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Music and Meaning: Studies in Music History and the Neighbouring Disciplines.

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Music and Meaning: Studies in Music History and the Neighbouring Disciplines. ByWarren and Ursula Kirkendale (Historiae Musicae Cultores, 113.) Florence: Leo S. Olschki Editore, 2007. [xi, 643p. ISBN-13 9788822256591. [Euro]66.] Music examples, illustrations, indexes.

This hefty book consists of twenty previously published essays. They are arranged in quasi-circular motion from six by Warren Kirkendale (W.K.) to seven by his wife Ursula (U.K.) to another seven by W.K, as if to illustrate the notion of circulatio discussed in the first of them. The topics range from sixteenth-century motets and instrumental music to the madrigal, the beginnings of opera, French opera at the court of Louis XIV, and various works or periods of the composers Caldara, Bach, Handel, Mozart, Beethoven, and Paganini; hence, as "studies in music history" the essays spread over four centuries. No less inclusive are they in representing five decades of the authors' research, from the 1960s up to 2006.

Of the twenty essays, several are major contributions in their innovative research and forceful presentation. No. 1 (by W.K.), for example, treats the circulus (alias circulatio) as a rhetorical figure that sundry composers, from Josquin down to Bach and Haydn, simulated by a wavy motive for words referring to the circle or its analogues (wreath, sun, ring, wave, world, wheel, circumference). Substantiated by evidence from "the neighboring disciplines" (rhetoric, emblematics, philosophy, theology, etc.), it focuses, in particular, on Josquin's motet Ave Maria... benedicta tu, with its circular depiction of the Virgin's breasts on "beata libera tua, quae lactaverunt regum regum" (your...

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