Jane D. Hatter, Composing Community in Late Medieval Music: Self-Reference, Pedagogy, and Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. xvii + 281 pp. ISBN 978-1-108-47491-7.

Polyphonic composition in the decades around 1500 frequently involved references, more or less direct, to music, musicians and music-making. Composers used specific chant or song melodies as cantus firmi, they used notational means to manipulate musical material, and they referenced solmisation through puns, soggetto cavato and hexachordal motifs. Perhaps most obviously, they named themselves and their contemporaries in motet and song texts and described themselves in the act of performance. The increasing use of apparently self-referential devices coincides with a growing awareness of composers as composers, no longer merely singers who compose. Jane D. Hatter’s stimulating new study connects these two trends, arguing that self-reference was an intentional tool used by composers to forge a new professional identity, indeed to construct the idea of a compositional community with artistic connections to the past yet firmly embedded in the present. The book is neatly divided into two parts, ‘Music about Musicians’ and ‘Music about Music’. The references discussed in the first half are mostly textual ones in which the composers named themselves, as in ‘musicians’ motets’ and laments specifically for musicians. Some of these references can be oblique, as in the case of acrostics and other wordplay. The second half concerns what Hatter calls ‘Musica compositions’, where structuring devices seem to reference pedagogical or theoretical concepts like hexachords, solmisation or mensuration. Hatter’s primary source of evidence is the music itself, and she brings new insights to well-known repertoires while introducing some anonymous and lesser-known compositions. The pieces she analyses have never quite fit into the standard music-historical narratives of the Early Music History (2020) Volume 39. © Cambridge University Press