1 See my remarks in my foreword to Oliver Strunk, Essays on Music in the Western World (New York, 1974), vii-viii.Google Scholar

2 Mendel, Arthur, ‘Gustave Reese (1899–1977): A Personal Memoir’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 30 (1977), 363.Google Scholar

3 Wooldridge, Harold Ellis, Oxford History of Music, i-ii (Oxford, 1901). For a typically pithy evaluation by Reese, see Music in the Renaissance, 927, under abbreviation ‘OH’ (= Oxford History of Music).Google Scholar

4 Cambridge, Mass., 1989, 67–78 and 79–94.Google Scholar

5 The older literature on the Renaissance, after Burckhardt, brought forth an avalanche of rebuttals from major medievalists, prominently including Lynn Thorndike; for example, his tough-minded article, ‘Renaissance or Prerenaissance’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 4 (1943), 65–74, repr. in The Renaissance: Medieval or Modern?, ed. Karl H. Dannenfeldt (Boston, Mass., 1959), 79–85. That Thorndike is well worth reading will be clear enough from his comparison of historical periods to former heavyweight champions – ‘they never come back’. But attacks like these in no way diverted stalwart partisans of the Burckhardtian view in its purest form from continuing to see the Renaissance as a period of decisive change and awakening, and such partisans are to be found in every field of Renaissance scholarship. In musicology the strongest voice for this view is still that of Edward Lowinsky; see, inter alta, his classic statement of the Renaissance as a period of sharp revolutionary departure from the Middle Ages, in ‘Music in the Culture of the Renaissance’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 15 (1954), 509–53, repr. in Renaissance Essays, ed. Paul Oscar Kristeller and Philip Wiener (New York, 1968), 337–81, and in Lowinsky's collected writings, published as Music in the Culture of the Renaissance and Other Essays (Chicago, 1989), i, 19–39. For brief remarks summarizing the milder and more evolutionary hypothesis that is buried deep but is discernible in Reese, Music in the Renaissance, in comparison to the opposed viewpoint in Lowinsky's essay, see my article ‘Renaissance’, The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (London, 1980), xv, 740 (section 5, ‘Current views of the Renaissance as a period’). At a distance of 15 years from the writing of this article I see no reason to alter its basic view, namely, that while ‘there is no reason to claim that this [the Renaissance] was a “better” age than its predecessor, yet it does appear to have been new in sufficient measure to warrant a separate historical identity, in part carrying forward certain tendencies of the Middle Ages, in part breaking with them’. For a recent and challenging review of the problem, with many references to writers of the period and their ways of construing the historical past, see Owens, Jessie Ann, ‘Music Historiography and the Definition of “Renaissance”’, Notes, 47 (1990–1), 305–30.Google Scholar

6 See Huizinga, Johan, Men and Ideas: Essays by Johan Huizinga (repr. Princeton, 1984), 243: ‘At the sound of the word “Renaissance” the dreamer of past beauty sees purple and gold.‘Google Scholar

7 See above, note 5.Google Scholar

8 See above, note 5.Google Scholar

9 Collingwood, Robin George, The Idea of History (Oxford, 1946), 327–8; quoted in my Music in Renaissance Ferrara, 1400–1505 (Cambridge, Mass., 1984), 1.Google Scholar

10 For a new view of the ‘ars subtilior’ aiming at a revision of both concept and title for the period, see Stone, Anne, ‘Writing Rhythm in Late Medieval Italy: Notation and Musical Style in the Manuscript Modena Alpha M. 5, 24’ (Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 1994). Of course Stone's dissertation had not been completed at the time of publication of Prof. Strohm's book.Google Scholar

11 See Fallows, , ‘The Contenance Angloise: English Influence on Continental Composers of the Fifteenth Century’, Renaissance Studies, 1 (1987), 189–208.Google Scholar

12 ‘Binchois’ Songs, the Binchois Fragment, and the Two Layers of Escorial A' (Ph.D. dissertation, Princeton University, 1988).Google Scholar

13 See Panofsky, Erwin, Early Netherlandish Painting (Cambridge, Mass., 1953), i, 196–7, and Edward Lowinsky, ‘Jan van Eyck's Tymotheos: Sculptor or Musician?’, Studi musicali, 13 (1984), 33–106.Google Scholar

14 Ockeghem, Johannes, Collected Works, iii: Motets and Chansons, ed. Richard Wexler with Dragan Plamenac, American Musicological Society Studies and Documents, 7 (Boston, Mass., 1992); see the review by Paula Higgins in Renaissance Quarterly, 47 (1994), 443–4, As to Busnois, the conference held on him at Notre Dame University in November 1992, ‘Continuities and Transformations in Musical Culture, 1450–1500: Assessing the Legacy of Antoine Busnoys’, organized by Paula Higgins, revealed more sharply than before the breadth and significance of his work and, by implication, his influence for the period.Google Scholar

15 See my remarks on this problem in my ‘Communicating Musicology: A Personal View’, College Music Symposium, 28 (1988), 1–9, which was the substance of my Presidential Address to the American Musicologica) Society in 1987. Among other things I wrote (p. 8): ‘In Renaissance studies … we are still waiting for even the first English-language biography or general study of Josquin Desprez, let alone comparable books on such figures as Mouton, Willaert, Rore, Gombert, Clemens, Marenzio, or even Orlando di Lasso. Books like Fallows's Dufay, Watkins's Gesualdo, or Hammond's Frescobaldi have shown that it can be done, but they have not yet been followed up.’ As of this writing, seven years later, the situation is unchanged.Google Scholar

16 I also incorporated into the Italian translation the various singers who had not been listed in the English version, and who were mentioned by William Prizer in his review in Journal of the American Musicological Society, 40 (1987), 95–104; see La musica a Ferrara nel Rinascimento, 393ff., where the indication ‘Prizer’ is added to the lists of singers under various years.Google Scholar

17 Alfred Einstein, review of Fausto Torrefranca, Il segreto del quattrocento, Music and Letters, 21 (1940), 392–5; also the gentle but, as Einstein noted, ironic review by Benvenuto Disertori in Riinsta musicale italiana, 43 (1939), 645–51. At this very moment, when Italian political life is once more dominated by forces of expediency and darkness, and is seemingly unable to restore the sense of hope in democracy that was felt from 1945 until now, reading a review like that of Einstein (so clearly antifascist in tone and meaning) is more salutary than ever.Google Scholar