1 - Renaissance Humanism and Music

Summary

FOR students of the Renaissance, “humanism” is a term that sends up warning flares. Its use is entrenched, its usefulness unquestionable, but it remains unsettled in meaning and hence worrisome, begging apology and qualification even from writers who have done much to define it. Thus Paul Oskar Kristeller opened his watershed Oberlin lectures half a century ago by noting that, although “the term ‘Humanism’ has been associated with the Renaissance and its classical studies for more than a hundred years, … in recent times it has become the source of much philosophical and historical confusion”; his became, then, a mission of delimitation and definition. More recently Donald R. Kelley began in a similar tone his admirable survey of the subject : “‘Renaissance humanism’ joins two debatable abstractions, one that suggests a cultural revival and the other a secular philosophy, perhaps divested of higher religious concerns.” Such ambivalence is found also among musicologists. James Haar ventured so far as to entitle a chapter in his Essays on Italian Poetry and Music “The Early Madrigal : Humanistic Theory in Practical Guise”; but he only came around to addressing humanism, near the end of the chapter, in order to complain that “The term is overworked in general in scholarly and popular writing on the Renaissance and so often misused in discussions of music that I considered not using it at all.”

This caution includes a good measure of valor, and it certainly has the virtue of forthrightness. Too often, instead, discussions of humanism evade the term's historiographical difficulties. Anyone versed in modern writings on the Renaissance, musicological or otherwise, knows the frustration aroused by sidelong references to an undefined humanism, to unspecified humanists, or to a vague humanist “orientation,” “inclination,” or “spirit.” Renaissance humanism has provided a historiographical terrain more congenial than many to the persistent growth of an undisciplined Geistesgeschichte—a particular fertility that lives on from the earliest uses of the term, in which it was connected to such broad and, for the Renaissance, questionable notions as individualism and secularism.