By all accounts, Shakespeare lived in a very rich musical culture --
but it was a very different kind of 
musical culture than the one we're used to.
For one thing, music was taught very
differently than it is today.
In academic context,
music was normally grouped with the
mathematical sciences, like astronomy and geometry.
At the same time,
musical notation was becoming more
standardized and the publication of
musical scores was exploding
thanks in part to enterprising people
like William Byrd and Thomas Morley,
who had managed to secure the only
patent for music printing in England.
Music was also becoming a lightning rod
for religious controversy.
Protestant reformers, often the same ones who are
attacking the theater, argued that music
was essentially a sensuous phenomenon.
They didn't see music as a language; 
rather, they felt that music competed with language.
Shakespeare was very much
well aware of these conflicting attitudes toward music
and he recognized that
where they differ was on the question of musical meaning.
It's not clear at all to Shakespeare that 
music by itself means anything.
For example, in Titus Andronicus, when
there's a trumpet call heard offstage,
Demetrius asks, "Why do the Emperor's
trumpets flourish thus?"
For Shakespeare, that's not a superfluous question
because ultimately, there's no way to
know what a trumpet call means until
someone tells you what it means.
So that's a very different kind of
musical experience than the one we are
generally used to. When we go to a film
we expect the music to make sense to us,
to tell us what we need to know.
Shakespeare's original audiences didn't
have those expectations of music because
the connection of music and meaning was
incredibly fluid and unstable.
This partly explains why, for example,
it was common to have the same tune for
different sets of lyrics. That kind of
fluidity was completely unremarkable.
Shakespeare also understands that
because musical meaning is imposed externally from the outside, that it can
also become an instrument of power --
theatrical power of course -- but also
social or political power.
For me, one of the most striking examples of music
being used as a political instrument
comes at the end of the Merchant of Venice.
Lorenzo and Jessica are listening
to a musical performance when Jessica says,
"I am never merry when I hear sweet music",
at which point Lorenzo gives
her a long academic lecture on the true
nature of music.
Now depending on how you read it, that
can either be a very romantic moment or
very troubling one.
Lorenzo, who is Christian, telling Jessica,
who is Jewish,
what is the correct context for
interpreting music, and yet that is the
condition of music in Renaissance
England. To approach music in a
particular way --
mathematically, philosophically,
historically, acoustically -- meant aligning
yourself with a particular ideology, with
a particular way of seeing the world.
