Renaissance Reform of Medieval Music Theory is useful but not glamorous. Some research projects describe vast landscapes, others present enclosed formal gardens, but some more humbly pull weeds out of flowerbeds. This is a book of the latter sort. It attempts to dispatch a body of musical theory so technical and counter-intuitive that most non-specialists will never encounter it. Yet it is a worthy task to eliminate a source of confusion.
Stefano Mengozzi's subject is the way orders of musical pitches ("diatonic space") were mapped out and conceptualized in medieval and Renaissance music by Guido of Arezzo (d. post 1032) and by subsequent scholastic, Renaissance, and Reformation theorists. What underlies this story is the tension between practice and theory inherent in all medieval academia but especially evident in music where liturgical music (and its pedagogy) originated independently from and had only limited points of tangency with the quadrivial science of music based upon Pythagorean theories transmitted to the Latin West by Boethius. Despite the best efforts of choirmasters and professors to integrate the two, practical music tended toward ad hoc inductive procedures while music theory involved abstract definitions and deductions.
Choirmaster Guido was more interested in results than theory. In four surviving, short, unsystematic works, he presents a wide range of techniques--some invented, some borrowed--by which he claims it is possible to teach music to even the most tone-deaf young boys. He stresses a seven-tone, octave-oriented diatonic scale, based on the notes A through G, which he can express through three octaves by using first capital letters (A-G), then minuscule letters (a-g), and then doubled minuscule letters (aa-gg). He was a pioneering developer of line staff musical notation. He boasts that he can teach students chants by enabling them to pluck out the melodies on a monochord. He facilitates learning by teaching the solmization "Ut Re Mi Fa Sol La," the original "Do Re Mi," and he is traditionally credited with inventing or at least popularizing the "Guidonian hand," a mnenomic device which assigns letters or syllables to the joints of the left hand in order to help singers remember chant modes.
The problem Mengozzi addresses results from the fact that the tetrachords used by ancient musical theorists (related to the octave system used today) differ from the six syllables of Guido's original solmization (the "Ti" that helps Julie Andrews finish the solfege scale in the Rodgers and Hammerstein song from The Sound of Music is a post-medieval addition). Guido's six syllables might simply be a movable framework, applicable to any melody in a variety of keys, to help students recognize "classes" of diatonic intervals. But could this solmization have been an alternative diatonic system, a new hexachordal yardstick by which medieval music was actually conceptualized? So some Renaissance and modern scholars have claimed. Mengozzi writes to demolish this notion, no easy task because to demonstrate how musicians did not understand music he is forced to attempt to prove a negative. He admits that certain scholastic and Renaissance theorists wrote confusingly about the role of Guidonian solmization, giving rise to misunderstandings among modern scholars, but he argues that medieval practical musicians conceptualized pitch in traditional octaves and used the solmization simply as a pedagogical device for recognizing melodic patterns.
Mengozzi states that "musical treatises until ca. 1250 tended to bypass the six syllables altogether" (61). Since theoretical treatises do not comprehensively survey practical traditions, he attempts to track more popular perceptions by analyzing the occurrence and use of the "Guidonian hand," whose pedagogical prominence--the "manus musicalis" was "handier" than the monochord--is one of the reasons invoked for assuming a hexachordal system. Mengozzi attempts a comprehensive inventory: he identifies 140 extant medieval illustrations, breaking off the transalpine tradition at 1500, the Italian tradition at 1400 (64-72). This valuable database reveals clusters and patterns suggesting relationships between different schools in different periods. He argues that the Hand's inconsistent inclusion in musical treatises, its relatively late popularity, and its variations (some examples use the letter note system and not the solmization) do not support the claim that it was the key to understanding medieval diatonics and in fact suggest "a more limited use of the Hand thanis generally believed" (81).
Mengozzi sees hexachordal analysis beginning to develop in the second half of the thirteenth century. Although scholars today are not sure if music still remained a regular part of the arts curriculum at the University of Paris, scholastic theorists certainly were interested in defining and explaining musical concepts. University-trained musicians attempted to systematize and integrate Guido's six syllables. Whether or not this had anything to do with actual musical technique, "Parisian theory after 1250 took the decisive step of parsing the gamut in major sixth segments according to the anchoring of the ut-la syllables on G, C. and F, so that the syllables in the end appeared to be in the driver's seat of musical theory and practice" (93). Mengozzi argues, however, that even the theorists who seem to portray the Guidonian syllables as "the structural pillars of the diatonic edifice" (95) still treat them in other contexts as a conceptual scheme. He claims that solmization remained a "soft" framework that interfered with heptachordal structure in the Middle Ages no more than it did in the eighteenth century when it was still used even after the modern system of composing in major and minor keys had triumphed. He assigns the full development of hexachordal theory to the fifteenth century.
The second half of the book analyzes the hexachord in the humanist musical curriculum, proceeding through the historiography theorist by theorist: here are Johannes Ciconia (d. 1412), who finished his career in Padua advocating musical reforms that would eliminate Guidonian hexachords; a line of attack followed, not always clearly, by Conrad of Zabern, a German musical reformer (d. ca. 1481), by the Carthusian Johannes Gallicus of Parma (d. 1474), and by Bartolomé Ramos de Pareja (d. 1522), a Spanish mathematician of great technical skill. But humanist reformers with reservations about polyphony and a desire to return to "original" music theories faced opponents, particularly Nicholas Burtius of Parma (d. 1528), who used and subverted Gallicus' text, and Franchino Gafori (d. 1522), an Italian theorist and musician who claimed that Guido's methods for sight singing were blessed by the authority of the Church. In these fifteenth- and sixteenth-century debates, Guido becomes more important than ever as all sides seek to claim his authority in battles that were complicated by extrinsic ideological considerations. Mengozzi's analyses of these debates include extensive quotations from relevant passages, followed by English translations.
In the first half of the sixteenth century, Gafori's interpretations of medieval solmization were influential in Germany and Italy. Gioseffo Zarlino (d. 1590), the dominant musical theorist of the age, further discussed hexachordal theories, and his work led eighteenth-century scholars such as Charles Burney and John Hawkins and contemporary scholars such as Richard Crocker to postulate a medieval hexachordal interlude. Non-specialist readers might wish that such strawmen had been systematically paraded out at the start of the book so that its targets and aims would have been clearer. The Renaissance Reform of Medieval Music is written for experts in the history of music theory and contains technical theoretical discussions. Its primary utility for the non-specialist is that it helps eliminate a theoretical understanding that unnecessarily alienates medieval music from classical and contemporary music and that can complicate scholarly interpretations of particular medieval compositions.