Musical Authorship from Schütz to Bach by Stephen Rose (review)

Abstract

Stephen Rose has contributed a fine new volume to Cambridge University Press’s series Musical Performance and Reception. Rose presents the book as treating the term and concept “musical author” and “attitudes towards authorship” in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Each of its six chapters engages with “authorship,” examining it from various points of view (models of creativity, dialogues between individuality and authority, signs of the author’s presence in printed music, ownership of music, the regulation of Lutheran church music, and the experience of music in performance). From my perspective, though, the book’s most valuable contribution is to use authorship to frame many central questions in the study of seventeenth-century German music: What changed so strikingly around 1650? Why did the publication of printed music decline so steeply? How did musicians conceptualize the creation of music? What is communicated by portraits of famous musicians? Rose provides both an investigation of authorship in the period and—even more usefully—an innovative and fruitful starting point for understanding the musical culture of the time. The book’s approach is nicely encapsulated in the introduction: “The present study complements previous work by probing the discourses and economic practices surrounding musical authorship in the seventeenth century” (7). First, the book does complement other scholarship explicitly; Rose frequently positions his work alongside or sometimes as a corrective to older research. This is helpful in understanding the work’s context, but also occasionally risks burying the study’s own truly original insights and its rethinking of old problems. Second, “discourses” are central—the principal materials of the book are writings from the period, and here Rose is in impressive control. His use and command of primary sources shows his deep immersion in contemporary writings; every reference one might anticipate is there, alongside a trove that even experts might not know. This puts the book’s arguments on a convincing footing. Third, this is very much a book about “economic practices.” Rose puts a high value on musical creation as commerce, and on the functioning of the market BACH: Journal of the Riemenschneider Bach Institute, Vol. 51, No. 2, 2020 Copyright © 2020 Baldwin Wallace University, Berea, OH