Composing Community in Late Medieval Music

Reviewed by: Composing Community in Late Medieval Music: Self-Reference, Pedagogy, and Practice by Jane D. Hatter Katie Bank Composing Community in Late Medieval Music: Self-Reference, Pedagogy, and Practice. By Jane D. Hatter. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. (Music in context.) [xvii, 298 p. ISBN 978-1-108-47491-7 (hardcover); 978-1-108-57580-5 (e-book). £75] Jane D. Hatter’s first monograph, Composing Community in Late Medieval Music: Self-Reference, Pedagogy, and Practice draws methodologies from the study of visual culture to expand scholarship on late medieval music in truly exciting ways. The original approach employed here brings insights from art history to bear on musical texts, and in the process, provides a model and inspiration for further efforts in this direction by musicologists, something that should be encouraged. That said, this is not necessarily a book for interdisciplinary readership, as much of its argument relies heavily on musicological knowledge that is inaccessible to many outside the field. As this period features canonical figures such as Josquin des Prez, the late medieval motet is a well-trodden area of study for the early music researcher. Though this subfield is packed with juggernaut composers—and a cornucopia of secondary scholarship from respected names within the field—Hatter makes her mark through innovative methodology and a fresh, big-picture approach to musical culture that brings together recent scholarship on this body of music to reveal a fascinating new understanding of late medieval musical communities. Hatter’s central research question asks: What was the purpose of writing a piece of music about writing music and why did so many composers in the decades around 1500 partake in this practice? Though self-referential composition from this period is well-known to modern scholarship and popular for concert programming, existing research has focused mostly on close reading and rarely investigates this practice as a whole. This includes music that references other musicians, music-making, music composition, and other music-related topics. As Hatter says, ‘[s]elf-referential pieces are unified by the common thread of providing evidence for the creator’s awareness of the act of creation on some basic level’ (p. 2). Music demonstrating meta-awareness of the musical process becomes material evidence of the musical ‘communities’ built by composers in distant locations. Through these compositions they not only composed their public selves, but also the idea of a mutually recognised ‘guild’ or international community of professionals, in lieu of actual confraternities. Hatter’s book is organised into two main sections. ‘Part I: Music About Musicians’, looks at Du Fay and pieces of musical devotion at Cambrai Cathedral that demonstrate how musical and professional identities were expressed through music. Part I then broadens out to [End Page 257] account for work by other composers that memorialised individual musicians in their texts, for example, musical prayers for musicians, acrostics, and laments for masters of the past. ‘Part II: Music About Music’ focuses on pieces that were written with musical references and ‘in-jokes’, including pedagogic references. This includes the symbolic use of the hexachord and other aspects of music theory as an emblem of composition. By looking at the social context of use for this music, Hatter’s research also takes into account anonymous pieces that are often ignored by those focusing on particular composers. The occasional humorous footnote or pop culture reference keeps the monograph quite readable and the author should be commended for the book’s numerous tables, which are mostly useful, as is the list of sources and sigla. The material nature of written music as a made object is key to Hatter’s argument, as the book is supported and framed through a comparison between the work of the painter and the work of the composer. Many features used by composers in building community relied on the physicality of notations, such as acrostics, reinforcing the idea that visual presentation and materiality are key. For example, the text of Obrecht’s Inter preclarissimas virtutes mentions ‘music supported by your hand’ and refers to ‘this page’, reminding the reader/singer of the physical object in front of them. Through textual reference, the materiality of the composition is reinforced. This

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