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Gary Tomlinson, Monteverdi and the End of the Renaissance. Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1987. xii + 280 pp.

In 1950, Leo Schrade published his Monteverdi: Creator of Modern Music. Now we have Monteverdi at the 'end' of the Renaissance. The shift in emphasis reveals one direction of Monteverdi studies over the past thirty-seven years. We no longer see Monteverdi as a beginning whether he is therefore an 'end' is another matter and we now judge his music both in the broader context of the shift from the Renaissance to the Baroque periods and from the more specific perspective of contemporary composers working in Italy over the 1600s. Monteverdi still stands out, but less because of his role as a 'creator' of new styles than because of the apparent quality and power of so much of his music. The shift in perspective forces us to come to terms with this music less as a preparation for things to come than as individual works of art. This raises a problem central to the dilemma facing modern musicology: how does one (indeed, should one) confront and explain aesthetic objects historically? Thus Monteverdi provides a test case for the challenges posed by recent attacks on modern musicological method as being excessively 'positivistic' in its pursuit of dry facts at the expense of higher-order criticism.