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Renaissance and Baroque Music: A Comprehensive Survey

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In the Spring of 2003 I signed up for my Fall semester courses. One of the classes I signed up for was "History and Literature of Music" (necessary for completing my music minor), and, knowing the teacher to be inept, decided to do some reading over the summer, hoping that in doing so I might be better prepared for the class. So, I did a few searches here at Amazon.com, looking for introductory books on the subject. I had no real background in music, knew nothing about composers earlier than the 20th century, but I thought, there must be a comprehensible, comprehensive introduction to so broad a subject. Unfortunately, there are not as many books on the subject as one might think. Most focus on the lives of individual composers, or genres of music (i.e. opera, symphony, etc.), and only a few focus on individual eras of music history. This is especially true concerning the particular eras that I needed to research: the Renaissance and Baroque periods. I narrowed my search here at Amazon.com down to a handful of promising prospects, and ultimately down to Friedrich Blume's "Renaissance and Baroque Music: A Comprehensive Survey."

And I have to say that I made a mistake in purchasing this. It was practically unintelligible; I have never read anything more opaque. Whether this is the fault of Friedrich Blume or the translator, or both, I can't say. I quote a sample passage from page 26:

"The musical elements of tone and rhythm are in equilibrium and through imitar le parole are brought on the way to their highest objective: to represent the affects to which the sensitive auditor (to whom Zarlino dedicates a detailed description) will respond with understanding. Through Zarlino the imitatio naturae became a decisive requirement of the declining Renaissance in its music. Thus one may explain, for example, that it was an outstanding distinction for Palestrina when Vincenzo Galilei once called him 'quel grande imitatore della natura.'"

I don't know if you get a sense of how impenetrable the sentence structures are, and how maddening it is to try to decipher what it is Blume is trying to communicate, but I promise you, every passage in this book is at least as dense as this, if not more. The English is bad enough, but Blume alternates between languages-German, Italian, and so on-without providing the translation. The translator is likely to blame for this, his job being *translation*. Most people who have English as their primary language do not speak a second language, so why does the translator assume that the reader knows several? Not only that, but Blume makes several references to ostensibly famous people and movements (Erasmus, Boccaccio, the Brothers of Common Life, etc.), but he doesn't explain the historical background of these references.

The bottom line: this book assumes too much of the reader. A better introduction to the subject is a book by David Barber, "If It Ain't Baroque..." (Barber's book covers more than the title implies), and for the most complete, comprehensive survey of Western music history, look for Norton's Anthology of Western Music by Grout.

I have to use this book for a doctoral survey class. I have a comprehensive background in music history as well as a general history minor. This book is more about ideas than about learning music history. If you want to teach people how to research you might use this book. It is not a review of music history but of concepts and ideas. If you want to know about composers this isn't the book for you. I agree totally with the other review, it's dense and presumes you know a great deal about philosophical movements, extra historical background and can speak Latin, Italian, French and German in addition to English.