'All this may seem a strange introduction to a paper about Renaissance music, yet comparisons with our own society may help us to appreciate the much greater significance of gift-giving in early modern Europe. The idea that compositions were written and circulated as gifts, which is the central claim of this article, may initially seem a paradoxical one. For there are many good reasons why we are interested in discovering precisely the opposite: the origins of music as a marketable commodity, protected by printer's privileges and early conceptions of private property. Those origins have been traced to the decades around 1500, and they are widely agreed to mark a paradigm shift in the perception and appreciation of music. It was during these decades that the musical work 'work' came to be viewed as an object, a thing, to be produced, bought, sold, owned, protected, contemplated and talked about.

Economically, this development has been described as one of commodification: musical works began to be treated as marketable goods, and composers regarded themselves as entrepreneurs operating in the market place. Conceptually one could speak of reification: the musical work came to be defined in terms of its durability, its capacity to transcend the immediate decay of musical sound. Aesthetically, one could describe the development as one of objectification: the appropriate response to the musical work—whether it was heard, studied, or talked about—involved aesthetic distance, and allowed it to be mapped and contemplated as a totality.

Yet if all this amounted to a paradigm shift, then what had been the existing paradigm? In recent years I have spent much thought on precisely this question. Although I cannot give a full answer, I shall propose here that the concept of the gift was a defining aspect of that paradigm. I arrived at this idea through a rather circuitous route. Several years ago I became intrigued by the question what it meant to publish a musical work before the age of printing. For instance, the Swiss theorist Heinrich Glarean wrote in 1547 that Josquin des Prez kept his works to himself for years, revising and polishing them until he was ready to make them public.

For those who knew him say that he published [edidisse] his works after much deliberation and with manifold corrections; neither that he released [emisisse] a song to the public unless he had kept it to himself for some years…

Yet once Josquin had reached that point, once he knew that his works were in perfect shape, how did he actually launch them into the public sphere? How did people know that a new setting by Josquin was in the making, and about to come out? Was there such a thing as advance publicity? Was publication the equivalent of a ceremonial unveiling, a world première, or some other ritual? Was there indeed any conception of 'publication' before the emergence of commercial book markets?

This question led me to an obscure article by the literary scholar Robert K. Root, published in 1913, which was entitled—promisingly—'Publication before printing'. In it Root argued that the principal modes of book publication in the Middle Ages had been twofold: either a formal reading before an invited audience, or, more commonly, a formal presentation of the book as a gift to its dedicatee. The cultural significance of this latter practice is illustrated by numerous medieval book illuminations in which the author kneels before the patron, and the latter graciously condescends to accept the gift. This type of illumination is to be distinguished from a type of authorial portrait that became current towards 1500, one in which the writer is working in blissful solitude in his study—an image not of feudal submission, but rather one of creative sovereignty. As Cynthia Brown has argued, the difference between these two types of illumination seems to reflect a change in the dignity and status of contemporary authors. It is hard not to suspect a parallel here with similar changes in the status of composers during this period. As I have argued elsewhere, it was in the decades around 1500 that composers developed a new sense of professional identity and self-esteem—indeed, that the profession of composer could be said to have been born.

Since the earlier of the two types of author portraits captures the moment of publication in the very gesture of formal gift presentation, it seemed worthwhile to explore the practice of gift exchange in medieval and Renaissance society. This led me to a fascinating study by Natalie Zemon Davis, The gift in sixteenth-century France (2000). Davis devoted an entire chapter to the changing status of books as gifts in early modern print culture, and her observations made me realize that many similar issues can in fact be witnessed in the history of music.'

'We could point out similar relationships between other spirituals and the Protestant hymns or scriptures. Always the spirituals change the language of the source materials so that the words become the personal utterance of the singer.'

'Bosses, dictators, and oligarchs fail to develop worthy identities because they never interact with peers.'

We Forced the Beat

'… in the real context of tail fins, Chuck Berry, and millions of burgers sold…'

'Since serialism is an organization of all the octave-classes, the presence of an octave when each note comes from a distinct, separate version of the series creates generally an unacceptable confusion. It threatens the method of organization itself, occasions a mistake in grammar so serious as to destroy sense. The prohibition of such octaves is part of a larger principle of nonredundancy. This does not ban the repetition of a note. What it bans is the return of a note in such a context as to imply the disruption of the series. For example, the first note of one form of a series may be repeated as often as a composer likes, provided it always sounds like the first note (in other words, as though the note was sustained with intermittences); it must not sound as if it had a second position in the series.'

'In a situation provided with maximum amplification (no feedback), perform a disciplined action.'

'The first dimension of silence captures the meaningful silence of the musical language. Unable to speak discursively or conceptually, music, Schopenhauer argues, nonetheless speaks—and it speaks not merely volumes but "everything." One purpose of my inquiry is to unravel in Schopenhauerean terms the apparent paradox that the fine art of sound is essentially silent, or that the purpose of the musical art is to express the inexpressible.

The second dimension of silence is a meta- or philosophical silence. It captures the inability of philosophy—at least in its traditional forms—to adequately describe the musical art. This silence derives from philosophy's own theoretical limits. Another purpose of my inquiry is to highlight how necessarily dependent Schopenhauer's philosophy of music is upon indirect, analogical description. Apart from the undoubted and explicit influence of Plato and Kant upon Schopenhauer's metaphysics, Schopenhauer works also within an age-old tradition of German anagogical mysticism and philosophical anxiety that utilizes claims of transcendence to find a sacred realm or refuge for the individual, be it in God or music. Like Augustine, but more explicitly like Aquinas, Schopenhauer demonstrates the use to which arguments by analogy (comparison, proportion, and negation) can be put if philosophers are to say anything about that which, in the strictly philosophical terms of rational explanation, cannot be spoken about.'

'On attaché trop d'importance à l'écriture musicale, à la formule et au métier! On n'écoute pas autour de soi les milles bruits de la nature, on ne guette pas assez cette musique si variée qu'elle nous offre avec tant d'abondance. Elle nous enveloppe, et nous avons vécu au milieu d'elle jusqu'à présent sans nous en apercevoir.'