This is a retrospective and heterogeneous collection of essays (some previously in print and others unpublished) by Audrey Ekdahl Davidson (1930–2006). Dr. Davidson's interests were broad, but this anthology of her writings focuses on medieval, renaissance, and early baroque music.
Her interest in vocal music and literature is represented by essays on the poetry and lyrics of Sir Philip Sidney, John Milton, and George Herbert. These cover both actual musical settings (in the case of songs by Henry Lawes, Robert Taylour, and another anonymous composer for lyrics by Sidney, including full transcriptions) and interpretive discussion of the musical imagery in poetry by Milton and Herbert. Two essays are focused specifically on the performance of early music: “High, Clear, and Sweet” interprets many of the historical sources that describe vocal performance, and in “Vocal Production and Early Music,” Dr. Davidson provides a more detailed historical and physiological examination of the same material. In other essays, she examines the use and meaning of the Marian antiphon, Alma Redemptoris Mater, in Chaucer's Prioress's Tale, including a transcription of the Sarum version for this chant, and in another provides a short, technical study of Giovanni Pierluigi Palestrina's compositional style.
Of particular interest to the readers of this journal will be the essays dedicated to dramatic passions and medieval liturgical drama. Her three studies of the music in the Cividale Planctus Mariae, the Beauvais Ludus Danielis, and Hildegard of Bingen's Ordo Virtutum, are reprints of already published material, and are probably well-known to scholars of this material. Two significant essays focus on the various ways that the passion narratives, and especially that from John's Gospel for Good Friday, were presented in a dramatic fashion. “The Origin and Development of Quasi-Dramatic Passion Music” studies a broad chronological range of material from the earliest ordines and chant manuscripts through the seventeenth century. The second essay, “The Roskild St. John Passion and Its Suppression,” is a close examination of a controversy in early eighteenth-century Denmark that had musical, liturgical, and theological implications. The problem was whether the dramatic performance of a musical passion setting was appropriate, since the Pietism of the local clergy sought to suppress “a ceremony which seems to be a relic of former Carnival performances” (181).
In sum, these twelve essays reflect both a broad spectrum of significant research and a fitting memorial of Dr. Davidson's scholarly life.
