Composers at Work: The Craft of Musical Composition 1450-1600

by Jessie Ann Owens

How did Renaissance composers write their music? In this revolutionary look at a subject that has fascinated scholars for years, musicologist Jessie Ann Owens offers new and striking evidence that contrary to accepted theory, sixteenth-century composers did not use scores to compose--even to write complex vocal polyphony.

Drawing on sources that include contemporary theoretical treatises, documents and letters, iconographical evidence, actual fragments of composing slates, and numerous sketches, drafts, and corrected autograph manuscripts, Owens carefully reconstructs the step-by-step process by which composers between 1450 and 1600 composed their music. The manuscript evidence--autographs of more than thirty composers--shows the stages of work on a wide variety of music--instrumental and vocal, sacred and secular--from across most of Renaissance Europe. Her research demonstrates that instead of working in full score, Renaissance composers fashioned the music in parts, often working with brief segments, according to a linear conception. The importance of this discovery on editorial interpretation and on performance cannot be overstated.

The book opens with a broad picture of what has been known about Renaissance composition. From there, Owens examines the teaching of composition and the ways in which musicians and composers both read and wrote music. She also considers evidence for composition that occurred independent of writing, such as composing "in the mind" or composing with instruments. In chapters on the manuscript evidence, she establishes a typology both of the sources themselves and of their contents (sketches, drafts, fair copies). She concludes with case studies detailing the working methods of Francesco Corteccia, Henricus Isaac, Cipriano de Rore, and Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina.

This book will change the way we analyze and understand early music. Clear, provocative, and painstakingly researched, Composers at The Craft of Musical Composition 1450-1600 makes essential reading for scholars of Renaissance music as well as those working in related fields such as sketch studies and music theory.

Genres: Music

368 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 1997

Reviews

[Acer Pseudoplantatus · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fantastic academic work of the highest standard and also a delightful read. I learned loads and thoroughly enjoyed the process.

[Silvio Curtis · Rating 5 out of 5]

This gets down to the nuts and bolts, or rather the pens and inks, of how early European composers wrote out their music. In theory, one voice of a polyphonic composition was supposed to come first (which voice depended on which theorist you asked) and the rest were supposed to be structured around it. In practice, as Owens argues from surviving manuscripts with rough drafts and corrections on them, the composers would often start with working out different temporal sections of the music and then figure out how to join them, with some composers starting with one voice like the theorists said and others working on all of them at once. I learned the word "tablature" from this book. If I understood right, it means notation specially adapted to a particular kind of instrument so that it directly encodes information about what you have to do to the instrument to play the music, instead of being a pure representation of pitch, duration, and rhythm, like what I think of as normal musical notation. According to this book, and it sounds like Owen was originally one of the first to say so, early composers only wrote in score format, with all the voices lined up one on top the other, when they were composing in tablature. Otherwise they wrote out each voice in a separate place. I'm not in a position to tell whether the conclusions are right, but the author is certainly thorough in laying out the evidence. It was also interesting to learn that composers had to either use special erasable tablets (slate, wax, etc.) or scrape off the surface of the paper when they wanted to erase something, because there were no good pencils yet.