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Music Books and Sociability

Taking as its starting point Roger Chartier’s significant observations in the late 1980s about the inherent (but almost wholly unexplored) social dimension of the act of ‘reading aloud’ and its importance as a crucial determinant of a new, materialist approach to the historiography of the histoire du livre, this essay makes a similarly provocative leap by proposing taking a parallel path in the exploration of traces of historic performance practices involving written music, particularly in part-book format, as evidence of the construction of likewise highly embodied and sociable forms of ‘reading aloud’. This approach has, in turn, the potential to open an entirely fresh cultural-historical methodology for understanding what was by far the predominant means by which – and motivation for why – most amateur musicians in the sixteenth- and early seventeenth centuries engaged in structured musical activity centred around collectively ‘reading’ music such as madrigals and related genres. The essay explores how the material format of part-books not only structures the social dimension of performances but also may be a significant compositional consideration in some kinds of musical texts themselves, particularly those intended for amateurs. Thus, while part-book (and to a lesser extent, choirbook) format can be seen as the most practical solution for printers and scribes to disseminate compositions, and the most convenient for professional musicians who need to be able to perform complex music without rehearsal, when it comes to amateurs, analysis of the evidence presented here proposes that the format of musical materials may play a variety of different roles in the construction of wider sociabilities. Sampling a series of pictorial, literary-anecdotal and notational evidence, the essay suggests that these social constructions might include aspects of inter-generational, inter-gender and ‘class’ relations, and identity formation; game-playing; and the negotiation of physical space and cultural environment.