This fascinating monograph by Katie Bank utilizes Elizabethan and Stuart musical-visual culture as a prism to interpret historical perceptions of emotion, identity, sociability, and musical engagement. The study explores how recreational music such as the late Elizabethan and early Stuart madrigal genre helped composers construct subjectivity. The author posits that, through the use of various dialogic forms, composers could manipulate this creative musical space to interrogate the gap between representation and reality. For the author, the term recreational encompasses all music engaged in for the purpose of social discourse and entertainment, albeit secular or sacred. Bank argues that group singing and the communal aspects of recreational music perform a distinct role in crafting identity.
She explores this premise by examining how collegial music-making plays out in this early modern repertoire. Bank considers the dialogical form expressed through music as a function of its binary capacity to vocalize aspects of contradiction and incompleteness. The interaction of different voices and agencies expressed through communal singing in dialogue presents an alternative modality for understanding this repertoire in its contextual frame rather than from a strictly formal analytic standpoint. Building on a phenomenological theoretical lens, the author examines how the interagency of various combinations of voices and their multivalent relationships offered a dynamic forum for the fashioning of self.
Beyond its examination of the dynamics of collective singing, Knowledge Building in Early Modern English Music unpacks how performance further assisted in this repertoire's constitution of identity. Bank demonstrates the formative role of music in terms of its ability to change the very structures of cognition. This metamorphosis becomes a way of recreating meaning through performance and performative dialogic acts, even reconfiguring the self through what Bank identifies in early modern terminology as the striking effect of this madrigal repertory. Another related topic concerns the role that this music plays in shaping notions of embodiment. Ultimately, the author views all these processes interacting within the madrigal to express a sophisticated language of selfhood.
The first chapter presents an etymological analysis of the term light as a methodology for understanding the way madrigals spoke to their own historical and phenomenological milieu. Eschewing outmoded historiographical formulae, Bank convincingly demonstrates how musicological scholarship relegates the English madrigal repertory to an inferior status. This is especially when compared with the lute song, a genre typically viewed as carrying greater depth and introspective potential than the English madrigal. By first investigating the contemporary meanings of light, a denomination often ascribed to the genre by composers including Thomas Morley, the study advocates for a finer apprehension of the term's connotation. This etymological scrutiny then becomes a springboard for rehabilitating musicological assumptions about this repertory's signification and reception during the time of its actual production.
In this pursuit, the author undertakes several close readings of madrigals by Thomas Weelkes and John Wilbye in order to illuminate how a madrigal text might destabilize perceptions of reality. These particular works problematize the fictions and realities of travel literature and their treatment of notions of truth, especially within the mythically expansive realm of music. The author argues that the recreational madrigal offered an optimal locus for mediating metaphysical inquiry because of music's proximity to the passions.
The second chapter enlists diverse literary and musical sources as a basis for formulating a hermeneutics of sensory and emotional experience. This collation commences with an inspection of Robert Jones's dedicatory remarks in his 1605 songbook, where hearing is proclaimed the most learned sense. Exploring sensory perception, dreams, and consciousness through the lens of early modern physics, recreational music and the English madrigal are interpreted as a vehicle for construing identity and self- referentiality. The study investigates Francis Bacon's approach to fiction alongside that of other contemporary writers. In concert with Lisa Gardine, Bank reveals how, despite a typically heuristic epistemology, Bacon often uses narrative to synthesize knowledge. Finally, the fourth chapter analyzes several types of dialogic form, ranging from epistolary exchanges to lessons in dialectic to the musical dialogue per se. These sources serve to explicate how the madrigal utilized dialogic engagement to build knowledge and a vocabulary of self-reflectivity.
This study brings a fresh perspective to English developments in the Italian madrigal form. Bank introduces new taxonomies to define the English madrigal flourishing in the seventeenth century in a creative analytic approach, unencumbered by the narratives of anachronistic scholarship.
