Easie Introduction to Practicall Musicke.² The same year, other London printers issued quartos of William Shakespeare’s Richard II and Romeo and Juliet and the premier edition of Francis Bacon’s Essays. Each of these references music in a different way.³ All but forgotten by modern scholars is another mass-market tome from the same city and year, intended, like Richard II, to be sold at one of the many bookstalls around St. Paul’s: Politeuphuia. Wits Common wealth by stationer, bookbinder, and bookseller Nicholas Ling (fl. 1580–1607). This small, duodecimo-size volume of 277 pages is a collection of proverbs, aphorisms, and other sententiae organized along the commonplace model by which writers and orators collected incisive snippets of information by topic for future speech and writing. Ling is obscure enough to be omitted from the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, and, in contrast to these other nine books, Politeuphuia remains only of historical interest. Yet it proved most popular at the time, going through dozens of editions between 1598 and 1722, thirteen already by 1612. It also inspired an entire series of pocket-size anthologies of wise sayings on culturally significant topics, including music.⁴ Ling’s original epistle To the Reader emphasizes that the book’s contents, gathered into certaine heads or places, will not only assist eloquent persuasion and civil conversation but provide moral edification and something resembling physiological sustenance as it moves from authorial pen to recipient’s ear to interior faculties. Its first revised edition is even clearer about the nutritive, transformative power of its contents.⁵ Its emphasis on aurality, sociability, bodily gesture, and self-improvement provides commonality with Short’s musical imprints. More importantly, the varied information under its heading Of Musicke, some of which is reiterated in Dowland’s book and Shakespeare’s plays, might help a reader better understand, and comment on, the prefatory material to utilitarian music books or musical references in other sorts of works. It could also enable the kind of formulaic debate described near the start of Morley’s treatise.⁶

Both from the Ears and Mind considers music through points of contact and divergence between works such as these ten and a plethora of others from roughly a century either side. These items circulated in manuscript and print, with and without complementary visual illustrations or musical notation. They belong to such contrasting fields as architecture, arithmetic, emblematics, moral philosophy, poetics, travel, and zoology. The result is new understanding of the breadth and depth to which music permeated intellectual endeavors during the Tudor and Stuart eras. Music was both art and science. It had a historical place in many human enterprises, and it inhabited the fluid conceptual space between abstraction and concretion. Music was ontologically mysterious yet manifestly made, intangible but produced and received by sensory means. Its effects lingered when it stopped. It was at best a slippery signifier but an easily comprehensible means to link otherwise incongruous constructs and model dynamical systems or explain unities of discrete elements. These apparent contradictions, all reiterated in sententiae such as Ling presents, enabled music to inhabit the liminal spaces between literal and metaphorical, mental and physical, and manifest and mysterious categories. To speak or write of music became code to consider other things as well as the art itself. Many took to heart what Ling and others present as a commonplace—that music embraces all disciplines—and, whether investigating a single topic or creating compendia of general knowledge, truly virtuosic wits often touched on music. The subject thus stood at the center, not the periphery, of the early modern English intellectual enterprise. Yet no matter how esoteric such discussions became, there always remains something of music’s audibility and potential for bodily pleasure and transfiguration.

This book began decades ago, when it became evident that music was referenced in an unexpectedly wide range of early modern English material. Recognition that what we would consider extramusical sources can deepen understanding of music and how it inflected other disciplines in early modern England was nothing new. As early as 1955, John H. Long observed in context of Shakespearean drama that Elizabethan stage music faithfully reflected the part played by music in the society of the period. Therefore it seemed important to consider the many references to music made in representative selections from the nondramatic literature of the Elizabethans.⁷ Around that time, Gretchen Ludke Finney and John Hollander did the same for lyric poetry from generations before through after Shakespeare.⁸ More recent investigations of similar topics have led to deeper understanding that, especially in Shakespeare’s day, music was conceptually more vast than it has since become. And it extended well beyond entertainment or poetic conceit.⁹ Such recognition also paved the way for studies that explain literary and performative works in relation to music and sound more generally by drawing on wider bodies of primary material—including anatomy, acoustics, and humoral medicine—by scholars such as Gina Bloom, Wes Folkerth, Bruce Smith, and Amanda Eubanks Winkler.¹⁰ Although my book engages with material included in such studies, its focus is neither drama nor other language arts. It cuts through these as it follows intellectual trajectories about music across disciplinary boundaries.

It became clear early in my research that music occupied a predictable place in writings on education and conduct of life broadly construed. The same is true of those touching all seven ancient liberal studies, offshoots such as natural philosophy and geography, and the divinity (and its relative, mythography), for which, as we shall see in chapter 3, the liberal arts or sciences were considered preparative. Christopher Marsh’s Music and Society in Early Modern England incorporates material from the former, as well as enumerating powers attributed to music, as the most thorough study to date of music in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English popular culture. Like his intellectual predecessor, William Chappell, Marsh emphasizes quotidian musical activities and oral cultures, whereas I foreground elite learning and written transmission.¹¹ Nonetheless, some core concerns about music were widely shared. And music itself slipped as easily as its conceptual significance between social groups and spaces.

Primary sources in geometry and alchemy pointed me toward numerology and magic just as Gary Tomlinson was finishing his seminal study of music in Renaissance magic and Penelope Gouk beginning hers on music, science, and natural magic in seventeenth-century England. The middle chapter of this book is beholden to both and to Brian Copenhaver’s magisterial work on magic, the last two to Gouk’s pioneering investigations of sound and musical healing.¹² My book shows that even the most hidden harmonies and profoundly secret cosmic musics relied on understanding of the audible sort. Furthermore, it becomes clear that the kind of snipping and reconfiguration of key information encouraged by inherited models of learning and books like Ling’s brought numerically based disciplines into juxtaposition with literary and visual modes of expression, with medicine, and with theology. Music served as a central point of contact. Recent histories of science have emphasized that early modern science and magic are sometimes impossible to tease apart and that premodern concepts of religio and scientia were founded on discontiguous, but not incompatible, habits of mind.¹³ Here, too, music and musical terminology served as connectors even as meanings and points of origination diverged. Throughout this book, similar information, sometimes presented in virtually identical words, is brought to bear on different contexts or even rival epistemologies; writers claim and reclaim it for their own purposes, reminding us that early modern ideas of authorship and authority were less fixed than they have since become.¹⁴ There is also increasing tension between the scholastic inheritance that privileged written authority and new programs of empiricist learning based on direct sensory observation, especially during the seventeenth century. Music, too, crosses these barriers and was applied to different ends by contrasting communities of discourse and practice.

Both from the Ears and Mind begins by locating discussions of music among the arts of persuasive speech and the classical imperative to precede embodied engagement with topical discourse. To speak of music and to perform it were fundamentally separate even if they sometimes overlapped. The former took precedence among the truly learned and was no less creative or bound by convention. The first chapter surveys verbal genres from which readers could learn core information about music and potentially generate their own timely arguments. Chapter 2 extends rhetorical and dialectical engagement with music into debates over appropriate use in Christian worship, meditation, and the moral life. Beyond predictable sectarian lines, and rival interlocutors who recontextualized the same inherited wisdom about music and the sacred, stand some surprising alliances, hints of cross-confessional musical tourism, and occasionally uneasy mergers of sacred and secular gestures and genres. Chapter 3 builds on tensions between bodily and spiritual ways of knowing music by considering concepts of harmony, number, and proportion from the Pythagorean heritage through increasingly empirical investigations into the nature and significance of occult musics. Metaphor and metaphysics pivot around perceptible music, and visual signifiers of acoustic phenomena signpost secret knowledge for those who could interpret them. Chapter 4 addresses ways in which music was thought to be perceived and to influence the human organism, social collectives, and connections between individuals and their surroundings. The kinds of quantitative underpinnings discussed in chapter 3 help demonstrate the affective powers of music and ways in which it could help model as well as influence cognition and consciousness. Chapter 5 takes up the issue of music in human ecology, as a means to achieve and maintain equilibrium and remediation from internal bodily systems to localized environments. The same slipperiness that enabled music to signify other things also meant that in spite of some accord about the affective connotations of certain musical structures, the choice of music for personal maintenance, restoration, and to accompany routine salutary practices remained highly individual.

Given the richness of primary material in this book, I have let many original voices speak for themselves. I have maintained original spelling and punctuation but have updated orthography to accord with modern practice. I have provided dates and occupations, when available, to help contextualize less familiar early modern figures. Unless otherwise noted, information comes from the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography or the Library of Congress. Some individuals remain so obscure that only their names survive.

CHAPTER ONE

Praise, Blame, and Persuasion

Of Musicke by Way of Disputation

In 1589, London printer Thomas East published six separate parts in broadsheet of a song titled A gratification unto Master John Case, for his learned booke, lately made in the praise of Musicke (fig. 1.1, bassus part). The poet Thomas Watson, the leading English translator of Italian madrigal verse, provided the text. William Byrd, joint holder of the patent under which the piece was printed at a time of tremendous activity in the English music trade, contributed the music. This charming part-song has received scant attention from modern scholars. Only two of its original broadsheets remain along with a copy of a third; the poem also survives in a manuscript verse miscellany.¹ In fact, this Gratification has garnered most comment in the context of the long-standing controversy surrounding authorship of the anonymous 1586 treatise The Praise of Musicke, for which the man to whom Watson addressed his poem was once a leading contender.² The learned Oxford physician, Aristotelian philosopher, and former chorister John Case certainly praised music in his Apologia musices of 1588 and, to a lesser extent, in his Sphaera civitatis of the same year. Careful consideration has cast doubt on his authorship of the vernacular Praise, although Byrd and other contemporaries may have promulgated the presumption. All three treatises were printed and sold by Oxford bookseller Joseph Barnes, with whose ventures East had no professional connection.³ Byrd, Watson, and East’s collaborative product deserves another look in light of the rhetorical and dialectical engagement with music it shares with these three treatises and with a wide range of other items across media and communities of discourse. This Gratification is more than a tribute to a single author for a work in a contrasting genre and print format, or even a multimedia advertisement for an independently produced book. It is not simply a paean to music, which alone would connect it to an ancient tradition made modern at a time of renewed interest in the powers of the art. It is a means through which three men with vested interest in the mass-market music business could profit from an increasingly widespread debate about the art and its place in contemporary English society. Its format as the cheapest and most ephemeral print commodity, often associated with timeliness and broad appeal, may relate to the perceived topicality and commercial potential of praising music in any medium.

Figure 1.1 William Byrd, A gratification unto Master John Case, bassus. The Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, MS Don.a.3 (3).

Reconstructed by Philip Brett from its three surviving parts, Byrd’s setting of Watson’s text is typical of English part-song from the late sixteenth century. It is through-composed and pays careful, but not unusual, attention to the accentuation and meaning of its words. It is predominantly syllabic with the limited vocal ranges that appeal to many sorts of singers, and it is polyphonic with ever-changing texture to retain interest and continuous motion. The song’s rhythms mostly follow the idiosyncratic speech patterns of the English language. Here and there, the composer makes clever use of such conventional devices as melisma, word-painting, suspension, and passing-tone dissonance. For example, alternating treble statements hover purposefully above the rest of the lower voices (mm. 6–15). The cited Scithian is truly barbarous from an aesthetic and compositional perspective (mm. 26–35). Each sphere turns gently in its own musical space (mm. 48–52), and the very name of Marsia[s] wants musical skill through its expression of that most dissonant harmonic interval, the tritone (m. 75).⁴ Perhaps more importantly, notes and words together draw attention to the suitability of music as a topic for the formal rhetorical exercise of praise and for location of the art between discourse and embodied practice. Especially in combination with Byrd’s notes, Watson’s text convinces the listener (or performer) of the correctness of his argument; to counter it literally opens an interlocutor to the charge of senseless barbarism. By drawing attention to a longer prose work through its own reiteration of a few well-known Western anecdotes on music and by the first-person immediacy of each singer’s individual voice, the piece invites personal engagement not only with Case’s learned booke but also with its topic. Byrd’s clever madrigalisms may also remind the listener that the combination of word, music, and especially wit were believed to engage the senses and activate the passions that bridged the faculties of sensation and intellect.

Like countless other learned Elizabethans, Byrd, Case, Watson, and the author of The Praise of Musicke were thoroughly steeped in a tradition of formulaic argument about music as familiar to the literate classes as their own schoolbooks. It was as old as other rhetorical traditions they revered. It was also as fresh and urgent as the social and religious changes that influenced current musical practice. This stylized topical verbal exercise reached from learned Latin treatises through vernacular sermons to emblem books to text-only broadsides to conduct manuals to at least one set of manuscript music partbooks.⁵ Written or spoken for any purpose and on any subject, words suggested not only sonority but also conviction for a culture still steeped in oral/aural learning. Wordes are voyces framed with hart and toung, uttering the thoughtes of the mynde, explains an early vernacular Art of Reason.⁶ Whether intended to be set to notes or to stand alone, words about music added an intellectual dimension to the art. They distanced it from sensory pleasure and manual labor. They also brought it into closer contact with the pristine arts of contemplation, the ancient privileging of musical discernment above performance, and the three liberal arts of verbal persuasion: grammar, dialectic, and especially rhetoric. Boethius’s authoritative De institutione musica, which remained the standard academic text on music through the early modern era, had not only divided (higher) speculative music from (lower) practical music. It also ranked practitioners, privileging those who had the capacity to judge performance above those who played, sang, or composed.⁷ Argument about music was both a preparative to such judgment and a way to dispose listeners favorably to specific performance practices and compositional styles. Such argument was also a way to frame embodied skill with classical erudition and bridge the increasingly anachronistic gap between speculative and practical participation in music.

In a much-neglected passage, Byrd’s most famous pupil, Thomas Morley, presents musical disputation ahead of sight singing in his Plaine and Easie Introduction to Practicall Musicke, which remained in continuous use from 1597 until after 1771. In the opening dialogue, Polymathes asks his friend Philomathes to "repeat some of the discourses which [he] had yester night at master Sophobulus his banket. The latter replies not only that the topic of the symposium had been music but that one wise and learned guest had fall[en] to discourse of Musicke," at which point others joined in debate. It was only after this formal disputation that the host’s wife presented guests with partbooks from which to sing.⁸ Lodovico da Canossa, the great champion of music in the most widely circulating and influential conduct manual of the early modern period—Baldassarre Castiglione’s Il libro del cortegiano—not only outlines familiar arguments in support of music before prescribing a practical program for the ideal courtier; he also methodically confutes Gasparo Pallavicino’s carefully articulated case against such training.⁹ The 1598 English-language version of Aristotle’s Politics titles book 8, chapter 5, Of Musicke by way of disputation, and how children should learn it. This brings the reader into the ancient philosopher’s recommended program of musical training only after properly debating the merits of the topic, exactly what we see in Castiglione’s and Morley’s dialogues.¹⁰ London’s Gresham College required from its foundation in 1597 that The solemn musick lecture is to be read twice every week, in the manner following, viz., the theoretique part for half an hour, or thereabouts; and the practique by concent of voice or of instruments, for the rest of the hour.¹¹ In such ways, the ancient liberal-arts tradition of music became an intellectual preparative to performance and aural judgment. The truly learned individual was expected to move between them.

Praise and Dispraise (of Music): Discourse, Dialectic, Disputation

Watson’s text, Case’s Apologia, and The Praise of Musicke all belong to an ancient encomiastic tradition in which speakers (or writers) first emphasized the importance of music as a subject for the listener’s (or reader’s) attention and then praised its essence, significance, and effects. It was a topical subgenre of the classical encomium, a hybrid of overlapping rhetorical genres intended to defend any person or topic the speaker deemed worthy of attention. Praise nothing that is not commendable, nor dispraise aught that is praise worthy, commands Edwardian and Elizabethan Gentleman of the Chapel Thomas Palfryeman (d. 1589) on the authority of Marcus Aurelius. In practice, the encomium often merged with the exordium, another laudatory genre in which the speaker disposes the audience favorably to the given topic. The encomium also overlapped with other rhetorical genres, most notably the Latin genus demonstrativum, which includes subcategories of both praise and blame.¹² Music was only one potential focus of the generic rhetorical attack or defense; Watson’s verse reminds us that the choice of topic was open when he leaves others [to] praise what seemes them best. Music became an especially popular subject for praise and dispraise in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England when the art drew fire for its use in such contested venues as church, theater, and alehouse and in such increasingly controversial practices as May games and Morris dance. The musical focus of this kind of literary exercise, and conversely its influence on the circulation of music itself, has only begun to receive the scholarly attention it deserves.¹³ Representative examples crossed media into visual imagery and performable music and range in length from single broadsheets such as the parts of A Gratification to the 152 octavo-size pages plus prefatory material of The Praise of Music. The adhortation and dehortation of music also came to engage a wider range of linguistic skills than rhetoric alone, especially as interlocutors by way of disputation made use of dialectical methods.

Formal works in praise of music overlap with those that enumerate the powers of the art or describe its ancient significance. Both rely on a common stock of stories detailing past marvels and daily use in Greco-Roman, biblical, and early Christian cultures. However, they belong to fundamentally distinct literary genres. From antiquity through the early modern era, commendations of music usually began with a history of the subject followed by an enumeration of current, often deplorable, conditions that have opened it to attack. They grabbed the reader’s or listener’s attention by deploying familiar anecdotes about the powers and importance of music and its proper practice. Many formal commendations are structured as responses to real or imagined detractors who denounce music in general or criticize some aspect of its current use, such as Watson’s statement that Case blamed "the senceles foole, & Barbarous Scithian, of our dayes" (emphasis mine) for any ill repute music had acquired by the late 1580s. Castiglione’s earlier Counte (Lewis of Canossa) takes the opposite rhetorical approach when he cuts off L(ord) Gaspar’s harsh critique of the art’s recreational use among noblemen in Thomas Hoby’s English translation of Il libro del cortegiano. Speake it not, he says firmly before promising to enter into a large sea of the praise of Musicke, and call to rehearsal how much it hath always bene renowmed emong the[m] of old time.¹⁴ Aristotle explains of the most ancient form of encomium that Praise is the expression in words of the eminence of a man’s good qualities. . . . To praise a man is in one respect akin to urging a course of action.¹⁵ Perhaps more importantly, he proclaims that we must also take into account the nature of our particular audience when making a speech of praise.¹⁶ The same became true of music. To praise or blame music was to urge a course of action by a specific audience left with the imperative to accept the speaker’s argument.

The impassioned Praise of Musicke and Case’s more detached Apologia musices, though written from contrasting viewpoints and for different audiences, are roughly contemporaneous book-length prose examples not only of the specifically musical encomium but the general literary form. Neither is a practical treatise for the would-be musician nor a summation of knowledge for the historian-critic. Neither is a work of philosophy or theology nor a comprehensive tract for students of the quadrivium of numerical arts that included music. However, both books acknowledge these facets of music, plus many others, in the sort of rhetorical collation dating back at least as far as Quintilian and with deeper roots in ancient Greek controversies.¹⁷ The vernacular Praise sets out from its title page to reiterate the civil and especially ecclesiastical importance of music by citing arguments borrowed from a wide range of classical and early Christian writers plus the sixteenth-century English humanist Sir Thomas Elyot. The work sparkles with anecdotes from ancient myth and zoology. In the finest Reformation tradition, the author also pays homage to biblical authority whenever possible and appropriate. He gently emphasizes his own background as a performer and positions praxis, ancient and modern, at the heart of his work. In contrast, the Latin Apologia is a more esoteric document that reaffirms the capacities of music to moderate all aspects of a universe pulsing with secret energies. Case hovers between the Boethian liberal-arts tradition of music and his era’s renewed interest in the marvelous. His is a more contemplative and more deeply intellectual inquiry into the divine gift of music. His Apologia relies on many of the same well-known classical and Christian sources as the vernacular Praise plus additional ancient Romans and such more recent Continental occult philosophers as Marsilio Ficino and Henry Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim. For Case, church usage and mythological wonder are less important than the meaning and operation of harmony and proportion through sound. However, The Praise of Music and the Apologia musices share a common dialectic. Both specifically advance ideas about music against a wide range of presumed detractors, some of whose arguments are addressed directly. Both also unify the vocabularies of speculation and practice and present the history of the art and science to support current use.

As these contrasting expositions demonstrate, early modern English thinkers privileged received wisdom above skilled practice even in what we now consider performing arts or arts criticism. Virtually all liberal-arts subjects were still taught by rote and imitation of written example. Music in its widest senses was no exception. During the sixteenth century, treatises on how to construct arguments proliferated as quickly as practical handbooks on specific subjects such as music. Thanks largely to the printing press, authors with a greater range of purposes were able to disseminate their views more widely and quickly than ever before, continually augmenting a common stock of ideas. Some disputants created dazzling displays of wit and skill, while others earnestly condemned or vindicated perceived threats to public order. Music loaned itself particularly well to disputation because of the profusion of ancient models pro and contra. Furthermore, through its position in the ancient mathematical quadrivium and connection through language to the trivium, intellectual inquiry into music potentially touched on all topics. "Because Musicke dothe comprehende al disciplines . . . Musicke cannot be entreated without all disciplines," explains Henry Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim with Platonic authority in James Sanford’s English translation of his De incertitudine & vanitate scientiarum et artum.¹⁸ Any comprehensive discussion of the artes liberales for any purpose therefore had to reserve a place for music in order to showcase the interlocutor’s thoroughness and breadth of learning.

Like the more familiar querelle des femmes, the debate over music had a long-standing association with ethics and the history of Christian doctrine. It likewise reached its apotheosis, especially in England, during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.¹⁹ Fifteenth-century participants had renewed the topic’s contemporary appeal by adding reference to their era’s most controversial musical practices, especially polyphony in sacred context.²⁰ This provided precedent for disputants from all confessional perspectives during the succeeding century to mingle ancient ideas of the worth of music with increasingly urgent contemporary examples of the art’s use and abuse, especially in religious or moral contexts. Either in such single-topic contributions as The Praise of Musicke or more general warnings against dubious temporal pleasures such as Philip Stubbes’s (ca. 1555–ca. 1610) The Anatomie of Abuses of 1583, the sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century attack or defense of music could therefore generate a sense of social immediacy while still drawing on a familiar storehouse of well-respected examples from past sages. To a fragmented set of subcultures that witnessed, among other relevant changes, a succession of official state religions, the steady growth of a market for printed works of music and musical instruction, the birth and later suppression of a public-access theater tradition that relied on music, the growth of an experimental natural philosophy that included acoustics, and the ongoing reconsideration of the appropriate role and styles of music in Christian worship, personal investment in the condemnation or vindication of at least select aspects of music ran high.²¹

Nonetheless, it is a mistake to consider the formal discursive attack and defense of music as evidence of a calculated war against the art in England. For one thing, the literary subgenre had been established in antiquity and was practiced among patristic writers. And it found continued expression in such important Continental writings on music as Gioseffo Zarlino’s Istitutioni harmoniche of 1558.²² Many sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English printed books of music, from instrumental self-tutors to collections of lute songs, begin with formulaic reference to the ancient and ongoing approbation of their topic. To purchase music was therefore also to purchase a few choice lines in its favor to aid the would-be musician or learned conversationalist with discourse. This convention also enabled those who read the book as laid out to follow established protocol for beginning a subject: approach it first through disputation and only then through bodily engagement. A number of manuscript miscellanies such as the one in which Watson’s text appears include a poem or set of statements praising music. Works on other topics, such as Stubbes’s Anatomie of Abuses, also found brief but conventional place for pithy words on music. Extended discussions of such contested musical venues as church, theater, tavern, or public space rarely fail to cite ancient authorities on the appropriate use of music in similar settings. Medical manuals and moral philosophies found room for a few venerable sententiae on the value of music. So many participated in what became a formulaic means to sell all manner of books and ideologies that musician-soldier Captain Tobias Hume could remark in his First Part of Ayres of 1605 that To prayse Musicke, were to say, the Sunne is bright.²³ Similarly, Thomas Ford gently reminds readers of the dedication of his 1607 Musicke of Sundrie Kindes that his purpose was to present performable musical works. I shall not neede to make an Apologie in defence of these musickes, says Ford, since none are so much in request nor more generally received then of these kindes.²⁴ As early as 1571 Thomas Whythorne tells us on the title page of his Songes, for five voyces that the contents are for singers and the disposition or delite of the hearers. He added later that the contents were set to be sung and not read. Therefore, in only one of his five partbooks, he tells us, did he include a preamble or preface to explain that What I cowld write in Musicks prays, I will at this time stay / And let you see what one famows, of that science doth say before giving his reader Walter Haddon’s Latin poem in commendation of the art. He saves his own classically constructed praise of music for readers—not singers—in his later manuscript autobiography.²⁵

The praise or blame of music was so widespread and so diverse that to associate it with any specific set of social agendas, or to see it merely as a rhetorical or poetic exercise, is to underestimate its reach and significance. From antiquity through the early modern era, Western intellectual traditions were built on continuous reinterpretation and reapplication of contradictory materials from evidently irreconcilable sources.²⁶ The dialectical understanding of music—with its tangled biblical, classical, and early Christian roots; its multiplicity of ritual uses; and its complex relationship to ever-changing sociocultural institutions—was no exception. English recusant priest and religious controversialist Thomas Wright (ca.1561–1623) reminds readers that the power of music was that of the sword: double edged, dependent on the wielder’s intent, and metamorphically transmissible through words.²⁷ Such perspectives reveal not only cultural attitudes toward music but, more immediately, its place in public discourse. Contrary to long-standing assumption, not one of the English interlocutors with a genuine agenda of social or religious reform was categorically opposed to music or supportive of all current practice. The art itself was never in danger; there was no coordinated anti-music movement.²⁸ With the exception of a few professional men of war, perhaps borrowing their arguments from Gasparo Pallavicino’s succinct iteration in Castiglione’s manual of courtly conduct, it was always somebody else who had no use for music.²⁹ Since the Judeo-Christian tradition emphasized the divine origins of the art, proper practice brought one closer to all things heavenly, which none dared deny. Even the most lurid warnings against the evil effects of music make exception for godly psalms or the courageous music of inspiration in the right times and places. As The Praise of Musicke points out most directly, to argue against music was to disgrace Saints Jerome, Ambrose, Augustine, Basil, Gregory, and the holy Fathers of the primitive Church.³⁰ Not even the most pious reformer dared do so as long as the art was used soberly and in appropriate context.³¹ Nor did any early modern intellectual have the hubris to oppose the most revered philosophers of ancient Greece or the greatest Roman orators. The exercise was at least as much about virtuosic recombination of long-standing arguments as the past and present value and powers of music.

Opposite those who warned of music’s deleterious effects but found place to praise its divine origins and wholesome spiritual effects stood men whose livelihoods depended on its widespread acceptance and use. They still qualified their arguments. Even the most ardent defenders of the art were loath to spring to its universal defense in an era when some occupational musicians were regarded with grave moral suspicion and state and ecclesiastical legislation was directed against independent musical contractors outside of the patronage system.³² Literate supporters of art music, particularly those involved with the increasingly lucrative industry of music printing and the creation of mass-market self-instructional manuals, positioned themselves rhetorically into competition with the followers of "those common kinde Practitioners, (truly ycleped Minstrells)."³³ They were hard pressed to justify any form of musical practice that might undermine their own or that might draw fire from legislative bodies or guardians of public morals. By virtue of their medium of expression and by paraphrasing metaphors familiar to the educated elite, such interlocutors immediately aligned themselves with wealthy and influential recreational musicians. Evocation of powerful patronage extended the arguments further. The dedication of Thomas Weelkes’s Balletts and Madrigals to Five Voyces to the right worshipful Master Edward Darcye Esquier, groome of her majesties privie chamber gives a typical sense of the defense of notated art music against its unjust detractors on one hand and against less elite practitioners on the other.

Right worshipful, it is no small comfort the Musicke professors conceive, when they consider the ever misdeeming multitude to brand them with infamy, whom the Honorable spirits have always honored: and although povertie hath debarred them their fellow arts mens companie, yet nature hath set their better part at libertie, to delight them that love Musicke. So many worthy men dayly labouring to call home againe the banished Philomele, whose purest blood the impure Minstralsie hath stained, I must presume to remember one of your worships least labours . . . the entertaining into your service the least proficient in Musicke, who with all dutifull observancie, humbly commend my poore labours to your worships protection.³⁴

Such careful deflections of antimusical sentiments onto a less literate body of independent musical contractors left passionate reformers such as Stubbes free to rave unchecked against the looseness, licentiousness, lewdness, and incontinence of those bawdy parasites known as minstrelles who ranged the countryside and haunted taverns, alehouses, and other publique assemblies.³⁵ Similarly, Caroline pamphleteer and lawyer William Prynne (1600–1669) could paraphrase St. Basil against the lure of the gorgeous lute-playing seductress for a culture with a deep-seated ambivalence about performance by women, especially of secular works in public places. Yet, in the same argument, he firmly supports women’s singing of psalms at home.³⁶ The Praise of Musicke skillfully anticipates and parries every potential argument against its subject but still concedes that incompetent performance and whatsoever is amisse in this or that lewd musician may well lead to contempt for the art.³⁷

As contemporary as some arguments sound, even the most grandiloquent critiques of music’s detrimental influence and the equally passionate vindications opposite them are mostly derived from earlier sources. Paradoxically, the strongest statements made in the service of actual musical practice, particularly in public venues, tend most to cite received wisdom and revered sages. The reformed playwright and future preacher Stephen Gosson (1554–1625), for instance, borrows his most flamboyant condemnation of theatrical music and its emasculating effects from the pseudo-Plutarchian De musica, a favorite source for his era’s musical anecdotes. The fact that a respected ancient authority had observed the sort of deleterious affective response to his theatrical music as Gosson recognized in Elizabethan England is more important than historical differences between sound, space, or performance practice. Both cases also foreground tensions between ancient and modern traditions.

Plutarch complayneth, that ignorant men, not knowing the majestie of auncient musicke, abuse both the eares of the people, & the art it selfe: w[ith] bringing sweet consortes into Theaters, w[hich] rather effeminate the minde, as prickes unto vice, then procure amendment of maners as spurres to vertue.³⁸

Arguing against the (unnamed) prosecution, The Praise of Musicke, the lengthiest and perhaps most ardent defense of music of the Tudor dynasty, is almost entirely derivative and cites an impressive range of classical and historic Christian authorities. Page after page of its advocacy of music in current civic and ecclesiastical rites showcase in text and in the margins a range of names familiar from any schoolboy’s commonplace collection: Athanasius, Augustine, Clement of Alexandria, Justin Martyr, Juvenal, Pliny, Plutarch, to name only a few. The book’s chapter 3, The Suavitie of Musicke, complete with its own marginal citations of the likes of Aristotle, Cicero, and Virgil, is substantially an uncredited translation from Ferrarese scholar Lilio Gregorio Giraldi’s 1545 Historiae poetarum tam Graecorum quam Latinorum.³⁹ It is therefore with the greatest and most unimpeachable authority, and on the basis of an impressive range of literary models, that the writer makes his argument. His own rhetorical style and use of supporting evidence dare his tacit opponent to contradict not himself but the words of experts across miles and millennia. In this Praise, as in all similarly constructed works, the sheer virtuosity and encyclopedic display of learning becomes at least as crucial as the argument itself. Yet by its very nature as a work of literary prose, the book inhabits an intellectual space paradoxically distinct from musical sound and corporeal judgment.

Practicing musicians who broached the medium of print often show self-conscious awareness that readers expected prefatory compilations of textual learning, as did Whythorne in his 1571 collection. Four years later, in a work aimed at a more elite audience, Thomas Tallis and William Byrd cleverly deflect this expectation. They explain to the reader of their monumental Cantiones, quae ab argomento sacrae vocantur why they need not display the authoritative arguments and experience they clearly know how to gather. In their dedication to the most serene Prince Elizabeth, by the grace of God Queen of England, they demonstrate more emphatically than Whythorne had that the purpose of their volume is not to argue about the importance of music but to offer performable works to the judgment of a skilled practitioner:

If it