Gramophone, February 2023

Edward Breen

The first time I reviewed a book by Andrew Parrott I confidently called him the éminence grise of early music (Composers’ Intentions? Gramophone 2015) and by and large my view remains unchanged. Musically speaking, like many of my generation I was weaned on his ground-breaking recordings: Machaut’s Messe de Nostre Dame (EMI 1984), Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas (the-one-with-Jantina-Noorman-as-the-sorceress, Chandos 1991) and, of course Una 'Stravaganza' dei Medici (EMI, 1986): it's amazing to think that such key musical and musicological moments come from the same conductor; from the all-vocal medieval aesthetic in Machaut to the characterisation of Purcell, Andrew Parrott is clearly a man who enjoys research as much as performance. This book, released in his 75th year, is both a musical history and the working collection that has informed his thinking. To be sure, the result is a heavy and lavish tome illustrated with over 300 colour images, but you would be wrong in dismissing it as a mere coffee-table book, far from it. It's an astonishingly varied collection of primary sources, numbering over 2,500 entries, some familiar from the standard reference works such as the indefatigable Strunk's Source Readings in Music History (Norton), and some less familiar, as well as paintings long studied by art historians but less so by music students. The immediate attraction of this collection is in the juxtaposition of such diverse primary sources in a format which will truly pay dividends in sheer serendipity.

Some 600 years’ musical activity are spanned from plainchant notation, memorably referred to as a moment when 'the curtain goes up' on music-making by Taruskin (The Oxford History of Western Music), to 1770 when Charles Burney began his chronical of music history. Parrott has organised his sources in a 3-part structure: music & society, music & ideas, music & performance; divided across 25 main chapters, each beginning with enormously useful, but brief, thematic introductions (most by Hugh Griffith). The first chapter, Everyday life, is subdivided into Country, Town, Home and Festivities. Sub-sections within are then organised chronologically but not geographically, conjuring up a general sense of historical-ness, which offers at any one point the spirit of an age but if you read quickly enough it blurs into the more general spirit of several ages. Of course, the real achievement here is to have assembled a narrative entirely through the words and images of contemporary musicians and their observers. For this reason alone, I have already lost many an evening to this book, enjoying passages both familiar and lesser known. The spread of readings both chronologically and geographically also serves to highlight the commonality of music's early history in unexpected ways such as descriptions of itinerant fiddle players in various cities across Europe. Pleasingly, it's particularly easy to become absorbed in this book since footnotes and original language texts are held online at www.taverner.org leaving printed pages uncluttered.

The subtitle is the best description for this book: 'Musical life in original writings & art' is really all you need to know. It's a delightful collection and a superb achievement which will interest any who seeks to explore Western music's fascinating history.