Tim Shephard

This book collates 100 exhibits with accompanying essays as an imaginary museum dedicated to the musical cultures of Renaissance Europe, at home and in its global horizons. It is a history through artefacts—materials, tools, instruments, art objects, images, texts, and spaces—and their witness to the priorities and activities of people in the past as they addressed their world through music. The result is a history by collage, revealing overlapping musical practices and meanings—not only those of the elite, but reflecting the everyday cacophony of a diverse culture and its musics. Through the lens of its exhibits, this museum surveys music’s central role in culture and lived experience in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Europe, offering interest and insights well beyond the strictly musicological field.

Visual representations of music were ubiquitous in Renaissance Italy. Church interiors were enlivened by altarpieces representing biblical and heavenly musicians, placed in conjunction with the ritual song of the liturgy. The interior spaces of palaces and private houses, in which musical recreations were routine, were adorned with paintings depicting musical characters and myths of the ancient world, and with scenes of contemporary festivity in which music played a central role. Musical luminaries and dilettantes commissioned portraits symbolising their personal and social investment in musical expertise and skill. Such visual representations of music both reflected and sustained a musical culture. The strategies adopted by visual artists when depicting music in any guise betray period understandings of music shared by artists and their clients. At the same time, Renaissance Italians experienced music within a visual environment that prompted them to think about music in particular ways. This book offers the first detailed survey of the representation of music in the art of Renaissance Italy, and in the process opens up new vistas within the social and cultural history of Italian Renaissance music and art.

The papers included in this volume were presented, in much shorter form, at a conference entitled ‘Sources of Identity: Makers, Owners and Users of Music Sources Before 1600’ held at the University of Sheffield in 2013. The stated aim of the event was to leave aside the traditionally dominant view of early music sources as a means of access to medieval and Renaissance repertoires, focussing instead on the people who commissioned, made, owned and used music books, and on their reasons for so doing. In the terms proposed by a recent study of art patronage in the period, what was the ‘payoff’ enjoyed by individuals and groups who created and deployed such objects?

Myths and stories offer a window onto medieval and early modern musical culture. Far from merely offering material for musical settings, authoritative tales from classical mythology, ancient history and the Bible were treated as foundations for musical knowledge. Such myths were cited in support of arguments about the uses, effects, morality, and preferred styles of music in sources as diverse as theoretical treatises, defences or critiques of music, art, sermons, educational literature, and books of moral conduct. Newly written literary stories too were believed capable of moral instruction and influence, and were a medium through which ideas about music could be both explored and transmitted. How authors interpreted and weaved together these traditional stories, or created their own, reveals much about changing attitudes across the period.

Looking beyond the well-known figure of Orpheus, this collection explores the myriad stories that shaped not only musical thought, but also its styles, techniques, and practices. Moreover, music itself performed and created knowledge in ways parallels to myth, and worked in tandem with old and new tales to construct social, political, and philosophical views. This relationship was not static, however; as the Enlightenment dawned, the once authoritative gods became comic characters and myth became a medium for ridicule. This collection provides a foundation for exploring myth and story throughout medieval and early modern culture, and facilitating further study into the Enlightenment and beyond.

Although it is common in the musicological literature to compare decorated music books with books of hours, studies addressing the musical features of books of hours are rare. This article considers musical features in the decoration of a book of hours made by leading illuminators in Ferrara ca. 1469. Images appearing in books of hours are considered to have had an exemplary and meditative function in relation to devotional practice; therefore, this study asks what the reader was intended to learn from musical images, drawing conclusions about the alignment of the senses and the significance of music in fifteenth-century religious experience.

Poster displayed at the Medieval and Renaissance Music Conference, Sheffield 2016.
The Muses were understood simultaneously as sources of musical and poetic inspiration, and as decorous exemplars of the studious woman; although to value a literary woman in this way was therefore implicitly to value her as a prompt or 'inspiration' for male literary efforts. The decorum of the Muses' example was not fixed, but required assertion and surveillance, either from rational Apollo or from Minerva whose military bearing gave her virtue a masculine quality; without this control, even the Muses' morality was in question.