Musicology and the Arab Origins of Solfege (Guest post by Michael Vincent)

From Linda: Hello, everyone! I want to alert you to the fact that this essay is a guest post by Michael Vincent. Not only is it informative and thoroughly researched, it fits with the overall mission of this blog. I am grateful that he shared this with me, and I hope you find it as fascinating as I do.

When in doubt, ask a musicologist. As Linda has noted elsewhere, musicologists are great for contextualizing music and history with larger ideas. But our discipline has blind spots. We train in European-style universities, where we sometimes continue to work. We tend to be Eurocentric, incorporating other perspectives but safely cordoning them off as secondary areas of interest. Owing to this blog’s mission, Linda hasn't shied away from the issue.

When I read this post from WQXR Blog on the origins of solfege, I was happy to see that the author consulted musicologist Andrew Dell’Antonio, who has contributed to Not Another Music History Cliché. Everything that James Bennett II (the WQXR author) writes conforms with what is commonly understood in our discipline—an improvement over an earlier essay that caught the attention of this blog. Bennett acknowledges complexities, since solfege is “found in musical cultures all over the world.” He specifies the subject of the post as “the form [of solfege] most associated with western European music.” He has done his due diligence in researching and presenting the information accurately. So what’s the issue?

It’s where Bennett writes “Guido d’Arezzo (ca. 991–after 1033), the monk to whom we attribute the beginnings of staff notation as we understand it today, also gets credit for solfège.” Bennett smartly hedges the language, noting that Guido “gets credit.” Yes, he does! While this level of information is appropriate for the reader of the WQXR blog, here we can get into why Guido gets credit: because of the Eurocentric perspective adopted by musicologists.

Is Music a Universal Language?

Hello, and happy new year! I hope your 2018 is off to a good start. I’m starting the year by tackling one of the most pervasive musical clichés, one that goes beyond any individual composer or even a particular musical style. Some readers may be upset with me for debunking this aphorism, perhaps because they believe it and that belief has done some good in their lives. Other readers have been waiting for this post since the blog began. So, here we go:

Is music a universal language?

Since this question is the title of the post and I’m big into Betteridge’s Law, you have probably already figured out that my answer is a resounding NO.

Monteverdi at 450: Don’t Believe the Hype (Guest post by Andrew Dell'Antonio)

From Linda: Hello, everyone! I completed my eighteen treatments of brain radiation a little over a week ago, and as far as I can tell, I’m not experiencing much in the way of cognitive impairment. That’s particularly good news, considering that in the past month I’ve had some fantastic opportunities: I received a commission to write program notes for a concert by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and I’ve been selected as a contestant for Jeopardy!, with the taping next week. So, even though I have a clear idea of what I want to blog about next, I haven’t had the time to write the posts.

But people keep being wrong on the internet, and I’m not the only one who cares. My friend and colleague Andrew Dell’Antonio (co-editor of The Avid Listener) spotted a trend in the way newspapers are using Claudio Monteverdi to boost tourism, and he offered to write a guest post. My sincere thanks to Andrew for his contribution!

As a long-time admirer of Linda Shaver-Gleason’s insights on the perils of musical-historical cliché, I am absolutely honored that she has given me this opportunity to have my say on an instance of celebratory flim-flam from my own musical-historical backyard.

Claudio Monteverdi
Portrait by Bernardo Strozzi

We are in the 450th anniversary year of the birth of Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643), verifiably one of the most prominent European musicians of the turn of the seventeenth century.  Anniversaries bring celebrations, and several have already been underway, the most noteworthy sponsored by the town of Cremona, where he was born, but also at Mantua, where he built his reputation, and Venice, where he landed and put down roots for the last 30 years of his long and productive life.

Most recently hype has bubbled up in a pair of posts from the travel sections of UK newspaper web sites The Guardian and The Telegraph, in conjunction with a planned performance in Venice of the three surviving operas by Monteverdi by prominent English ensembles directed by John Eliot Gardiner. Stephen Pritchard of The Guardian gushes:

The first composer to break through convention and display the true nature of humanity… a man who moved music out of the Renaissance into the Baroque, as much a revolutionary in his own artform as his contemporaries Shakespeare, Galileo, Cervantes, Caravaggio and Rubens were in theirs.