Syrene Soundes: False Relations in the English Renaissance

False relations remain one of the great enigmas of English Renaissance musical culture. Contemporary theoretical treatises explicitly discouraged their use, and yet these deliberate dissonances are hallmarks of English Renaissance music. Over the centuries they have accumulated a surfeit of subsequent connotations that have obscured how they once functioned, yet they have never been fully critically explored or elucidated in an English context. In Syrene Soundes, author Eleanor Chan excavates beneath strata of accumulated meanings to uncover the way that false relations delighted and confounded their original listeners and performers.

The book offers a holistic investigation of the false relations phenomenon, examining the cultural, literary, visual, and material understanding of such dissonances in relation to the broader culture of incongruity, surprise and error, and metaphors of harmony that captured the imagination of the English in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Chan argues that interdisciplinary angles can galvanise understanding of technical musical theoretical tropes like the false relation. She demonstrates that the false relation and its graphic ephemerality can productively be explored through the lens of English Renaissance visual culture and its idiosyncratic representational strategies. By anchoring it within the milieu of the English Reformation, burgeoning aspirations towards empire, and the increasing need for a self-fashioned collective English identity, Chan reveals that the false relation was key to the mythology of an inherited English tradition of music-making.

• https://doi.org/10.1093/9780197748206.00...