This fine study is a fitting counterpart to Dr Kim’s earlier study, Humanism and the Reform of Sacred Music (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), which examined the background of Merbecke’s Booke of Common Praier Noted (1551), especially the role of Erasmianism in English Reformation thought. Here Dr Kim turns over some of the same issues at greater length and in different ways. For example, where Kim considered Tallis’s Dorian Service in her earlier book from the perspective of prosody, here she considers the perceived ethical implications of his choice of the Dorian mode. The guiding thread is a reconsideration of the ways in which Renaissance thinkers explored the implications of Boethius’ articulation of music into musica mundana, humana and instrumentalis, particularly within the context of the Renaissance revival of Neoplatonism. Kim contends that many prominent Renaissance writers understood musica humana in an ethical way.

In the history of philosophy, the Renaissance was for a long time a kind of Cinderella, lost between the more immediately impressive achievements of the scholastics on one side, and the seventeenth-century rationalists on the other. Yet this situation is changing. Stimulated in large part by the colossal figure of P. O. Kristeller, philosophers and intellectual historians have begun to explore the unfamiliar lineaments of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century thought. Musicology has taken a little while to make the most of these developments within intellectual history. Kim, one of the few to have done so, sometimes sounds like a voice crying in the wilderness. For example, she protests on several occasions that certain of the assumptions of ancient, medieval and early modern musical thought that underpin her argumentation may seem unfamiliar to modern readers. But she need not be so defensive. Her case is strong and compelling, and needs little apology. Her comments on psalmody and on singing as prayer and sacrifice in chapters 5 and 6 are a particularly important contribution to the literature on the music of the Reformation, both Protestant and Roman Catholic.

By drawing on a wide range of authorities, Kim manages to place several figures familiar to music historians, such as Gaffurius, into a broader context to illuminate their sometimes puzzling comments. She makes a number of interesting arguments. Several Renaissance theorists defined music as the art of song, which indicates the supreme importance of singing over instrumental music (or perhaps over merely theoretical considerations). Kim argues that singing meant something different in the Renaissance from what it did in the Middle Ages or in later times, primarily because of the reintroduction of ancient ethical attitudes to singing.

Kim rightly points out that attitudes towards instrumental music in antiquity were not uniform. Aristotelians tended to be more positive about instrumental music than Platonists, and this diversity of opinion was reflected in the Renaissance. Many Renaissance humanists were critical of instrumental music. Kim finds that this prejudice, absent from the Hebrew or Christian Bibles, begins to appear in the works of some Church Fathers, such as Jerome. These attitudes were picked up by some Renaissance interpreters of the Fathers, such as Erasmus, who admired Jerome greatly. Kim digs even deeper to identify the privileging of vocal music over instrumental music to Greek, and specifically Pythagorean and Platonic, ideals of education, which aimed at producing temperance. Renaissance humanists combined such ideas with biblical notions to create a theory which is neither purely classical nor purely biblical, but a product of a particular historical convergence of both streams, characteristic of the ‘Ancient Theology’ revived by Renaissance thinkers such as Ficino. (Kim rightly points out that Renaissance humanists must be approached as interpreters of the past, not simply as neutral conduits.) Unlike the human voice, instruments are inanimate, devoid of the breath of life that turned inanimate clay into the first man (a biblical notion), and devoid of the logos that distinguishes humans from beasts (a philosophical notion).

For Kim, the various attempts to reform church music in various religious traditions – whether within the Roman Catholic church (Erasmus) or outside it (Luther, Zwingli, Calvin and others) – may be understood as an attempt to use music to produce, on a grand scale, the kind of ethical transformation at which classical authors aimed. This is a fascinating argument. But where Kim describes the Reformers’ attempts to spread the ethics of ancient music, as interpreted by Renaissance humanists, as egalitarian (p. 22), I am sceptical. In his groundbreaking study, Luther’s House of Learning (1978), Walter Strauss presented the Reformers’ attempts to catechise their flocks as an attempt at mass indoctrination. Engagement with Strauss’s rather more suspicious view of the Reformers’ imposition of liturgical and doctrinal forms on their new congregations might have prompted Dr Kim not to take the Reformers too much at their own word when they spoke about music. After all, was the imposition of a strict and sober style of liturgical music with the purpose of creating responsible moral agents, even when done with the best of intentions, really an egalitarian liberation, or an attempt at forced conversion?

Kim rightly points out that rhetoric was the lifeblood of Renaissance humanism, and highlights the importance of the Renaissance revival of Quintilian for musical thought (p. 47). Yet the rhetorical nature of Renaissance humanism demands that we approach humanist texts from a rhetorical perspective. When Renaissance humanists recall exemplary classical and biblical stories of the inventors and effects of music, they are entering into dialogue with the tradition of the discourse. Sometimes it can be hard to see where commonplaces are fluff, and where they are significant bearers of meaning. For example, on p. 45, Kim mentions Merbecke’s comment that he regretted that he had spent so much time learning music in his youth rather than studying something more worthwhile. Kim quite rightly points out similar expressions of regret made by Alexander and Nero. Given that Merbecke managed to make a living as a musician at St George’s, Windsor, one wonders whether his expression of regret at a misspent youth was genuine, or simply an appeal to a rhetorical trope. If he did feel any regrets over his chosen career, it was perhaps only because he was only one of many employees of ecclesiastical institutions in mid-century England who wished at some stage that their lives had taken a different path.

Kim also treats the traditional ethical associations attributed to music from antiquity to the Renaissance, and the well-known complaints of humanists that music often leads to a degeneration rather than regeneration of morals. It would be interesting to try to identify when and how scholars and reformers realised that their attempts to effect a reformation of morals through music was unavailing, the point at which optimistic appeals to music’s power were given up as hopeless.

There are points in the book where I wished for more evidence. For example, on p. 51, Kim writes that Thomas Campion more often used auditory imagery than visual imagery. This is an interesting insight, but on this basis she concludes: ‘Campion’s experiment for poetic music intends to embody the “musical spirit” which bridges the human body with the soul. Campion does not mention Plato or Ficino in his work, but his ayres are among the best examples to illustrate Ficino’s music-spirit theory discussed earlier.’ Without some firm evidence that this was Campion’s intention, and Plato or Ficino his source or ultimate inspiration, I would be hesitant to accept such claims without reservation.

Kim points out often that the object of her investigation has been neglected by modern scholarship, but sometimes this criticism is misplaced. For example, she complains that modern scholars have displayed a lack of interest in the ethics of ancient music, yet three of the great lights in the study of ancient Greek music, Warren Anderson, Martin West and Andrew Barker, do not figure in her bibliography. Anderson’s Ethos and Education in Greek Music (1968) would have been of particular relevance to the discussion. Jean-Claude Margolin’s Erasme et la musique (1965) is also missing. Kim perceptively identifies the foci of several modern commentators on musical humanism. She writes that Claude Palisca was most interested in discussions of technical aspects of music such as octave species, modes, consonance, dissonance and tuning, while Don Harrán’s work focuses on the rhetorical and poetic aspects of Renaissance song. Kim suggests that the concerns of both writers reflect a prevailing secular bias which has too long ‘mainly focused on secular music, based on the traditional Burckhardtian interpretation of the Renaissance, which views humanism as a new philosophy of the Renaissance that is essentially secular in culture and spirit. . . . few studies have thus considered sacred music in the light of the humanism.’ This does not seem fair to Palisca and Harrán, neither of whom excluded sacred music from their investigations. Surprisingly, discussion of the work of D. P. Walker is relegated to the footnotes, and other authors who could have proved valuable sparring partners, such as Penelope Gouk or Gary Tomlinson, are not mentioned outside the bibliography. Kim also argues that modern discussion of the dynamics of sacred music, especially in the context of the Reformation, have tended to focus on externals such as changes in liturgical form, rather than engaging with the ethical reasoning that motivated such change. However, such valuable studies as Oskar Söhngen’s Theologische Grundlagen der Kirchenmusik (1961), Joseph Herl’s Worship Wars (2004) or Christopher Boyd Brown’s Singing the Gospel (2005), which could have added much to Kim’s discussion of the content of Reformation musical thought, do not appear in the bibliography or in the discussion.

The production of the book is of high quality, though there are some problems with typesetting, such as the faulty Greek on p. 20, a stray question mark on p. 33, and the paraphrase and comment on p. 41 which is indented as if it were an extended quotation. There are also a few typographical errors: Willem Elders appears as ‘Elder’ on p. 21; ‘Hildegard of Binging’ on p. 118.

Despite these reservations, Kim’s study is to be recommended warmly. It shows eloquently and persuasively that our understanding of Renaissance music still requires a more serious and sustained engagement with its intellectual climate, even when this climate is in many ways forbidding through its unfamiliarity.