| While music historians continue to struggle to define the Renaissance as an epoch, listeners from the past, such as music theorists, can help in the development of more sensitive models for music periodization. Two treatises, the Complexus effectuum musices (ca. 1477-8) by Johannes Tinctoris (ca. 1435-1511) and the Dodecachordon (1547) by Heinrich Glarean (Glareanus) (1488-1563), are read with special attention to the music aesthetics and historiographic models of their writers. As rhetoric is always linked, in antiquity, to music, and undergoes a general rehabilitation in the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries, theorists grounded in humanist intellectual practices readily transfer rhetorical concepts to music criticism. The notion of imitatio, as understood by humanists not committed to strict Ciceronianism, and the precept of decorum, which teaches the necessity of adapting rhetorical material and arguments to a given situation, are the interpretive tools that allow Tinctoris and Glarean to hear music of their time as equal to, or even superior to, the music of antiquity. A Renaissance in music is thus affirmed without any reference to actual antique music. The case of Tinctoris and Glarean is shown to provide an alternative model for defining the Renaissance in music, based not on retrospective stylistic criteria but in the terms proposed by the historical witnesses. |
