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David R M Irving, Early musicking in its own words and images, Early Music, Volume 52, Issue 1, February 2024, Pages 122–125, https://doi.org/10.1093/em/caae006
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This anthology of texts and images, selected and curated by Andrew Parrott, is a welcome addition to any personal or institutional library. Comparable publications can be seen in Piero Weiss and Richard Taruskin’s edited volume Music in the Western world: a history in documents (New York and London, 1984) and of course the well-known Strunk’s source readings in music history, edited by Leo Treitler (New York, 1998). What distinguishes this new offering, however, is its focus on a carefully defined set of centuries that are of particular interest and relevance to practitioners of historically informed performance. Moreover, the volume is based on a whole career of close scrutiny of and practical engagement with original source materials, with a far greater number and variety than found in other collections.
An impressive number of illustrations complement the historical, cultural and theoretical details of the texts. This material is reproduced lavishly in full colour, on glossy paper that helps retain the colours and hues in full. It is a joy to leaf through such a luscious volume, pause on specific images and read the surrounding texts to gain an idea of context. The bulk of the figures show paintings and engravings (some hand-coloured), but there are also copious reproductions of music notation (staff and tablature), some choreographic notation (for example, p.243), and photographs of instruments (p.148, p.253) as well as sculpture (p.242). They are, collectively, a vital element of the book. As Parrott puts it in the Introduction: ‘Synthesis and abstraction, the necessary stuff of most historical writing, will rarely prove a match for the particularity of strong visual images speaking directly across the centuries’ (p.xi).
