Reviewed Elsewhere: Jessie Ann Owens and Katelijne Schiltz, eds. Cipriano de Rore: New Perspectives on his Life and Music.
Jessie Ann Owens and Katelijne Schiltz, eds. Cipriano de Rore: New Perspectives on his Life and Music. Turnhour: Brepols, 2016. 507 pp. €80.00 (paperback), ISBN 978-2-503-56777-8.)
Cipriano de Rore belongs to the rare (or perhaps not so rare) group of sixteenth-century composers whose extraordinary fame, both contemporary and posthumous, is matched by an equally outstanding neglect by researchers. For want of an authoritative biography, a catalogue raisoné and even a critical edition of his music (no critical apparatus is provided in Bernhard Meier’s edition in Corpus mensurabilis musicae), Rore scholarship has long been doomed to be the sole domain of a few individuals. This publication marks a decisive step towards overcoming these impediments. Assembling the cream of current Rore experts and prompting others to explore his life and works, Jessie Ann Owens (a household name in Rore scholarship) and Katelijne Schiltz have put together a pioneering volume that is equally informative and inspiring. As the title promises, the volume offers ‘new perspectives’ on Rore’s biography, his sources and repertory, analytical approaches to his music, and his place in early twentieth-century scholarship.
Bonnie Blackburn once more lives up to her reputation as the supreme sleuth of early modern music history. She not only skilfully extracts new information from well-known primary sources, but also digs out significant new material from Italian archives. She sheds fascinating new light on Rore’s early Italian career prior to his employment as maestro di cappella at Ferrara (1546), which had long been shrouded in mystery. With all due caution, Blackburn employs circumstantial evidence to draw the contours of a network of patrons and fellow musicians within which Rore moved as an enterprising freelancer in Brescia. ...
With its many quirks and bold features, Rore’s music does not respond well to conventional analytical approaches. Four chapters seek to address this challenge through close readings of individual works and more systematic investigation of individual compositional parameters. ...
Rore’s anticipation of later developments such as Monteverdi’s seconda pratica is also demonstrated by Jessie Ann Owens, albeit from a more exegetical angle. Her persuasive close reading of Rore’s Dissimulare etiam sperasti, a (selective) setting of Dido’s lament from the Aeneid, establishes Rore’s compositional and rhetorical strategies in representing a text, and in particular the utterance of a woman. ...
The concluding chapter leaves Rore as a historical figure behind and examines his position in Alfred Einstein’s history of the Italian madrigal (first published in three volumes in 1949), which defined the master narrative of the genre for future generations. ... As Bolz is firmly entrenched in his meta-historiographical approach, he shows surprisingly little interest in checking Einstein’s ideas against the musical evidence or indeed against current (re-)evaluations of Rore as plentifully offered by the preceeding chapters. As a result, the concluding chapter remains strangely disintegrated from the rest of the book.
... Not many edited books can claim to showcase as much original scholarship and open up as many perspectives as the essays gathered by Jessie Ann Owens and Katelijne Schiltz. ...
Even so, the book does not do justice to all genres within Rore’s oeuvre. One looks in vain for studies of his masses, magnificat, and other liturgical compositions, or indeed the assimilation of Rore’s works in later imitation masses and magnificats by Palestrina, Lasso, and others. ... Yet, any such petty grievance pales into insignificance when confronted with this milestone volume that will be the steady companion for future students of Rore and a game changer in research on his life and music.
Christian Thomas Leitmeir. Music and Letters 99, 1 (2018), 107–110.
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