of music in performance, something lost when music becomes text, and therefore lost to the historian’s
direct experience.
Lest we think for that reason that the account must be wholly fictional, and lest we therefore despise
it, we might reflect on other manifestations of musical soul-loss as experienced by the audiences of
charismatic performers throughout history and into our own time. Similar uncanny mesmeric effects were
achieved by Romantic virtuosi like Paganini on the violin and Liszt on the piano—effects that, in the
twentieth century, have largely been ceded to what are now known as popular entertainers: Frank Sinatra,
Elvis Presley, the Beatles, Michael Jackson. These are the names of Francesco da Milano’s most recent
heirs.
Like him, and like Paganini and Liszt did when performing, they work primarily in an oral medium.
While there is certainly some contact between their art and preserved musical texts of various kinds, it is
a secondary contact of a sort already available to Francesco da Milano. But it did not constitute his art,
the way the music text of a Willaert or a Buus constituted the ars perfecta in Francesco’s time, or a
symphony by Beethoven in Paganini’s time, or a string quartet by Arnold Schoenberg in Frank Sinatra’s
time.
The ars perfecta, the Beethoven symphony and the Schoenberg quartet, being primarily textual, are
more adequately recorded in history than the performances of Ficino, Francesco, Paganini, or Sinatra. The
historical record is partial (in more than one sense). It leaves out a lot—not necessarily because it wants
to but because it has to. The danger is that we will forget that anything has been forgotten, or value only
what is not left out, or think that that is all there ever was. As the fox who couldn’t reach the grapes
reminds us, there is a tendency to despise what one can no longer have. What we no longer have (until the
twentieth century) are recoverable performances. It is a bad mistake to think that texts can fully
compensate their loss, or that they tell the whole story, or that the story that texts tell is the only story
worth telling.
PEEKING BEHIND THE CURTAIN
In its penetration (through publications like Musica Nova or Buus’s ricercari) of the instrumental domain,
long the bastion of the unwritten and the spontaneous, the ars perfecta can seem to embody a crowning
triumph for literacy. All that was captured, though, was the elite protruding tip of a huge iceberg. The vast
majority of instrumentalists continued as before to perform by a combination of ear, hand, and memory.
Even church organists more often improvised their accompaniments to liturgical action than read them off
their music rack. (And they still do; organists are perhaps the only literate musicians who still receive
training in the art of improvisation.) Even those who did read their music (or rather, Buus’s or Willaert’s
music) off the rack did not read it literally, the way we might imagine them doing on the basis of our own
education and experience. Again a reminder is due that literacy has never totally eclipsed orality, even in
those repertoires and fields of practice where it can seem most firmly ensconced. And there is no reason
to expect that it ever will.
Which is by no means to disparage the degree of ready literacy that existed among sixteenth-century
church musicians. Choral sight-singing, practiced since Guido’s time, will hardly amaze us nowadays. We
can do that. But the idea of an organist putting four separate partbooks on his music rack to play a
ricercare at sight is somewhat stunning. Yet any sixteenth-century organist could do it, even a mediocre
one. For anyone aspiring to a professional post it was considered a requisite, not an exceptional, skill.
Nevertheless, we should not suppose that what came out of the organ under those circumstances were
the notes in the partbooks and nothing but the notes. No performer treated musical texts in those days with