Jonathan - As a singer and as someone with a degree in French (and who spoke French - admittedly a cleaned-up version of Canadian French - as a child) and who worked for three years with the French as a liaison officer in Europe, I think the very issue you're addressing is one of culture. The late Pope John Paul II spoke directly and often to that issue, and the more I have reflected on that, the more I'm convinced that for all the validity of other forms of study, knowing more about a culture's "milieu" is the real challenge. I could not agree with you more that there is a major, perhaps an insurmountable, challenge in dealing with a culture not intimately your own. Doesn't mean we shouldn't attempt it - but we shouldn't have the hubris to think we really can nail it, either.

This is perhaps a cultural bias, but I recall my dear French teacher in high school commenting that it seemed as though the gift of the French, at least in music, was in the smaller forms. His description of what a French composer did was to focus on one facet of the jewel (some aspect of human endeavor or struggle, spoken or un-) and polish it until it gleamed. Did he seriously think that French composers were incapable of or uninterested in larger forms? Hardly. But what he seemed to be focusing on was on the "genius" of the French - and it may be a reflection of the language's peculiarities as a reflection of the worldview of the French themselves. I realize this gets into extremely dangerous ground - generalities (including this one) being inherently indefensible, at least from a logical standpoint. Nonetheless, a study of the language is to study profoundly and intimately the subtleties of society and culture and point of view. (A small and telling example is how in English we say, "I AM hungry," thus identifying ourselves directly with our hunger - in a mathematical way, saying "I = hunger". The French (and Spanish and other Romance languages) say "J'ai faim" - "I HAVE hunger" - rather like a possession that you can drop on the side of the road, if need be; or mathematically, "I +/- hunger". One is not ruled by one's physical needs in the Romance tradition. Is one less hungry? Hardly - but the viewpoint can be instructive even in the most basic expressions. Yet another example is the emphasis on "time" in the past - imparfait, passe compose, plusqueparfait, passe anterieur, passe historique - sorry I don't have the accents there - but such an awareness of the passage of time in the past and their relationship the one to the other is much more common in modern spoken French than in English, where we tend to put everything into "the past tense" - without significant gradation.)

Am I suggesting that one shouldn't approach any of this music unless one has a Ph.D. in cultural anthropology, a or several languages, history, musicology, etc.? No, no - we'd never do a darn thing, and we'd all be impoverished as a result. But at the very least, as a director or performer (with the choice of music at hand), one should be very aware of the cultural context - the fullest range of history, religion, sociology, etc. - and be prepared to share that with one's chorus and/or to integrate into one's own performance, if solo. You mentioned Simon Schama - yet another is Fernand Braudel and his monumental works on Renaissance Europe, especially Spain. And is there a "cultural language" that seems to be understood by a specific group of people - which goes beyond the mere bounds of language? I believe so. To the extent that people share a common cultural heritage - take the African-American as a case close to home - no matter how much the rest of us try to achieve that, we will fall short in general, and with rare individual examples succeeding. It would take more time and space than is truly available here to go into the why of this - but I think it doesn't require a raft of degrees to figure out why - and it boils down to culture.

As to the repertoire of the Renaissance, looking at English music of the Tudor period compared to that of France at the same time, is to look at an increasingly "muscular" society, feeling at one and the same time hyperconfident (defeating France in the Hundred Years War on a fairly regular basis until right before its end, and defeating Spain both near home and in the New World) and supremely lacking in confidence (constantly looking over their shoulder and wondering when Spain/the Empire/the rest of Catholic Europe were going to try yet again to knock Elizabeth off the throne) - and then you have the French, who are feeling themselves militarily and politically surrounded (the Empire/Spain/England) while at the same time finding Europe turning to them for cultural direction - it's all reflected in the literature and the music. And so it goes. Any easy answers? No - but the struggle has to be worth it - because without it, we fail to grasp at least the edges of our heritage. And there will be parts of the musical repertoire that we just won't nail - but we should try, because it is ours, in a sense.

Ron Duquette
ronart.assoc@cox.net