This paper is in two sections. The first briefly considers the
methodological and theoretical challenges that examining
subjectification poses to musicological work on Renaissance and early
modern music. Most music published in the sixteenth century was vocal
music, much of it written for specific liturgical or political
functions, including broadcasting the public persona of an individual
patron. Thus, sixteenth-century music is not a straightforward
expression of a composer’s interiority. Rather, composers balanced their
own interests with, first, the reality of their subordination to a
patron or the needs of their audience; second, the demands of other
creators and performers; and third, the demands of the text and any
characters therein. Susan McClary has demonstrated that composers of
Italian madrigals used music to create complex interiorities for the
subjects in the poetry; a similar methodology could be developed and
integrated into studies that also consider the complex power dynamics
around patronage, and the selfhood of patrons, composers, performers,
listeners.
The second section takes an aside in Michel Foucault’s 1982 article
‘The Subject and Power’ as a starting point. Foucault suggests we can
learn more about a thing from studying its opposite:
legality/criminality, sanity/madness. Musicality and music are
challenging to study in this way: not only is there no simple opposite
to musicality, but there were many competing regulatory bodies
overseeing music. I briefly review concepts and uses of silence and
noise, and demonstrate similarities and differences in the view of the
relationship between music/noise/silence and the self in the proceedings
of the legal court of the Old Bailey of Restoration London and in the
records and treatises associated with sixteenth-century Italian
academies (particularly of Vicenza and Venice). These arenas share an
understanding that music can reveal something of the self, for listeners
as much as performers, and that music should be used judiciously to
care for the self. They disagree about what kinds of music are
appropriate in caring for the self. In sixteenth-century Italian
academies, it seems, any and all music is appropriate, including lowbrow
suggestive song. Humanist literary and music theorists did not rule out
low matter dealing with physical desires as long as it was written in
an appropriate genre and stylistic register. In the eyes (and ears?) of
the Old Bailey, however, lowbrow musicmaking was highly questionable and
could reveal a truth about an individual’s capacity for sin.
Foucault argued that the Reformation brought about a new form of
subjectivity. Martin has suggested that there was not a clearcut break,
rather, the “prudential self (a rhetorical posture that subordinated
honesty to decorum)” was reformed during the sixteenth century; and a
new self, the sincere self “which subordinated decorum to honesty”,
developed. I suggest that context is also important: multilayered,
dissimulating selves appear differently under the gaze of different
regulatory bodies. That is, different lenses highlight different aspects
of selfhood.