{"id":148,"date":"2011-11-11T13:57:49","date_gmt":"2011-11-11T13:57:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/rring\/?p=148"},"modified":"2011-11-11T13:57:49","modified_gmt":"2011-11-11T13:57:49","slug":"memoirs-of-musick","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/rring\/2011\/11\/11\/memoirs-of-musick\/","title":{"rendered":"Memoirs of Musick"},"content":{"rendered":"

[Posted by Francis Russo (’13), for Jonathan Elukin’s History of the Book course]<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>When we first went down into the Watkinson stacks I came up with a gigantic, vellum bound volume filled with pages printed side by side in both Greek and Latin. The massive book was Plutarch\u2019s Life of Alexander<\/em>\u2014at least, that\u2019s what I could decipher at first glance before I ended up abandoning the monstrosity.\u00a0 In connection with another project, my attention was drawn to another volume quite the opposite of the Alexander text.\u00a0 This new book was small and plain. The spine was no thicker than an index finger and the cover lacked any elaborate design.\u00a0 The simply stamped title, however, was intriguing:\u00a0 Memoirs of Musick<\/em>. Is this a story of a musical experience, or an autobiography of a musician?\u00a0 Perhaps it\u2019s a history of music or tract on music theory\u2026<\/p>\n

I hoped to find an answer in the title page, but that only added a whole new dimension to the mystery with each line: Memoirs of Musick \u2026 by the \u2026 Hon. Roger North \u2026 Attorney-General to James II \u2026 Now first printed from the original MS. and edited, with copious notes \u2026 by Edward F. Rimbault, LL.D. F.S.A. \u2026 Member of the Royal Academy of Music in Stockholm; Secretary to the Musical Antiquarian Society of London, Etc. Etc<\/em>. \u2026 London \u2026 1846.<\/p>\n

Why did a former Attorney-General to James II (the one gently booted off the throne in the Glorious Revolution of 1688) write a piece on Music?\u00a0 And what did a Member of the Royal Academy of Music find in it over a hundred years later that warranted the trouble of editing and printing it?<\/p>\n

Before things get too confusing the book explains itself and tells its own history in a short preface.\u00a0 This three-page introduction is a wonderfully detailed tale of the life of North\u2019s original manuscript.\u00a0 It claims that the Memoires of Musick <\/em>was \u201cfirst made known to the world\u201d when selections of it appeared in a certain Dr. Burney\u2019s General History of Music<\/em>.\u00a0 Charles Burney, who received honorary degrees in Music from Oxford in 1769, was an early music historian intent on writing a general history of music and drew on many sources to complete it.\u00a0 After this initial appearance with Burney in the 1770\u2019s, North\u2019s manuscript was bought, sold, inherited and passed down through the hands of more than five people and over a hundred years, having a \u201cvery narrow escape from destruction\u201d before finally reaching the \u201cpresent editor.\u201d\u00a0 The preface also tells us about the book\u2019s contents.\u00a0 The volume is formed from half of North\u2019s original manuscript, a 1728 \u201csketch of the progress of the art [of music].\u201d\u00a0 It leaves out its counterpart, a \u201ctreatise on the Science of Musick.\u201d<\/p>\n

After putting the book into some kind of context, two general strands of thought emerge.\u00a0 One is North and his writings about Music and the other is Rimbault\u2019s heavy editorial hand.\u00a0 North is first described in a biographical note as an amateur lover of music, noteworthy for his knowledge on a subject not usually associated with his background of law and politics.\u00a0 North\u2019s writing covers all sorts of musical topics from performance, theory, philosophy and more, reaching back as far back as Ancient Greece.\u00a0 He organizes the work without chapters or any subject headings and seems to ramble on whatever subject amuses him.\u00a0 However, North is aware of his scattered nature and admits at the beginning that he is \u201cnot pretending to a full History, a work for Herculean shoulders, but only to collect and modify some Historico-critical scraps.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Interestingly, Rimbault is also aware of his own work: \u201cThe notes which have been added are the result of much reading, and the peculiar facilities which the editor enjoys of consulting rare works.\u00a0 If their minuteness be sometimes uncalled for in explanation of the text, the new and curious information they convey will, it is hoped, be some excuse for the insertion. [signed] E.F.R.\u201d\u00a0 The reason for this apology in advance becomes abundantly clear once you page through the text.\u00a0 Rimbault formats each page as a grid with separated spaces for North\u2019s text, annotative commentary, decorations, a title heading, pagination, and subject markers in the margins.\u00a0 The commentary is truly overwhelming at many points, to the extent that some pages contain only four or five lines of North\u2019s text and the rest filled with Rimbault\u2019s annotations.\u00a0 It seems Rimbault takes up the \u201cHerculean\u201d task North sought to avoid.<\/p>\n

North\u2019s original reference to Hercules brings us to another characteristic of the work.\u00a0 Both North\u2019s text and Rimbault\u2019s commentary are filled with references to the Classical world.\u00a0 What is most interesting is that the book goes to great length describing the music of Ancient Greece and considers Classical myth as well as scholarship as explanations for musical concepts.\u00a0 Discussing the origin of scales, North mentions an \u201cOrphean Harp,\u201d which Rimbault picks up on: \u201caccording to several traditions preserved by Greek historians, it was Orpheus who completed the second tetrachord, which extended the scale to a heptachord, or seven sounds.\u00a0 The assertion of many writers that Orpheus added two new strings to the lyre, which before had seven, clashes with the claims of Pythagoras to the invention of the octachord\u2026\u201d\u00a0 Rimbault\u2019s dense discussion goes on for much longer, in this case and throughout the entire book.\u00a0 It would be fascinating to find the other half of North\u2019s manuscript and see what he considers to be the \u201cScience of Music.\u201d\u00a0 Do the physics-based principles of harmony and sound we know today come out in North\u2019s explanation?<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Rimbault\u2019s extensive and thick commentary also brings out another color of the book.\u00a0 It seems that Rimbault\u2019s printing of such a fragmentary and unknown work is more of a scholarly project than anything else.\u00a0 His interest is to explain and organize the work in a way suggesting that contemporary audiences would not be able to understand North\u2019s 100+ year old original if it were not for him.\u00a0 In this sense, the book also becomes an effort in historical preservation.<\/p>\n

I will end this brief overview of this truly fascinating and multi-faceted book with an anecdote North provides.\u00a0 Although much of his discussion is technical, sometimes confusing, and I suspect in many cases inaccurate, he does sometimes speak to a certain universally.\u00a0 When posing the question of why perfectly good contemporary music was forgotten, \u201claid aside\u201d and even \u201ccontemned,\u201d North says that \u201cThis would be harder to answer, if it were not a great truth, and notorious, that every age since Apollo did not say the same thing of the musick of their owne time. For nothing is more a fashion then musick.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[Posted by Francis Russo (’13), for Jonathan Elukin’s History of the Book course] When we first went down into the Watkinson stacks I came up with a gigantic, vellum bound volume filled with pages printed side by side in both Greek and Latin. The massive book was Plutarch\u2019s Life of Alexander\u2014at least, that\u2019s what I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":122,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/rring\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/148"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/rring\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/rring\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/rring\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/122"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/rring\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=148"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/rring\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/148\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":152,"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/rring\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/148\/revisions\/152"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/rring\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=148"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/rring\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=148"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/rring\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=148"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}