History Source Essays
Zee Badoni
This 3000-word source-based essay focuses on one primary source to shed light on material evaluation in the Enlightenment. To achieve this, the essay will also draw on other primary and secondary sources.
The essay will be marked using the usual history-specific marking criteria for written work. That said, a primary-source essay is a particular type of essay that calls for specific tasks that are not relevant to all other essays.
Like any other essay, this one needs to be an argument--it needs to state a thesis and make a case for that thesis. Unlike other essays, the argument of this essay will centre on a primary source. More details on the task are below.
The thesis. This needs to be related to the theme of the module, namely material evaluation in the Enlightenment. Beyond that, you are free to choose a topic as a function of your own knowledge and interests. It may help to consider some of the theses we have encountered in the secondary readings, such as Emma Spary's thesis that botanical expertise replaced scholarly expertise as the main way of evaluating coffee in France around 1700; or William Ashworth's thesis that the hydrometer was part of the political struggle between producers and the state in eighteenth-century Britain. Your thesis will probably be less ambitious than these, given the constraints of the assignment. But you may find these theses (by Spary, Ashworth, and the other historians we have read) a useful model to follow. The note under 'Contextualise' below may also be useful.
The primary source. This may be any primary source related to material evaluation in the Enlightenment. The one limitation is that it cannot be one of the primary sources we have discussed in detail in seminars, such as Robert Boyle's 1675 article on gold assaying in the Phil. Trans., or Henry Drax's instructions on the management of a Barbadian sugar plantation. More precisely, you cannot choose the passages from these sources that we discussed in detail in class. For example, you may choose the sections on beer in Leadbetter's Royal Gauger, but not the sections on the distillery. The source may be a written document, but it may also be an object, diagram, painting, or any other historical artefact that sheds light on the past.
Finding a primary source. One way to find the source is through a relevant secondary source. If you are interested in connoisseurship in the fine arts, for example, you might look through the Warwick library catalogue for books on this topic related to the eighteenth century. You might then find, for example, Carol Gibson-Wood's book Jonathan Richardson: Art Theorist of the English Enlightenment, which in turn discusses many relevant primary sources. Another approach is to start with the primary sources themselves by searching through collections of relevant sources. Examples are:
Analysing the primary source. Analysing primary sources is more an art than a science, and there are no hard-and-fast rules about how to do it. However, for the purpose of this essay you should do at least the following:
The essay could be structured around these three tasks, with one section on each - but it does not need to be. The important thing is to do these three things as part of your research, and to integrate them into your argument.
Other sources. Although the essay should be centred on one primary source, it does not need to be limited to that source. Indeed, you will need to draw on other primary and secondary sources to make sense of the primary source that you focus on. The expectation is that you will draw on five (or more) secondary sources and one (or more) additional primary sources. The secondary sources can be made of books, book chapters, journal articles, or chapters in edited collections.
Meeting with tutor. All students are strongly encouraged to meet the tutor (during office hours) to discuss their choice of primary source. This meeting can take place any time in term 2 before the essay deadline, but should be around the time you decide upon that source.
In its primary sources, music merges with the representational arts. Oral tradition has played a fundamental role in all ages, but in its formal sense, history--and the history of music--begins with thevisual record.
Musical notation, having emerged on a wide scale in all civilizations, produced in itself a highly individual record of artistic endeavor. The medieval monks who compiled the missals and other liturgical books for the service of worship rose from their function as scribes to artists in their own right; among the greatest documents of Baroque art are the holographs by Bach; and an entirely novel phase in artistic musical score design was initiated in the twentieth century. The primary sources ofmusic reproduced in this volume rely on various aspects of the graphic arts, but foremost among them stands the representation of the musical sound itself, the art of musical notation.
Among the manifold forms the written image of music has taken are letters or syllables, to represent individual tones, and symbols to represent groups of them. But a more advanced approach is expressedin notation guided not only by the wish to fix the immediate impression of a given musical sound but by the attempt to render the act of musical performance in its continuity. The notational signs which were to prove of the most lasting influence were the highly expressive neumes; it was from them that the generally surviving style of musical script arose. The term was derived from the Greek word neuma --a nod or motion, and in this particular context the manual gesture or gestures to establishdifferent pitch levels--and it suggests the melodic flow as indicated by the leader of an ensemble. Widely used in Eastern and Western music practice, the neumes were invariably connected with vocal performance whose notation was also greatly aided by the joining of musical symbols with verbal text.
The decisive step in the evolution of a readily perceptible image for the musical sound was taken by the Benedictine monk Guido of Arezzo (circa 1000), the preceptor of the cathedral choir school at thatnorthern Italian city and a theorist of unusual pedagogical gift. Guido's achievement was in placing the neumes on lines, for clearer orientation drawn in different colors and representing the interval of a third. With this invention he created the basis of a system that has remained alive in modern practice. So immediately successful was his method that Pope John XIX, "after brief instruction, and to his own surprise, was able to sight-read a melody not previously known to him, without any error," and in justified pride, Guido added "musica sine linea est sicut puteus sine fune" ("music without lines is like a well without a rope").1
Guido's refinements in the definition of pitch were followed by corresponding advances in graphically defining the musical sound's duration. The use of neumes gradually gave way to that of square-shapednotes and combinations of notes in so-called ligatures. While obviously emanating from the forms of neumes, these new symbols served their purpose with greater exactness of detail.
contribution to the history of music. Influences from the south and east met with those from the north and west by which traditions of monophonic music--unaccompanied melody--merged with developments in probing the harmony of simultaneously sounding voices. They led to the work of the masters at Notre Dame in Paris and various other regions of northern France, the first figures in music history who stand out as individual composers of indigenous styles. In the early polyphonic settings of chant, long and short note values were distinguished by applying the rhythmic modes, inferred from the verse meters of antiquity, to groups of notes. But fourteenth-century theorists declared a categoric difference between old and new styles (ars antiqua andars nova), the latter reflected by means of notation that departed from the modal system and adopted a system of strict measuring, the so-calledmensural notation. The differentiation of note values grew, adding to the horizontally placed square shapes more precisely placed diamond shapes; and the color of notes changed from black to white (i.e., a mere black outline of the note shape which, once again, ensured greater precision of notation).
The magnificent appearance of missals from the waning Middle Ages and early Renaissance, with their lavish illuminations, may make it at times difficult to decide which is the greater artistic achievement:the manuscript itself, or the art it represents. We are dealing with a period that was not yet fully conscious of the distinction between artist and artisan known in later ages. But the time was approaching when the work of the scribe was supplanted by that originating in centers of printing whose interest and influence reached beyond the sphere of the individual artifact. The process of music printing obviously grew in stages. In early phases, merely the lines were given in print, the neumesbeing entered by hand, or folios were produced by "double printing"--the lines in red and, in a second imprint, the notes in black. The first printer of mensural music, the Venetian Ottaviano Petrucci, wasfor a long time considered the inventor of the art of printing music with movable type, yet his excellent work (begun about 1500) was preceded by that of various print shops in the north.
The sixteenth century became a "golden age" that produced the classical summaries of the art of vocal polyphony in sacred and secular music as well as in treatises on music theory. Among the latter,L'Istitutioni Harmoniche (1555, reprinted 1562 and 1573) by Gioseffo Zarlino (1517-1590), Master of the Chapel at St. Mark's in Venice, assumed a preeminent place. As the title suggests, the work wasdedicated to the age-old ideals of symmetry and proportion, the "harmony of all parts in relation to the whole," as described by the writers of antiquity. In his thorough discussion of the correlation of tonesand melodies, Zarlino--like the early authors on perspective--saw himself obliged to create a completely new terminology. His concern with measurement and the concepts of division and inversion lends his work an authority extending to the fine arts as much as to music, and the numerous ornamental illustrations accompanying his text go far beyond the traditional embellishment of enhanced initial letters. They render scientific design that represents a true counterpart to the decorativemusic printing of the era.
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