Rhetoric and Popular Language
Contrapuntal allusions have a clear parallel with the rhetorical thought of humanists from the late fourteenth into the sixteenth centuries. Particularly for ecclesiastical humanists—whether active in the international milieu of the papal court or at a northern university or court—there was a marked tendency to seek an accommodation between the conflicting interests of humanists and those of medieval theologians and scholastic philosophers. Among those who took the lead in arguing that the scholastic realms of dialectic and philosophy should function in the language of the age was Lorenzo Valla. Taking his cue from Quintilian and Cicero, Valla maintained that "philosophy and dialectic do not usually, nor should they, depart from the most frequent usage in speaking the path . . . beaten by the masses and sturdily paved." [3] The humanist secretary Giovanni Pontano subsequently expressed the same view in his Aegidius : "We must discuss divine matters
[2] Strict definitions of humanism are not limited to musicological studies. Recent historical research also comments on the overly narrow view of humanism prevalent through the 1970s. An insightful study of the diversity of humanistic thought is Riccardo Fubini, "L'umanista: Ritorno di un paradigma? Saggio per un profilo storico da Petrarca ad Erasmo." Investigations of humanism increasingly recognize differences by city and region; see, for example, John F. D'Amico, Renaissance Humanism in Papal Rome: Humanists and Churchmen on the Eve of the Reformation , xiii-xviii and 3-37; and the city-by-city review of humanism in Albert Rabil, ed., Renaissance Humanism , vol. 1, Humanism in Italy , 141-331. Roy M. Ellefsen, "Music and Humanism in the Early Renaissance: Their Relationship and Its Roots in the Rhetorical and Philosophical Traditions," has imaginative and useful insights, despite lacking musical sophistication. Further references are cited below.
[3] The translation is from David Marsh, "Grammar, Method, and Polemic in Lorenzo Valla's 'Elegantiae,'" 105. Jerrold Seigel also discusses this passage in Rhetoric and Philosophy in Renaissance Humanism: The Union of Eloquence and Wisdom, Petrarch to Valla , 162-64. For an account of Valla's argument in favor of Quintilian rather than Cicero, see Salvatore Camporeale, Lorenzo Valla: Umanesimo e teologia , 89-100. On the accommodations made between scholasticism and humanism in Roman cultural and intellectual life, see D'Amico, Renaissance Humanism in Papal Rome , esp. 115-43.
with the same words we employ in talking and reasoning about human affairs."[4]
The rhetorical impulse to discuss divine matters in the popular language led painters to portray biblical stories with modern images, peopling their frescoes with contemporary figures dressed in the latest fashions; and it caused composers to base their Masses on chansons.[5] This practice did not so much "sanctify" worldly affairs, as Erwin Panofsky claimed for art,[6] as the reverse: By using earthly means to describe otherworldly matters, the descriptions became more immediate, more understandable, more persuasive. While the associations between chanson tune and the implied text and the actual Mass text are occasionally presented today as irreverent humor, composers of the time would have had loftier motives. Their popular allusions helped them to humanize the religious mysteries they celebrated. The use of a chanson tune in a sacred context followed Cicero's advice to orators to draw on popular usage rather than philosophical distinctions, to weigh words not in "a goldsmith's balance, but in a popular scale."[7]
At a time when the Bible first began to be interpreted as a book of history, secular and sacred imagery regularly intermingled or alternated.[8] Sermons in the vernacular by no means replaced sermons in Latin; and among those preached in Latin, the older thematic sermons
[4] "Nec nos de Deo cum disserimus aliis quidem verbis quam cum de homine et loquimur et disputamus"; Marsh, "Grammar, Method, and Polemic," 106. Marsh makes the connection between Pontano and Valla.
[5] On the necessity for painters to imitate the ancients while also acknowledging modern styles, see E. H. Gombrich, "The Style all'antica: Imitation and Assimilation," 122-28; and Sydney Anglo, "Humanism and the Court Arts," 70, who quotes Lodovico Canossa in Baldassare Castiglione's II cortegiano , "Se noi vorremo imitar gli antichi, non gl'imitaremo" (I. xxxii). And there is much that is relevant to this theme in Michael Baxandall, Giotto and the Orators: Humanist Observers of Painting in Italy and the Discovery of Pictorial Composition, 1350-1450 ; see, for example, pp. 97-98, where he quotes Leonardo Giustiniani, a pupil of Guarino, on the value of portraying things "fashioned as if living" (p. 98).
[6] Erwin Panofsky, Early Netherlandish Painting, Its Origins and Character , 1: 142.
[7] Cicero, De oratore , 2:38, 159, quoted in Marsh, "Grammar, Method, and Polemic," 105; "non aurificis statera sed populari quadam trutina."
[8] On the appearance of a historical interpretation of the Bible, see John O'Malley, Praise and Blame in Renaissance Rome: Rhetoric, Doctrine, and Reform in the Sacred Orators of the Papal Court, c. 1450-1521 , 62.
held their own against more modern examples of epideictic oratory.[9] For musicians the popular scale advocated by Cicero did not preclude composing motets and Masses on chant. Josquin was as comfortable basing a Mass on Pange lingua as he was on the L'homme armè tune. And despite the focus of chapter 10, allusive quotations of chants were doubtless as frequent as those of chansons. We are not so much wrong as partisan (siding with conservative churchmen of the time) to see a qualitative difference between works based on a chant and those on a chanson. It mattered more for the tune to be presented recognizably, so that the source of the Mass could be understood and, according to one of the chief aims of epideictic rhetoric, enjoyed. Because sacred and secular history were both valued sources of knowledge, Tinctoris had as much right to praise Pope Alexander VI by comparing him to Alexander the Great in the motet Gaude Roma as Du Fay did when he honored Eugenius IV in the motet Ecclesie militantis by drawing on two chants for the archangel Gabriel (Gabriele was the Pope's secular name). Both lauded their subjects by making comparisons to historical or religious figures that would have been easily understood and appreciated by their audiences.
Allusions and quotations of chansons in contrapuntal voices differ most significantly from the chanson tunes presented in a cantus firmus in that they are unannounced. Composers who wove chanson and chant motives into the contrapuntal lines of Masses and motets did in music what many humanists did in words. Whether writing letters, treatises, or orations, humanists at times quoted and alluded to classical and biblical sources without calling attention to their allusive habits. In her edition of a volume of letters by Poggio Bracciolini, Phyllis Gordon cites the constant appearance of phrases in his letters from classical texts, biblical verse, and passages from the Church Fathers. Although
[9] Humanist oratory utilized principally the third type of classical eloquence, the genus demonstrativum or epideictic. Intended to arouse feelings of praise or blame, it was particularly suitable for celebratory and ceremonial events. Epideictic oratory attempted to move listeners as well as to teach and to impress them with the beauty and artistry of the oration. On epideictic oratory in the Renaissance, see O'Malley, Praise and Blame , 36-41; A. Leigh DeNeef, "Epideictic Rhetoric and the Renaissance Lyric"; and John McManamon, Funeral Oratory and the Cultural Ideals of Italian Humanism , 32-35, 155-56, and 132-34.
some sentences are a "veritable mosaic of quotations," none of the borrowed phrases is ever identified as a quotation.[10] O'Malley has similar conclusions in his study of sermons preached at the papal court, noting particularly a sermon by Agostino Filippi that has quotations, paraphrases, and allusions from sacred and profane sources that "fit the rhythm [of the text] and do not attract attention to themselves."[11] Whether quotations were incorporated seamlessly into the new text or presented conspicuously, there were important classical models. The allusive techniques of Virgil, who integrated earlier texts into his own, have recently been contrasted with those of Ovid, who preferred to call attention to the artifice of his allusions.[12]
Another function of chanson allusions and quotations is easily overlooked in the midst of other rhetorical considerations; namely, that composers would have implanted chanson melodies in Masses to entertain. With regard to his epistolary style, Poggio Bracciolini explicitly acknowledged this purpose when he published his letters in 1436: "For I used to put into letters whatever came to the tip of my tongue, so that sometimes even the vernacular is mixed into them, though for amusement."[13] For Mass composers in the fifteenth century, French chansons were the musical vernacular, the source of witty commentary on traditional texts. The desires to please as well as to teach were both served by the complex and sophisticated interactions that were possible between the texts (whether written or remembered) of the tenor and the Mass, between those of an allusive motive in a contrapuntal voice and the Mass, between a contrapuntal voice and the tenor, and between all three. Parody Masses differ from the technique described above primarily in drawing the contrapuntal voices from the same source as the tenor, an option not available in Masses based on chant.
But if composers regularly incorporated contrapuntal allusions, why
[10] Poggius Bracciolini, Two Renaissance Book Hunters: The Letters of Poggius Bracciolini to Nicolaus de Niccolis , 9.
[11] O'Malley, Praise and Blame , 54.
[12] Charles Segal discusses the two complementary tendencies in the foreword to his edition of Gian Biagio Conte, The Rhetoric of Imitation: Genre and Poetic Memory in Virgil and Other Latin Poets , 12.
[13] Bracciolini, Two Renaissance Book Hunters , 21.
didn't music theorists from the period mention this practice? For such a purely rhetorical technique, music-theoretical commentary was hardly necessary. Quotation, allusion, and paraphrase were rhetorical devices, and rhetorical instruction was readily available. For the same reason, fifteenth-century Italian humanists wrote few original rhetorics. Far from implying a lack of interest, this scarcity testifies to the great authority and availability of classical manuals. Cicero and Quintilian were not easily supplanted.[14] And if modern investigations into compositional practices were limited to the issues discussed by Tinctoris and others, there would be no investigations of proportional structures in Josquin, of numerological significance in Busnois, of the impact of commercial math on the mensural system, or of imitation, as either a contrapuntal technique or a rhetorical principle. Theorists of any age have circumscribed interests.