Music and Musicians in Renaissance Cities and Towns. Fiona Kisby
teenth-century England along the lines of Carolyn Merchant's description of the changing understanding of nature — occasioned by the scientific revolution — from nurturing womb to laboratory cadaver. David E. Cohen challenges the idea that Jean-Philippe Rameau's famous attempt to ground music in a natural principle, the corps sonore, is related to his "discovery" of the problem of music cognition, and demonstrates, through a subtle and nuanced discussion, that Rameau relied upon a concept of "musical instinct," a "gift of nature" which he took to be a faculty of the senses, not of the mind. Finally, in "Nietzsche, Riemann, Wagner: when music lies," Leslie David Blasius explores what it means for a theory of music to be true. Scott Burnham opens part 2, "Natural Forms — Forming Nature," with a gracefully written reappraisal of what is generally understood to be "the burden of our sense of sonata form: the idea of return as resolution and the closely related ideas of teleological process and unequivocal completion" (113). On the contrary, Burnham demonstrates, using musical examples from Haydn and Beethoven, sonata form can be much less than a psychodrama with a single desired outcome; it can demonstrate to us another basic rhythm of life, eternal renewal. In the remaining two contributions to this section Alexander Rehding examines August Halm's early twentieth-century German idealist approach to the formulation of an ontology of sonata and fugue; and Suzannah Clark discusses in detail Arthur von Oettingen's attempt to relate all aspects of harmony to one "natural" principle, the major-minor system. In a final section, "Constructions of Identity," Ian Biddle analyzes nineteenthcentury German critical writing on music as a transformation from a reading motivated by desire to an activity related to the invasion and exploration of a musical "body." Music Theory and Natural Order concludes with Peter A. Hoyt's identification of Antoine Reicha's appeal to the "music of savages" as an attempt to justify certain foundational presumptions of his 1814 Traitide melodie. The excellent essays which form this volume, although focused specifically on music and music theory, are case studies of the universal tendency to substantiate ideology by means of appeals to "nature" and "natural order" and, as such, are certainly of general interest. BLAIR SULLIVAN Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, University of California, Los Angeles