The lecture I wish to deliver today concerns a topic that is somewhat unusual in relation to the subjects I typically address. It is unusual, first and foremost, because I will be discussing an extraordinarily long historical process—one that spans roughly a thousand years. Out of this extensive timeline, I will be focusing today on a period of approximately 300 years.
To give you a sense of scale—of just how much longer this process is than the historical developments I usually examine—let me remind you that the composer who was the subject of my doctoral dissertation, Henry Purcell, lived only 36 years. His creative life, which forms the core of my research and the transformations I typically trace, lasted less than two decades. The same is true of Georg Muffat, the composer about whom I am currently writing a book: fewer than 20 years separate the earliest and latest surviving compositions that can be attributed to him.
So it is not self-evident that I would find it important to discuss the role of present-day performers. After all, what connection is there—ostensibly—between historical processes, archival documents, and centuries-long developments, and a group of musicians performing today who, however sincere and intellectually rigorous they may be in the realm of early music performance, are ultimately trying to make “good music,” attract an audience, and sell tickets? And yet, as I will argue, these performers play a role in the story I aim to tell.
So what is this long historical process I wish to discuss? It is a process we might term the rise of stylistic awareness. Now, I will admit that stylistic awareness is not a particularly catchy phrase, but it most plainly expresses the phenomenon I want to investigate. To my surprise, no more widely accepted term seems to exist for it, despite the fact that I consider it one of the central developments in the history of Western music. I have no reasonable explanation for the degree to which this phenomenon has been overlooked.
The most conventional way to begin a lecture of this kind is to play the “Chopin” movement from Robert Schumann’s Carnaval. However, since I am speaking today to an audience of medievalists and early modernists, I will travel some 300 years back in time from Schumann and begin instead with a short piece for vihuela by the Spanish composer Alonso Mudarra, who was born around 1510 and died in 1580. As a young man, Mudarra was likely a musician at the court of Emperor Charles V, and he spent several years accompanying the imperial entourage outside of Spain. The piece in question was printed in 1546—the same year that Mudarra returned to Spain and took up a post as canon at the Cathedral of Seville. The printed volume contains three books of music for vihuela, and the piece we are about to hear bears the title: Fantasia que contrahaze la harpa en la manera de Ludovico—“A fantasia that imitates the harp in the manner of Ludovico.”
I would like to draw your attention to three things:
First, the title makes it explicitly clear that the piece imitates someone’s style—someone named Ludovico—whom Mudarra evidently believed his performers or listeners would recognize.
Second, although this is a piece written for the vihuela, a plucked string instrument akin to the guitar, Mudarra goes to considerable—and rather successful—effort to make the instrument sound like a harp. I will point this out when we listen to the piece. I will also project the music on the screen and, later on, say a few words about the notational system used.
Third, at a certain point in the piece, we will hear an unusual sound. Mudarra adds a special instruction in the notation to reassure the performer that, from this point to the end, there will be notes that may seem wrong, but that they are in fact intentional. This is quite similar to how we sometimes use the notation sic when quoting a text that includes an apparent error or unexpected detail.
In my view, this fantasia is one of the most important musical works of the sixteenth century—and I will explain why later in the lecture. But first, let me lay out the central issue in schematic form:
Does a composer write music in their own, authentic style—one that expresses their innermost feelings? Or is the composer aware of the style in which they are writing, and making a deliberate choice to adopt one style over another, just as they might have chosen a third or fourth? The reality is, of course, more complex. But I believe that even from the title of this lecture, and certainly from the two short examples I have mentioned—Schumann and Mudarra—you can already sense that composers are indeed capable of donning and shedding styles, even when those styles are not “their own.”
Stylistic awareness is a quality I primarily ascribe to composers. And so, to proceed, I would like to begin by unpacking the term composer itself.
In the Western tradition, we have come to draw relatively sharp distinctions between the composer, the performer, and the listener. These categories reached their most refined and rigidly distinct form in the mid-nineteenth century. But in the seventeenth century—the era I typically focus on—musicians were defined less by such categorical distinctions and more by their institutional affiliations: that is, their position within the ecclesiastical or courtly hierarchy.
In England, for example, we encounter musicians designated as Gentlemen of the Chapel Royal. To be sure, anyone in their circle would have known who among them sang, who played instruments, who was the organist. But the bureaucratic label—Gentleman of the Chapel Royal—was of primary significance, much as in a modern university one might be categorized as junior academic staff, administrative personnel, or a government employee.
The difference between a trumpet player at the court of Louis XIII and a viol or lute player in the same court was profound, determined not just by their instrument, but by which division of the royal household paid their salary. These distinctions affected not only their compensation, but also which seasons of the year they were expected to reside at court, whether their positions could be inherited by their sons, and even their tax privileges. For instance, trumpeters often enjoyed exemptions from certain taxes.
Indeed, the difference between a court composer employed by the Musique de la chambre and an instrumentalist employed by that same division was far less significant than the difference between two performers—say, a flautist and an oboist—if one was paid by the Musique de la chambre and the other by the Grande Écurie. These occupational definitions were thus of enormous importance.
After the French Revolution, as many traditional institutions dissolved, musicians began to drift through the professional landscape rather like free-floating molecules. This radical social upheaval demanded equally radical redefinitions of musical roles. One of the key developments in the 19th century—largely in the wake of Beethoven, who, arguably, could not have existed as he did without the French Revolution—was the sharpening of boundaries between three distinct categories:
The Composer – the person who writes the music. Over time, composers wrote music in a way that increasingly limited the range of interpretation available to the performer. The score became more detailed, more prescriptive.
The Performer – the one who interprets the musical text. Gradually, performers' authority to intervene in the score was curtailed. It became increasingly unacceptable—heaven forbid—for performers to add or remove music on their own initiative.
The Listener – a passive participant in the musical event. After Beethoven, the listener comes to the concert hall seeking transcendence, some kind of aesthetic or spiritual catharsis. This concept of transcendence was not always part of the musical discourse. In earlier times, for example, a duke visiting a prince’s court and hearing the court musicians was likely not seeking transcendence. He may have experienced it—but that was not the purpose of his visit. He came for social or political reasons. So the listener, too, is “liberated” by the revolution, gaining the right to purchase their own catharsis—in the form of a ticket.
Many of the musical rituals we take for granted today—most notably the public concert—reflect this tripartite division. What is interesting is that those figures who retained some of the earlier fluidity between roles—particularly composer-performers, like Franz Liszt—were framed not as holistic artists, but as exceptional dualities. Liszt, for instance, is remembered as a rare genius precisely because he both composed and performed. Yet, two centuries earlier, this combination would have been so commonplace that no one would have bothered to mention it.
Take, for example, the cadenza—those few minutes in the middle of a Classical or Romantic concerto where the composer nominally leaves space for the performer to improvise. In practice, these cadenzas were almost never improvised; performers typically chose from a range of pre-written cadenzas available on the market and played them as written.
I won’t delve into it deeply today, but it’s worth noting that by the early 20th and 21st centuries, these categories have shifted somewhat in the world of concert music—and dramatically so in popular music. Today, we have arrangers, producers (who now often assume many of the composer’s and arranger’s roles), bands who write collaboratively, and many other models that challenge the traditional composer-performer-listener triangle. Moreover, the role of notation has diminished, and the role of recording has risen accordingly. "Strawberry Fields Forever", for instance, is not synonymous with the notes of "Strawberry Fields Forever"—but rather it is the recording released on February 13, 1967. This shift also applies to many so-called "concert works" of the late 20th century. I could spend two hours just discussing issues of stylistic awareness in the 20th century—it is indeed a fascinating subject—but today I want us to focus on the period before the full crystallization of the “Composer” in the 19th century.
The very notion of a “composer” is closely tied to the act of writing music—as distinct from, say, improvising it. In Indian classical music, for example, or in classical Arabic music, speaking of a “composer” in the Western sense would be misleading. The same applies to jazz: My Favorite Things, as performed by Coltrane, attributes composition to Richard Rodgers (of Rodgers and Hammerstein), but in the jazz world, this is of secondary importance. Rodgers provided the melodic skeleton; the improvisation and performance on top of that are what make the piece meaningful. That’s why we naturally refer to it as Coltrane’s My Favorite Things.
Because of this dependence on writing, it’s clear that we cannot really talk about “composition” until Western staff notation becomes established—gradually, around the year 1000. This is a complex process, involving many small innovations, theoretical writings, and isolated breakthroughs. In one monastery, we may find sources from a new notational system from a specific year; in a neighboring monastery, it might take another hundred years.
Let me point out a few key moments in the story of the emergence of the Composer (with a capital "C"):
In the 12th century, we encounter the phenomenon of the troubadours and trouvères—poet-musicians who composed verse, and in some cases, these verses have come down to us with melodies and attributions in manuscripts. So, at least on the surface, we have melodies and we know who composed them. But it is not always easy to determine what “composing” meant: did the individual create the melody, fit the melody to the text, or perhaps commission someone else to write it and then sign their name?
In the 13th century, we have the Cantigas de Santa Maria, a collection of sacred songs written or compiled at the court of Alfonso X. On the one hand, we have texts and melodies associated with a royal figure. On the other hand, because of the elevated status of figures like William IX of Aquitaine, Chrétien de Troyes, and Alfonso X himself, it’s hard to say: did they personally “invent” the melody, make aesthetic decisions, choose which pitches sounded best?
Concurrently, between the mid-12th and mid-13th centuries, we see the emergence of the Notre Dame School, a group that includes two named Parisian composers: Léonin (Leoninus) and Pérotin (Perotinus). Here, we’re much closer to modern notions of composing. These composers worked with liturgical texts—not poetry of their own—and used the technique known as organum, which required an enormous number of prior decisions: how many voices, how long to sustain each note of the chant, what rhythms to use... In short, someone had to make decisions about every single note. The identity of that decision-maker began to matter. The result could now be understood as an intellectual and aesthetic achievement—something to be attributed to a particular person. The term organum itself starts to signify something concrete—a work, a text—that can be discussed. Suddenly, we have not only “a composer,” but “a composition.”
A key piece of evidence comes from a treatise called De mensuris et discantu, written around 1270 by an anonymous author whom musicologists refer to as Anonymous IV. In this text, Anonymous IV refers to Léonin and Pérotin as recognized figures of authority—agents of musical creation. In Chapter 5, he writes: "Sunt quidam boni organistae et factores cantuum"—“There are certain excellent organists and makers of songs.” These are people worth mentioning. Even more exciting is what he writes in Chapter 6:
"Est quoddam volumen continens quadrupla, ut: Viderunt et Sederunt quae composuit Perotinus magnus"
“There is a volume containing quadrupla such as Viderunt and Sederunt, which were composed by Pérotin the Great.”
In other words, we have here a composer, a reputation, and the verb composuit—“composed”—a term that has followed us all the way to the present.
Due to time constraints, and given that our primary goal today is to explore how composers developed stylistic awareness, I’ll now briefly highlight the key milestones in this evolutionary process.
The 14th century marks a watershed moment, as contemporaries themselves coined the term Ars Nova—“New Art”—to describe the musical innovations of their time, both in pitch and rhythmic organization. This very name reflects a distinctly chronocentric worldview: they were aware that something radically new was happening. We begin to see composers not only signing their works, but also gaining reputations as individuals. Leading figures such as Philippe de Vitry and Guillaume de Machaut in France, and Francesco Landini in Italy, exemplify this trend. The music itself becomes markedly more sophisticated. Without delving too deeply into technicalities, we can observe that the musical structures increasingly demonstrate the composer’s technical mastery, planning, and inventiveness under various constraints.
Even if we avoid overgeneralizing from a singular, exceptional figure like Machaut—who, being a poet as well as a composer, left an unusually rich documentary footprint—we can still assert that by this point, composers were gaining explicit recognition for their work. What’s even more interesting is that this recognition begins to extend posthumously. In the 15th century, we encounter the Squarcialupi Codex, a beautifully illuminated manuscript that includes not only works by deceased composers but also painted miniatures of them. Suddenly, it isn’t just important to know that a piece was composed by Francesco Landini—we also want to see him, playing his portative organ.
The leading composer of the 15th century, Guillaume Dufay, goes so far as to insert references to himself into his music. In the motet Salve flos, for instance, he writes, “And I, Guillaume Dufay, salute the honorable people of Florence and the beautiful women of Florence.” Composers begin to write laments for one another—Ockeghem composes a lament for Binchois (Mort tu as navré), and Josquin writes one for Ockeghem (Nymphes des bois). A sense of professional pride, of artistic lineage, begins to form. The language used to describe composers increasingly elevates them, casting them as near-mythic figures with Orphic powers.
Josquin himself, who leads us into the 16th century, becomes the first composer to achieve pan-European fame thanks to music printing. His name starts to appear on works he didn’t even compose—a phenomenon so widespread that musicians joked Josquin had composed more music after his death than during his life. But of course, this attribution mania speaks volumes about the importance of the composer’s name. As the century progresses, the act of publishing music becomes an opportunity not only for artistic dissemination but also for political maneuvering. A composer might dedicate a piece to a noble patron, receiving a fee for the dedication, while the patron gains prestige from association with a great composer. Dedications become sycophantic letters of praise. Composers begin to switch patrons much like modern athletes change teams, their fame turning them into commodities of symbolic capital. In a striking reversal, even aristocrats like Carlo Gesualdo—Prince of Venosa—begin to publish music composed by their own hand.
These developments only intensify during the 17th and 18th centuries. Composers like Monteverdi adopt the rhetorical flair of celebrities, as seen in the prefaces to his madrigal books. Portraits of composers become increasingly common—not just as engravings in published music, but also as oil paintings by professional artists. Lully whispers in the ear of King Louis XIV. Biber and later Gluck receive noble titles. Handel owns art collections, speculates on the stock market, and has a biography written just a few years after his death. Some composers even produce short autobiographical essays.
All of this brings us to the Romantic era, in which composers are not only subjects of full-length biographies, but also known for dominating their patrons—Beethoven being the paradigmatic example. They publish extensive memoirs, as Berlioz does; they produce works with deeply autobiographical resonance, again as in Berlioz; they suffer from delusions of grandeur, like Wagner; and they generally behave as though their emotions are the most important thing in the world—because they are "creating Art." In this, they are hardly different from painters or novelists. And indeed, the evolution of the painter and the writer offer important points of comparison.
However, the uniqueness of musical material—its dependence on notation, its structural particularities, its technical demands—shaped this development in a distinctive way. Music also retained a quasi-supernatural aura. We often ascribe to musicians Orphic powers—the ability to tame wild beasts—which we rarely attribute to poets or painters.
Now that we’ve mapped out the key milestones in the emergence of the composer as an individual, we can move on to style and stylistic awareness. What do we mean by "style"? And what does it mean for a composer to be stylistically self-aware?
Style refers to a set of shared characteristics within a body of works:
There is the style of an individual composer—"This piece reflects Rameau’s late style."
There is the style of a historical period—"This is an early Renaissance work."
There is the style of a geographical region—"This piece is in the Parisian style," or "a madrigal in the Ferrara style."
There is the style of a school or group of composers—"This is a dodecaphonic work in the Schoenbergian tradition."
There is functional style, based on the work’s purpose or audience—"Handel’s coronation anthems are written in his most grandiose, ceremonial style."
And there is instrumental idiom—"This piece exemplifies empty romantic pianism," or "this is unmistakably idiomatic violin writing."
Yet not all of these dimensions are equally present in the mind of the composer. Some are clearly conscious, while others operate beneath the surface.
Take Bach, for instance. In 1735, he publishes the second volume of his Clavier-Übung, which includes two major works: a concerto in the Italian gusto, and an overture in the French style. On the face of it, this demonstrates a high degree of stylistic awareness—what I just referred to as a “regional style.” Bach is deliberately crafting one piece to sound Italian, the other to sound French.
But is he consciously trying to make them sound like works from the year 1735? Probably not—that simply comes naturally, because it is 1735. Is he trying to make them sound like works by Bach? Again, no—it just happens that he is the one writing them. Did he consider writing them in a style twenty years out of date? Probably not. Did he consider making them sound like something a colleague from Weimar or Halle might write? And if he had, how would such an act have been perceived by his contemporaries? How was this volume received by the musicians and readers of his time? Isn’t it fair to say that—above all the French and Italian stylistic gestures—it is written in the mature Leipzig style of J. S. Bach?
Let’s return now to Mudarra and his beautiful fantasia in imitation of Ludovico's harp. As I’ve mentioned, notation plays a critical role here. But what I didn’t tell you at the beginning of the lecture is that this book—like all music written for plucked instruments at the time—was printed using a notational system called tablature. The harp-like resonance that Mudarra seeks to evoke is made possible precisely because this tablature system, designed for the vihuela, allows him to specify technical aspects of performance with great precision. And such precision is essential if one wishes to imitate the sonority of the harp. Specifically, Mudarra employs a technique known as campanella—a method of playing that produces overlapping resonances, like the sustained ringing of bells or harp strings. In the 16th century, this effect could only be notated accurately using tablature. If Mudarra had attempted to write this piece using “regular” staff notation, it would have been extremely difficult—if not impossible—for him to convey the detailed instructions necessary to produce the campanella effect. And this point is crucial. It’s not only essential for understanding how the composer temporarily steps out of his own idiom and adopts another style; it’s essential even for recognizing that such a stylistic substitution has taken place. Without such precise notation, would we even realize that Mudarra was trying to imitate the harp?
So, why do I consider this piece one of the most important compositions of the 16th century? (And by the way, I don’t think anyone else has ever referred to it in those terms!) Because if the 16th century was marked by the rise of idiomatic instrumental music—that is, music written specifically for the technical capacities of a particular instrument—then this piece is idiomatic squared. It’s super-idiomatic vihuela music that tries to sound like super-idiomatic harp music! As I will elaborate further on, this piece encapsulates an entire complex system involving composer, stylistic model, audience familiar with that model, and a notational system that enables the re-creation of that model in a way the audience will recognize as imitation.
The fact that notation plays such a central role in shaping the sonic outcome allows us, on the one hand, to look back and trace earlier examples where composers used notation to give performers highly specific instructions. But on the other hand, we must focus on periods in which the notational system was already capable of balancing specificity and flexibility.
This is where the composer Johannes Ciconia becomes a fascinating case study—not only because he straddled different styles, but also because he highlights the challenges we face in identifying such examples.
Let’s begin with the challenge. I’ll play you now two modern performances of an Italian madrigal by Ciconia called Una Panthera. The first is by an ensemble called Catherine Bott and Friends. The second is a collaboration between two ensembles: the Swiss group La Morra and the French ensemble Diabolus in Musica.
The Bott performance is purely instrumental—three medieval fiddles played by Catherine Bott, Pavlo Beznosiuk, and Mark Levy. The La Morra / Diabolus performance begins instrumentally—with recorder, fiddle, and harp—and then adds three voices. The sound is entirely different.
Bott’s version starts at 100 BPM, while the La Morra version begins at 60 BPM. That’s a substantial difference.
Bott’s lasts under four minutes; La Morra’s version goes for five and a half. Bott’s performance sounds “higher” in pitch; La Morra’s, “lower.” It sounds different.
There are even specific notes interpreted differently because of musica ficta—the practice of adding unwritten accidentals based on stylistic conventions. Again, it sounds different.
Now, these differences are not unique to Ciconia, nor to these particular ensembles. Almost any piece from this period, given to two different ensembles, will result in at least different instrumentation—if not a complete shift from vocal to instrumental interpretation—and differences in tempo, pitch level, and treatment of ficta.
Most of these differences arise because we simply do not know how to interpret the notation. We lack clear evidence—often even vague evidence—about whether a given piece was meant to be sung, played, or both; what instruments were used; what tempo was intended; what pitch level; what accidentals should be applied.
So, the question arises: earlier I argued that Mudarra intended to imitate the harp by having the strings ring out in a particular way. But how can I make a similar claim about pieces like Ciconia’s when the notation leaves so much to interpretation? How can we know what the composer’s intention really was?
Well, we can be fairly certain from the notation of Una Panthera, and not just from the language of the text, that Ciconia composed this work in accordance with the conventions of the 14th-century Italian madrigal. The notation, despite all the freedom it allows, closely resembles other Italian madrigals of the time.
Let me give you an example. Listen to the vocal version of Una Panthera… About 25 seconds in, just before the voices enter, the recorder plays a long melisma: 16 rapid notes in succession, followed by another 24.
[PLAY EXCERPT]
This kind of florid run is characteristic of Italian music. And not because “Italian is a musical language,” as the tiresome cliché goes—but because the 14th-century Italian theoretical system, as codified by Petrus de Cruce, not only allowed for but encouraged the subdivision of a single note into complex melismas: octonaria (8-note runs), duodenaria (12-note runs), and so on. These ornate passages are built into the structure of the system itself. In this case, Ciconia uses two octonaria and two duodenaria to create a single 40-note melisma. And he does so effortlessly, fully embracing the capabilities of Italian notation.
But here’s where things get tricky: is Ciconia’s style truly “Italian”?
Ciconia is an enigmatic figure. He was probably born in Liège around 1370—though we can’t be sure. It seems that his father was also named Johannes Ciconia, and there were several other family members active in church institutions around the same time, which complicates identification. We don’t know how many of them were musicians. Most of the music we now attribute to “Ciconia” was probably written by the one who worked in Padua from July 1401 until his death in June or July of 1412. Before Padua, he was likely in Pavia, at the court of Giangaleazzo Visconti. 'Una Panthera' is dated to around May or June 1399, when Lazzaro Guinigi, one of the leaders of the city of Lucca, came to negotiate with the Duke about a potential alliance—so the image of the panther, the symbol of Lucca, is thematically linked to that event. Before Pavia, we have only circumstantial evidence that he may have spent time in Rome. Based on all this, scholars estimate his birth around 1370. In short, Johannes Ciconia was a composer from Liège who—if born around 1370—moved to Italy in his twenties, lived in Rome, then Pavia, and finally Padua until his death in 1412.
So what do we make of his songs that don’t fit neatly into the Italian madrigal genre?
Let’s take, for instance, a French chanson by Ciconia, with a French text, and notation that—again, with all its ambiguities—is clearly French in style. Or even more precisely: in the ars subtilior style, which combined French and Italian elements and was practiced at the papal court in Avignon during the Schism, as well as in Giangaleazzo’s court in Pavia.
Let’s listen to a few notes from such a piece, called 'Sus une fontayne'. And to make this more challenging, I’ll play it for you in a performance by the same ensemble as before—La Morra and Diabolus in Musica—and from the same album where they recorded Una Panthera.
Because I believe the similarity in sound between the two pieces has more to do with the performers than with the underlying musical style. Today, no ensemble—none of us—has access to definitive information about how a French chanson from Avignon in 1395 should have sounded, versus how an Italian madrigal from Padua in the same year should have sounded.
Let’s hear a few bars:
[PLAY Sus une fontayne]
If I now project a transcription of the piece from Anne Stone’s 2001 article, I can highlight—just using colored markers—all the moments in the score where there are shifts in meter, or mismatches between the meters of the different voices, or sequences of syncopations that make the music sound as though it’s in a different meter than it’s written.
And the boxed annotations? Those are moments where Ciconia quotes melodies from an older Italian composer, Philippus de Caserta. None of these features appear in his Italian madrigals.
All of these elements—just like the campanella technique that can be notated in tablature but not in standard staff notation—are only notatable within the rhythmic system of French notation, not Italian.
Just as the octonaria and duodenaria flourishes can be captured in Italian notation but not in the French system.
In other words, we are dealing with a composer who writes in one manner for a particular patron—or even for a single event hosted by that patron—and in a completely different manner for another event under the same patronage. The fact that it all sounds somewhat similar to us is largely due to our own ignorance: we simply do not know how to perform these pieces in a way that is—pardon the term—authentic.
This leads us to a compelling conceptual framework:
Composers aim to give their works a certain sound, and that sound is shaped by their aural familiarity with it. In order to imbue their music with that desired sound, they must encode it as specifically as possible using the notational system available to them. However, if we fail to interpret the text encoded in that notational system, we cannot recreate the intended sound. Consequently, we cannot truly know whether we have succeeded in capturing the sonic character the composer sought to convey. And of course, the historian—Anne Stone, for instance—may continue to propose hypotheses regarding why Ciconia might have adopted a particular stylistic mask. Yet such a discussion remains somewhat speculative: we can theorize why a composer would write in a divergent manner, but our inability to reconstruct the precise soundscape—one presumably familiar to Ciconia’s audience—keeps us suspended in the realm of conjecture.
In today’s lecture, we will not have time to delve into the stylistic tensions that emerged between Protestants and Catholics in the 16th century. I will not be able to discuss how composers adapted their musical language in response to ecclesiastical shifts—composers such as Palestrina or Vincenzo Ruffo, who adhered to the formal decrees of the Council of Trent. Nor will I be able to address figures like Thomas Tallis, who navigated back and forth between Anglican and Catholic identities so convincingly that to this day, scholars remain unsure of his true religious affiliation. Monteverdi, for his part, explicitly claimed to compose music in two distinct styles, choosing the appropriate one based on context.
Nor will I be able to touch upon Purcell and Muffat, whom I mentioned earlier, despite the fact that both composers were strikingly self-aware of their stylistic choices and made deliberate efforts to adapt their music to a sound they perceived as distant or foreign. By the late 17th century, two dominant national styles had emerged—the Italian and the French (not to be confused with the Italian and French notation systems I mentioned earlier). With the rise of music printing, there was near-complete uniformity in notational practice across Europe. Thus, by the end of the century, Italian and French styles shared the same notation but diverged in musical forms, harmonic language, and other technical aspects beyond today’s scope. Unlike Arcangelo Corelli and Jean-Baptiste Lully—quintessential representatives of the Italian and French styles, respectively—Purcell and Muffat invested considerable effort in documenting their process of stylistic adaptation. In the preface to his 1683 book of sonatas, Purcell writes that the author “aimed for the exact imitation of the great Italian masters”; he even adopted a distinctively Italianate notation style in one of his few Latin-texted works. In some of his 1690s semi-operas, his imitation of Lully’s music is nearly perfect. Muffat, in a preface to one of his collections, declares that he studied with the great Lully and was the first to introduce Lully’s style to parts of Germany and Bohemia. He even refers explicitly to “Lullists,” counting himself foremost among them.
Most of all, I will not have time to explore the rich typology of motivations behind stylistic imitation:
Was Louis Couperin’s composition “in the style of Froberger” a friendly homage? A parody?
To what extent is it in poor taste for Purcell to compose a memorial piece for his older mentor, Matthew Locke, entirely in Locke’s style? Is this likewise a tribute—or perhaps a parody?
When and why did composers seek to make a piece sound older than it actually was?
When and why did they attempt to make it sound like it came from elsewhere?
Were such stylistic shifts always conscious?
What about the commonly held notion that early-career composers (such as Beethoven, Brahms, or Schoenberg) almost uncontrollably resemble their mentors (Haydn, Beethoven, and Mahler, respectively)?
Did the rise of the Composer—with a capital C—have a chilling effect on certain musicians? The most famous example from the early 20th century is the violinist Fritz Kreisler, who wished to write music suited to his own concerts—melodic, beautiful, perhaps slightly naïve—but felt unfairly judged. As a result, he began to compose in old styles and attribute the works to past composers. This well-known story is, in my view, paradoxically not that of someone who wanted to be a composer but failed; rather, it is the story of someone who did not want to be a composer in the late-Romantic sense of the word, yet who still wished to create music. Perhaps his story, which some view as a case of artistic dishonesty and I see as deeply moving, epitomizes the idea of “composers fleeing from identity.”
This story also resonates, to my mind, with a phenomenon often seen in today’s composition classes: People are drawn to a particular musical style, are educated through the masterpieces of that tradition, and naturally wish to express themselves in the very language that originally drew them to composition. But then they are told: if you want to be a composer, you must innovate. This expectation is paradoxically the result of the very presence of historical musical languages. After all, before the canonization of “masterworks from the past” in the late 18th century, innovation was not considered a value in and of itself.
At the beginning of this lecture, I offered the following definition of a composer: someone who writes music—and gradually does so in a way that narrows the range of interpretive freedom available to performers.
In light of the discussion we’ve had, it seems likely that the more prescriptive the composer’s writing becomes, the greater their ability to achieve a specific sonic imitation. And thus, despite the category-breaking I noted earlier with regard to music today (the “producer,” the “band” credited collectively for the creative process), the liberation from notation and the direct engagement with sound as a medium actually simplify the act of imitation. Indeed, artificial intelligence only streamlines this further, rendering imitation the most fundamental operative mechanism of our time: “ChatGPT—compose a Shakespearean sonnet”; or “Generate an impressionist-style painting of a drunken duck.” Perhaps the AI revolution and the so-called “death of the composer” it brings are not so much a rupture as a regression—or, to avoid judgment—a pendulum swing back to a pre-composer state. If we want soft background music for a romantic evening, we will receive just that—and we won’t care who composed it, because it can be generated without a composer. We do not seek innovation here, but rather the most distilled form of stylistic awareness. If we want music at 130 BPM for a gym session—who needs a composer? “ChatGPT, give me gym music at 130 BPM that raises my heart rate to 150 after ten minutes and gradually brings it down to 110 over the next twenty.” The listener remains; the only question is whether the listener is willing to receive their moment of spiritual elevation from artificial intelligence.
My optimistic conclusion is this:
Just as I mentioned earlier—perhaps in passing—that the listener too was liberated from the ancien régime during the French Revolution, so too now the autonomy of the consumer is paramount. Will the composer, like the programmer or the customer service representative, vanish in the age of generative AI? Perhaps, instead of spending twenty minutes discussing the rise of the Composer in the West, we should devote that time to the rise of the Listener.
I would argue that, just as there are still realms of human interaction in which we demand, at least for now, a flesh-and-blood partner, so too in music. We may brainstorm with AI—but we do not yet wish to treat it to a weekend in Prague. Likewise in music: it can accompany us through intense workouts, but we do not (yet) seek transcendence from it without a composer’s hand behind the experience. And wherever there is a composer—and wherever notation exists—that composer will adapt their mode of expression, find ways to stretch the boundaries of the notational system, and continually don and shed stylistic masks.