advocates ever since the trecento repertory was rediscovered by musicologists around the beginning of
the twentieth century. It has not caught on generally, however, partly because the rediscovery came after
the conventional style-periodization of modern music history had been established, and partly because of
the situation implicit in its very rediscovery.
That situation, simply put, is the extreme perishability of music compared with the other art media,
and the consequent lack of classical models for it. There could be no revival of a pre-Christian classical
past in music, since there was practically nothing left from that vanished musical culture to revive. As a
result, the idea arose among musicians and their audience alike that music was an art virtually without a
past—or at least without “a usable past.” As one German writer, Othmar Luscinius, put it in 1536, at the
very height of what we call “the Renaissance,”
how strange it is that in matters of music we find a situation entirely different from that of the general state of the arts and
letters: in the latter whatever comes closest to venerable antiquity receives most praise; in music, he who does not excel
the past becomes the laughing stock of all.^8We have already observed a comparable attitude in Landini’s madrigal Sy dolce non sonò, in which
all the mythological (i.e., classical) masters of music were mocked by a comparison with (on the one
hand) a “modern” musician (Philippe de Vitry), or (on the other hand) a barnyard fowl. Many modern
historians prefer to view the beginning of the musical “Renaissance” somewhere between the beginning
and the middle of the fifteenth century, a period from which we have many witnesses testifying to the
general perception that music had been reborn—or rather, that a usable music had actually been born—in
their own day. We will sample and evaluate their opinions on the new in later chapters; here it will
suffice to quote the fifteenth-century theorist Johannes Tinctoris’s opinion of pre-fifteenth-century music,
including trecento music. Such songs, he wrote, were “so ineptly, so stupidly composed that they rather
offended than pleased the ear.”^9 Indeed Cosimo Bartoli, a Florentine scholar of the sixteenth century,
observed (in a book about Dante!) that the composers of Tinctoris’s time had “rediscovered music, which
then was as good as dead.”^10
If we call that “rediscovery” the beginning of the “Renaissance” period for music, we are using the
term in a very different way from the way it is used in general history. We are in effect endorsing and
perpetuating an invidious comparison. The term, in such a usage, is not descriptive but honorific—a mark
of favorable judgment—or even, as the music historian Reinhard Strohm has suggested, a mere “beauty”
prize.^11 The use of the term “Renaissance” to coincide with what fifteenth-century musicians saw as the
birth of their art, or its rupture with its past, becomes downright paradoxical at the other end of the
period. For at the end of the sixteenth century, musicians did in fact try to revive the art of pre-Christian
antiquity—not in terms of its style (for they could not know what that was) but in terms of its effects as
described by classical authors. Only then did music actually join “the Renaissance,” as the term is
understood by general historians. But this belated emulation of antiquity was precisely what led to the
overthrow of what music historians now call the “Renaissance” period, and its replacement by the so-
called Baroque!
Yet to try and avoid this terminological quagmire merely by pushing the beginning of the
“Renaissance” back a hundred years to the trecento would scarcely help. As we will shortly see (and
whether or not it makes sense to call it a “Renaissance”), there was indeed a stylistic watershed for music
in the fifteenth century, as there was for painting and literature in the fourteenth. If there is to be a
periodization, it should not contradict the actual history of styles. As already hinted, the fifteenth-century
watershed came about as the result of the internationalization of musical practices—what might be called
the musical unification of Europe. But it was not a “Renaissance,” and there is no point in calling it that.