Renaissance Forum: Volume 4, Number 1, 1999: Ceri Sullivan

Diane Kelsey McColley. 1997. Poetry and Music in Seventeenth-century England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 311 pp. ISBN 0-521-59363-8. Ł40/$59.95.

For the poets and musicians studied here, music is both 'the formative soul of the cosmos made audible' and a practice in which the artist may join with other created things in praising God. McColley argues that there was a continuity between musical styles in England before and after the Reformation. The existence of polyphony in particular affected Donne, Herbert, and Milton among others in two ways: in their opinion of what music represented, and in the use of musical genres and structures in their poetry. Her book is in three sections. The first chapter is theoretical, detailing the opportunities and problems raised by relating texts and sound. The second and last chapters are historical, describing the connections between musical controversies, the practice of music in church and private devotions, and the visual arts; this discussion is exemplified by the chapel of King's College Cambridge and encomia on music produced after the Restoration. The middle three chapters provide close readings of the poetry against church part-song music, thus moving on from previous work on the poets' use of solo songs or court and theatre music.
One might expect a discussion of the links between words and music to start with prosody, move quickly through the use of music as metaphor, and then into the areas of neo-platonic or hermetic philosohpy. McColley eschews the obvious. Her first chapter examines the belief that creatively analogous thinking is at the heart of poetry. Language is fallen, admittedly, but it has also shared in humanity's regeneration; the Babel to which we were consigned by pride can be remade into a many-voiced choir of praise. The polysemous is creation in process, not a sign of minds which are, in seventeenth-century terms, mired in confusion, or, in our terms, mere fluxes of phenomena. McColley demonstrates the decorum of a mode of reading Renaissance poetry which treats it as part-song, picking up resonances ('concinnities') across the poem rather than reading lineally. The problem of how to write about sound is not evaded; she provides highly technical descriptions of the methods available to Renaissance musicians of putting ideas usually expressed in words into music. Certain musical genres carry meanings acquired from their previous uses in that mode; polyphony, for instance, which enacts the introduction of multiple personae into the text, or wordpainting, where notes mimic either the physical or emotional aspects of the words being sung, so that 'Amen' and 'Hallelujah' are often freely melismatic. McColley draws largely from contemporary and twentieth-century musical commentators to describe these methods, and is courteously concerned to allow the musically-ignorant – like myself – to get back to the actual experience of the notes (so, for instance, a discussion of modal music and its relationship with the Dorian, Phrygian, Lydian, Mixolydian, Aeolian, Locrian, and Ionian modes, is introduced using 'scales on the white keys of the piano'). This chapter of the book is learned, clear, and thought-provoking about the permissibility of moving from ascribing emotions to sound, to giving them meaning. Some readings of these methods were inspired (Byrd's use of 'strange Chromatic notes'); some made me giggle (Francis Pilkington's madrigal 'Have I found her' of 1613, for instance, 'musically strokes the lady's hair on "seemly tresses" with smooth descending whole notes'); all were fascinating.
The second chapter is an ambitious attempt to illustrate the church music controversy (and more widely, the Reformation and, later, the Laudian positions on the use of art in religion) by an interdisciplinary study of King's College Chapel windows, the music played there, and devotional poetry by men who were up at Cambridge in the early and mid-seventeenth century. The Chapel's windows were installed between 1515 and 1547; they are represent a great typological cycle, with stories from the life of Christ, the Acts of the Apostles, the life of Paul, and legends of the Virgin Mary reflected by scenes from the Old Testament. Their emphasis is on the King of Kings. McColley studies the nuanced relationship between these, and the political position of the Chapel as it moved from pre-Reformation royal patronage, through the successive changes in liturgy and devotional styles permitted by Henry, Edward, Mary, and Elizabeth, to its exposure in 1642 to the Puritan John Dowling's destructive interest. McColley argues that in the area of music, contrary to the belief that the Reformation enforced homophonic music which prized intellibility above all, there was continuity between these periods – the Reformers, after all, also valued singing from the heart, and hence, expressive music. McColley's nuanced and agile argument deals in detail with the manuscript collections of music made by Henry Loosemore, the organist at the Chapel from 1627 to the Revolution, Peterhouse College part-books, and service music collections from Ely Cathedral, which contain pre-Reformation and Marian music, or pieces by composers whose work spanned several reigns (in particular, Tallis and Byrd). The final chapter returns to the practice of music, this time after the Restoration, looking at its sublime image in poetry and increasingly professionalised performance.
At the centre of the book lies the poetry of Donne, Herbert (at Cambridge between 1609 and 1628), and Milton (there from 1625 to 1632). Here McColley steps nimbly between difficulties by moving into the conditional mood. In the cases of Donne and Herbert she is not so much interested in their opinions of music, though she does detail their exposure and reactions to secular and church music (such as Donne's pleasure in hearing his 'Hymn to God the Father' sung at St. Paul's, and the musical evenings preserved in Magdalene Herbert's Kitchen Book). Instead, she focuses on similar structures or themes in contemporary church or private part-song and in the poetry. While McColley is careful not to say the songs provide sources for the poetry, music is often ascribed to the verse by McColley. 'The experience of singing such texts might well arouse the productive indignation of Donne's muse', she says, of similarities between Giovanni Croce's Musica Sacra and Donne's holy sonnets; similarly the fire of Donne's 'A Fever' is said to be 'a favorite madrigalian image, treated to word- painting of licking flames to describe the lover's torment, imported from Italy in Noel Faignient's contribution to Yonge's Musica Transalpina'. The wish here has inspired the interpretation; Donne may also be remembering the spoken liturgy, or a favorite Petrarchan device, common to both music and verse.
The problem with McColley's readings of Herbert is slightly different; her interpretations are based on an idea that 'he practiced – perhaps invented – a form of language analogous to polyphonic music sung in pure intonation, in which linear arrangements of words form vertical consonances whose overtones, as well as fundamental meanings, are in tune' – a method which seems to me to be indistinguishable from traditional, careful, reading in depth. Her explications of Herbert's poems work best where the overriding metaphor or theme of the poem is music itself, so that such an interpretative strategy is invited by the poetry. Her view of Herbert as a polyphonic poet, not a solo voice singing in retirement, is intriguing. These sections provided resonant and sensitive readings – such as her illumination of the annealing in Herbert's 'The Windows' by the King's College lights – but in some cases they could have been written without reference to music as anything more than a contextual example of the popularity in the visual and aural arts of the themes, tones, and positions appearing in verse.
This caveat disappears when McColley turns to Milton. Recent work on his father's engagement in secular and sacred part-songs (Morley, for instance, invited him to contribute to the Triumphs of Oriana) establishes the son's varied musical background. 'On the Morning of Christ's Nativity' and Paradise Lost celebrate what McColley calls an 'oddly unreformed' style of music. Concinnity, not plainness, is the mode preferred by heaven, sung by antiphonal and full choirs. The debate about whether art and freedom are contradictory is fundamental to this music – an understanding of the theology of the poems thus needs an knowledge of the music running through them. This is a superb chapter which represents the best points of McColley's work: its deep scholarship in manuscript music and poetry, a crisply-clear knowledge of the theological controversies over the three arts, the wholly original engagement with an area of music not dealt with before, and, most of all, a high sensitivity to the verbal texture of the poetry.

CERI SULLIVAN
UNIVERSITY OF WALES BANGOR