Elizabethan Musician
A Plain and Easy Introduction to Practical Music. By Thomas Morley. Edited by R. Alec Harman, with an Introduction by Thurston Dart. (Dent. 35s.) NOT only musicians, but also most people who are interested in Shakespeare and in matters Elizabethan, have at some time come across the famous opening of Morley's Plain and Easy Introduction. In this passage a young student confesses his shame and embarrass- ment at being unable to take his part at sight in madrigal-singing. The significance of the incident, in relation to Elizabethan culture as a whole, should not be sentimentalised, for it was obviously in the interests of a writer of a tutor in descant-singing and composi- tion to claim that music was socially desirable. None the less, one cannot read through Morley's classic work without realising that it could have been produced only in a period of the highest and deepest musical culture ; for it is an academic text-book which consistently implies that music is a part of the totality of human experience.
This is the more striking because Morley was, on the whole, a conservative, even reactionary, musician. The " transposition " signature of two flats fills him with horror, however frequently it may have been introduced by Mr. Byrd ; and the reason he gives for his objection is the traditional one that it will " amaze " the young singer and make him go out of tune. Similarly many progressive elements in the techniques of the time which were associated with the humanist desire to make music more immediately expressive are deplored by Morley. False relation, which seems to us so typical and poignant a feature of the English school, seems to Morley the reverse of meaningful—a " stale and naught " cliché, a hangover from the organist's loft, " unpleasant harsh music . . . flat against the rules." He can appreciate the relation between dissonance and instrumental styles; but does not see—or as a teacher affects not to see, for his theory is here somewhat at variance with his practice—what the emotional implications of instrumental dissonance were.
Yet if Morley, like most theoretic writers, is in some ways insen- sitive to the liveliest Knds of his time, how different he is from theorists of a later daa. We can see even from his prose style that for him musical theory is an aspect of human thought and feeling. When he says, " The light music hath of late been more deeply dived into," he is using metaphor as Shakespeare uses it ; when, in describing a students' tiff, he remarks that " the descant books were made angels " he reveals a poetic imagination. His teaching of the stuff of music is distinct from the academic treatise because he always relates his rules to the demands of the ear ; and furthermore makes clear that what the ear finds tolerable cannot be separated from the making of moral judgements. Technical cunning is not justified unless it provokes " delightfulness and pleasure ".
While most of Morley's book is as plain as he can legitimately make it, given the complexity of the subject, it is anything but easy, even for the specialist. Yet its significance, as I have tried to indicate, extends far beyond its topical and local technicalities ; it provides food for thought for anyone interested in the bases of musical culture. The original edition of 1597 had been reissued in facsimile by Dr. Fellowes ; but this was barely intelligible to those unversed in sixteenth-century notation and typography. This new edition is a model example of how to present an old book to contemporary readers. The original title-page and text are preserved intact, but divested of superficial and misleading quaintness ; the music examples are printed in clear modem notation, except where sixteenth-century typography is essential for an understanding of Morley's point, Mr. Harman's notes are lucid and discriminating ; there is almost always a note when one needs one, and it usually tells one what one wants to know. Mr. Dart's introduction, placing Morley's work in the context of Elizabethan life, musical theory and music printing, is as helpful as it is economical. The production as a
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