I’m teaching medieval monophonic song to undergraduates at the moment  and I always ask them to critique modern editions in the light of the complex source situation, especially for the troubadour and trouvère repertoire. They report finding Gallica quite hard to navigate, so I’ve designed this blogpost for them so that they can at least be directed to some of the troubadour and trouvère sources.

I found information and updates on Gallica’s holdings from various posts on Dominique Gatté’s social network site for medieval musicology. It’s really worth joining — despite its URL, it’s not just for chant! They send a lot of emails, but you can opt to have them aggregated into a a daily digest (recommended).

The links below are to a few of the troubadour and trouvère chansonniers with melodies (and without) that are on Gallica (those from other libraries, as well as vernacular song repertoires from other linguistic traditions, can be found via a recent blogpage on Gatté’s site). NB: The sigla are particular to troubadour OR trouvère sources; so troubadour C is not the same as trouvère C!

Chansonnier Trouvère M “du roi” (F-Pn fr. 844)

Chansonnier Trouvère N (F-Pn fr. 845)

Chansonnier Trouvère O “Cangé” (F-Pn fr. 846) (and an 18thC copy of this source in F-Pn fr. 12610)

Chansonnier Trouvère X “Clairambault” (F-Pn n. a. fr. 1050)

The ones below have poems but no melodies:

Chansonnier Troubadour C (F-Pn fr.865) [no musical notation]

Chansonnier Troubadour B (F-Pn fr.1592) [no musical notation]

Chansonnier Trouvère C (F-Pn fr.856) [no musical notation] 

Chansonnier Trouvère S (F-Pn fr. 12581) [no musical notation]

Chansonnier Trouvère V (F-Pn fr. 1553) [no musical notation]

I’m posting their ready-made blogpost version of the WordPress.com report below. While not massive, the numbers in the stats show a perhaps surprising interest in my blog’s rather specialist subject matter. As a strong advocate of open access resources in education, I hope it might encourage others to blog their medieval musicology research!

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Syndey Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 11,000 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 4 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

When I was approached by Michael Tenzer and asked to contribute a chapter to a follow-up volume to his Analytical Studies in World Music I have to admit to being a little mystified.   Although I was present when Nicholas Cook gave the paper that declared that ‘we are all ethnomusicologists now’, and although I work in the UK where the subdisciplinary divisions between musicology, ethnomusiology, and music theory are rather more fluid at the institutional level, I wasn’t quite prepared for a book with such a title to include a repertoire quite as historically distant as the music as Guillaume de Machaut. Nonetheless, I was happy to oblige.

Working with Michael and his co-editor on the second volume of Analytical Studies in World Music (titled, eventually, Analytical and Cross-Cultural Studies in World Music) was very rewarding. As editors they engaged in detail with my analysis and its pre-suppositions and made me make more precise my description of what I was doing in it. The result, I think, is a more limpid explanation of my method of approaching the musical material of fourteenth-century song than I have published before, and something that I hope will offer a ‘way in’ to those not primarily interested in the Middle Ages, but quite fascinated in musical structures of all kinds, as well as those interested in the text-music relations of other song repertories.

Unfortunately the publishers, Oxford University Press–an institution that is supposedly a department of my own institution–were categorical in their refusal to allow me to post a copy on my personal website or in my institutional repository (see here for my early blogpost moaning about this). I think that’s a huge shame, because the title of the book that it’s in will not make my chapter an obvious find for scholars of Machaut or for students of pre-tonal Western music theory and analysis. Luckily there is partial access to it via Google Books (click here to link to the chapter on Google Books).

The chapter is in a number of sections; the opening section on Background gives an overview of the kinds of song the piece represents, and includes an image of what it looks like in one of the manuscript sources; Analytical Method outlines my approach to the song’s underlying dyadic counterpoint; the next sections present the analysis, giving an Overview of Form and Rhythmic Organization, an Analysis of Counterpoint and Tonal Structure, Cadences and Tonal Orientation, Tonal Narrative (covering first the balade’s A section, then its B section and Refrain), an Interim Summary, a section on the Triplum Part, and a full Summary of the Analysis. The final sections give details of Text and Context, Broader Contexts, and B18 Today (a discussion of several recordings, one of which can be heard on the book’s accompanying website).

The bibliography below lists the works referred to in my chapter.

Bibliography

Apfel, Ernst. 1982. Diskant und Kontrapunkt in der Musiktheorie des 12. bis 15. Jahrhunderts. Wilhelmshaven: Heinrichshofen’s Verlag.

Arlt, Wulf. 1982. “Aspekte der Chronologie und des Stilwandels im französischen Lied des 14. Jahrhunderts.” In Aktuelle Fragen der musikbezogenen Mittelalterforschung: Texte zu einem Basler Kolloquium des Jahres 1975, 193-280. Winterthur: Amadeus.

Attwood, Catherine. 1999. “The Image in the Fountain: Fortune, Fiction and Femininity in the Livre du Voir Dit of Guillaume de Machaut.” Nottingham French Studies 38: 137-49.

Badel, Pierre-Yves, ed. 1995. Adam de la Halle: Oeuvres Complètes. Paris: Brodard et Taupin.

Bain, Jennifer. 2005. “Tonal Structure and the Melodic Role of Chromatic Inflections in the Music of Machaut.” Plainsong and Medieval Music 14(2): 59-88.

Bent, Margaret. 1994. “Editing Early Music: The Dilemma of Translation.” Early Music 22(3): 373-92.

———. 2002. Counterpoint, Composition, and Musica Ficta. London: Routledge.

Berger, Anna Maria Busse. 2005. Medieval Music and the Art of Memory. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Berger, Christian. 1992. Hexachord, Mensur und Textstruktur: Studien zum französischen Lied im 14. Jahrhundert. Vol. 35, Beihefte zum Archiv für Musikwissenschaft. Stuttgart: Steiner.

Bowers, Roger. 2004. “Guillaume de Machaut and His Canonry of Reims, 1338-1377.” Early Music History 23: 1-48.

Brown, Elizabeth A. R. 1989. “Diplomacy, Adultery, and Domestic Politics at the Court of Philip the Fair: Queen Isabella’s Mission to France in 1314.” In Documenting the Past: Essays in Medieval History Presented to George Peddy Cuttino, ed. J. S. Hamilton and P. J. Bradley, 53-83. Woodbridge: Boydell.

Butterfield, Ardis. 2003. “Enté: A Survey and Re-Assessment of the Term in Thirteenth and Fourteenth-Century Music and Poetry.” Early Music History 22: 67-101.

Clanchy, M. T. 1993. From Memory to Written Record: England 1066-1307, 2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell.

Clark, Suzannah. 2007. “’S'en dirai chançonete:’ Hearing Text and Music in a Medieval Motet.” Plainsong and Medieval Music 16(1): 31-59.

Cohen, David E. 2001. “‘The Imperfect Seeks its Perfection’: Harmonic Progression, Directed Motion, and Aristotelian Physics.” Music Theory Spectrum 23(2): 139-69.

Coleman, Joyce. 1996. Public Reading and the Reading Public in Late Medieval England and France. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Dömling, Wolfgang. 1969. “Zur Überlieferung der musikalischen Werke Machauts.” Die Musikforschung 22: 189-95.

———. 1970. Die mehrstimmigen Balladen, Rondeaux und Virelais von Guillaume de Machaut : Untersuchungen zum musikalischen Satz. Tutzing: Schneider.

Earp, Lawrence. 1995. Guillaume de Machaut: A Guide to Research. Vol. 36, Garland Composer Resource Manuals. New York: Garland.

———.  2005. “Declamatory Dissonance in Machaut.” In Citation and Authority in Medieval and Renaissance Music: Learning from the Learned, ed. Suzannah Clark and Elizabeth Eva Leach, 102-22. Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell and Brewer.

Fallows, David. 1976. “L’origine du Ms. 1328 de Cambrai: Note au sujet de quelques nouveux feuillets, et de quelques informations supplémentaires.” Revue de Musicologie 62: 275-9.

Fuller, Sarah. 1992. “Tendencies and Resolutions: The Directed Progression in Ars Nova music.” Journal of Music Theory 36(2): 229-57.

———. 1998a. “Exploring Tonal Structure in French Polyphonic Song of the Fourteenth Century.” In Tonal Structures in Early Music, Vol. 1, ed. Cristle Collins Judd, 61-86.  New York and London: Garland.

———. 1998b. “Modal Discourse and Fourteenth-Century French Song: A ‘Medieval’ Perspective Recovered?” Early Music History 17: 61-108.

Harper-Scott, J. P. E. 2006. Edward Elgar, Modernist. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Hassell, James Woodrow. 1982. Middle French Proverbs, Sentences, and Proverbial Phrases. Toronto and Leiden: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies and Brill.

Huot, Sylvia. 1997. Allegorical Play in the Old French Motet: The Sacred and Profane in Thirteenth-Century Polyphony, Figurae: Readings in Medieval Culture. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

———. 2002. “Guillaume de Machaut and the Consolation of Poetry.” Modern Philology 100: 169-95.

Leach, Elizabeth Eva. 2000a. “Counterpoint and Analysis in Fourteenth-Century Song.” Journal of Music Theory 44(2): 45-79.

———. 2000b. “Counterpoint as an Interpretative Tool: the Case of Guillaume de Machaut’s De toutes flours (B31).” Music Analysis 19(2): 321-51.

———. 2000c. ‘Fortune’s Demesne: the Interrelation of Text and Music in Machaut’s Il mest avis (B22), De fortune (B23), and Two Related Anonymous Balades’, Early Music History 19: 47-79.

———. 2001. “Machaut’s Balades with Four Voices.” Plainsong and Medieval Music 10(2): 47-79.

———. 2002. “Death of a Lover and the Birth of the Polyphonic Balade: Machaut’s Notated Balades 1-5.” Journal of Musicology 19(3): 461-502.

———, ed. 2003. Machaut’s Music: New Interpretations. Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer.

———. 2006. “Gendering the Semitone, Sexing the Leading Tone: Fourteenth-Century Music Theory and the Directed Progression.” Music Theory Spectrum 28(1): 1-21.

———. 2010a. “Guillaume de Machaut, Royal Almoner: Honte, paour (B25) and Donnez, signeurs (B26) in Context.” Early Music 40.

———. 2010b. “Nature’s Forge and Mechanical Production: Writing, Reading, and Performing Song.” In Rhetoric Beyond Words, ed. Mary Carruthers, 72-95. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Leech-Wilkinson, Daniel. 2002. The Modern Invention of Medieval Music: Scholarship, Ideology, Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Lefferts, Peter. 1995. “Signature Systems and Tonal Types in the Fourteenth-Century French Chanson.” Plainsong and Medieval Music 4(2): 117-47.

Ludwig, Friedrich, ed. 1926-1954. Guillaume de Machaut: Musikalische Werke, Publikationen älterer Musik. Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel.

Martinez, Marie Louise. 1963. Die Musik des frühen Trecento. Tutzing: Schneider.

Maw, David. 1999. “Words and Music in the Secular Songs of Guillaume de Machaut.” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Oxford.

———. 2002. “Meter and Word Setting: Revising Machaut’s Monophonic Virelais.” Current Musicology 74(2): 69-102.

Memelsdorff, Pedro. 2003. “Lizadra donna: Ciconia, Matteo da Perugia, and the Late Medieval Ars contratenor.” In Johannes Ciconia: musicien de la transition, ed. Philippe Vendrix, 233-78.  Turnhout: Brepols.

Page, Christopher. 1998. “Tradition and Innovation in BN fr. 146: The Background to the Ballades.” In Fauvel Studies: Allegory, Chronicle, Music, and Image in Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, MS français 146, ed. Margaret Bent and Andrew Wathey, 353-94. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Perkinson, Stephen. 2004. “Portraits and Counterfeits: Villard de Honnecourt and Thirteenth-Century Theories of Representation.” In Excavating the Medieval Image: Manuscripts, Artists, Audiences: Essays in Honor of Sandra Hindman, ed. Nina A. Rowe and David S. Areford, 13-36. Aldershot: Ashgate.

Plumley, Yolanda. 1996. The Grammar of 14th Century Melody: Tonal Organization and Compositional Process in the Chansons of Guillaume de Machaut and the Ars Subtilior. New York and London: Garland.

Robertson, Anne Walters. 2002. Guillaume de Machaut and Reims: Context and Meaning in his Musical Works. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Rothenberg, David J. 2006. “The Marian Symbolism of Spring, ca. 1200-ca. 1500: Two Case Studies.” Journal of the American Musicological Society 59(2): 319-98.

Sachs, Klaus-Jürgen. 1974. Der Contrapunctus im 14. und 15. Jahrhundert: Untersuchungen zum Terminus, zur Lehre und zu den Quellen. Ed. Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht, Walter Gerstenberg, Kurt von Fischer, Wolfgang Osthoff and Arnold Schmitz. Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner.

———. 1984. “Die Contrapunctus-Lehre im 14. und 15. Jahrhundert.” In Die mittelalterliche Lehre von der Mehrstimmigkeit, Vol. 5, ed. Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht, F. Alberto Gallo, Max Haas, and Klaus-Jürgen Sachs, 161-256. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft.

Stone, Anne. 2003. “Music Writing and Poetic Voice in Machaut: Some Remarks on B12 and B14.” In Machaut’s Music: New Interpretations, ed. Elizabeth Eva Leach, 125-38. Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer.

Upton, Elizabeth Randell. 2001. “The Chantilly Codex (F-Ch 564): The Manuscript, Its Music, Its Scholarly Reception.” Ph.D. dissertation, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Vale, Malcolm. 2001. The Princely Court: Medieval Courts and Culture in North-West Europe 1270-1380. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Welker, Lorenz. 2008. “Guillaume de Machaut, das romantische Lied und die Jungfrau Maria.” In Annäherungen: Festschrift für Jürg Stenzl zum 65 Geburtstag, ed. Ulrich Mosch, Matthias Schmidt, and Silvia Wälli. Saarbrücken: Pfau.

Magnus Williamson has been awarded the 2011 Claude V. Palisca Award of the American Musicological Society for the DIAMM publications facsimile of the Eton Choirbook, whose introduction he authored. The Palisca Award is for editions or translations and this is the second time a DIAMM publications facsimile has won, since DIAMM provided the photography for Margaret Bent’s study of Bologna Q15, which won the prize in 2009.

The OUP journal Early Music has sent me the link to my review of several CDs. This is the first CD review I’ve done and it might be the last! Reviewing audio material takes ages to do, and I originally wrote several times the number of words required, so had to cut it down to fairly bald description. Anyway, here are the links:

Link to Full Text  or Link to pdf Version

Manuscript Studies in an Interoperable Environment doesn’t sound like the most enticing site ever titled, but this project, based at Stanford University, really should get the pulse of any Machaut scholar racing. One of its pages aggregates and provides links to the various Machaut MSS currently online. My future Machaut classes are going to be so much more visually attractive than they were in the days of my reliance on black-and-white photocopies from microfilm!

OK. Apologies. For some of you this is just going to be too much, but Acts IV and V in the opera ‘The Sexing of the Semitone’ have now appeared and it seems (at least as far as MTS‘s editor is concerned) that the whole multi-author work on whether or not the semitone was considered feminine in the Middle Ages has now been concluded. Luckily for those of you with the patience to read them, the last two acts are much shorter than the earlier ones, especially the gargantuan 20K Act II (Fuller’s 2011 response). For copyright reasons I can’t post Fuller’s letter here (but here’s a link for those of you with a personal or institutional subscription), but my response to it can be accessed by clicking the link on the publication information below.

Published as ‘Elizabeth Eva Leach Responds’, Music Theory Spectrum 33/2 (2011): 232-233. doi: 10.1525/mts.2011.33.2.232. © 2011 by The Society for Music Theory Inc.

Copying and permissions notice: Authorization to copy this content beyond fair use (as specified in Sections 107 and 108 of the U. S. Copyright Law) for internal or personal use, or the internal or personal use of specific clients, is granted by The Society for Music Theory Inc. for libraries and other users, provided that they are registered with and pay the specified fee via Rightslink® on Caliber (http://caliber.ucpress.net/) or directly with the Copyright Clearance Center, http://www.copyright.com.

Works cited (in the letter)

Brucker, Charles, ed. 1994. Denis Foulechat: Le Policratique de Jean de Salisbury (1372), Livres I–III. Geneva: Droz.

Cohen, David E. 2001. “ ‘The Imperfect Seeks its Perfection’: Harmonic Progression, Directed Motion, and Aristotelian Physics.” Music Theory Spectrum 23 (2): 139– 69.

Hochadel, Matthias, ed. 2002. Commentum Oxoniense in musicam Boethii: Eine Quelle zur Musiktheorie an der spätmittelalterlichen Universität. Munich: Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften and C. H. Beck.

Huot, Sylvia. 1997. Allegorical Play in the Old French Motet: The Sacred and Profane in Thirteenth-Century Polyphony. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press.

Kay, Sarah. 1999. “Desire and Subjectivity.” In The Troubadours: An Introduction. Ed. Simon Gaunt and Sarah Kay. 212 – 27. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

———. 2007. The Place of Thought: The Complexity of One in Late Medieval French Didactic Poetry. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

———. 2008. “Touching Singularity: Consolation, Philosophy, and Poetry in the French dit.” In The Erotics of Consolation: Desire and Distance in the Late Middle Ages. Ed. Catherine E. Léglu and Stephen J. Milner. 21–38. Basingstoke [UK]: Palgrave Macmillan.

Leach, Elizabeth Eva, and Nicolette Zeeman. 2013. “Gender.” In The Edinburgh Companion to Music and Literature. Ed. Helen Deeming and Elizabeth Eva Leach. Vol. 1. Before 1600. Forthcoming. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Robertson, Anne Walters. 2002. Guillaume de Machaut and Reims: Context and Meaning in His Musical Works. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Zeeman, Nicolette. 2007. “The Gender of Song in Chaucer.” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 29: 141– 82.

My first blog-only ‘publication’

A concordance for an early fourteenth-century motet

The link above gives access to the pdf of a something that I’ve written purely to post here on my blog. Rather than the anonymous peer review of the tradition journal, I thought I’d subject it to the views of the crowd. All discussion, corrections, etc. most welcome. Unlike most journal articles it is designed less as a product of my own research and more as a prompt to other people’s: I spotted the concordance here, but I’d love for someone else to run with the questions that it raises for the repertoire c.1300.

I know, too, that the bibliography on this subject — especially the issue of English traits in 13thC motets — is much more extensive than the part of it that I’ve quoted here. I didn’t want to overburden a mere blog article with a whole musicological back history when its purpose is to stimulate someone (hopefully one of my future graduate students) to further action.

Rather than posting the piece as such, I thought I’d use the opportunity to learn LaTeX so I could create an attractive downloadable article for people to view online and/or print out. The file contains a complete edition of the motet Exaudi/Alme deus/TENOR, which has not, to my knowledge, been performed since the fourteenth century (go on, someone, sing it!).

Photo by Ivanhoe (via Wikepedia: click for link)

The publisher Brepols has kindly granted me a pdf offprint of my 2009 article on grammar and music in the Middle Ages: Elizabeth Eva Leach, “Grammar in the Medieval Song-School”, New Medieval Literatures, 9 (2009), 195-211; doi 10.1484.J.NML .1.100590

Carmina Cantabrigiensia Manuscript C, folio 436v, 11th century (Cambridge University Library, Gg. 5. 35)

I can’t post the pdf directly here (see earlier blogpost on why not), but please contact me by email if you would like a copy.

The article basically re-packages elements of my first monograph, Sung Birds, especially sections on vox from chapters 1-2, which discuss the relation of grammatical teaching (especially Donatus and Priscian) to music theory (especially that of Guido of Arezzo). The chapter then considers the song Aurea personet lyra, a lyricization of the voces animantium set to music in the earlier Cambridge Songbook as an example of practical musical isntruction in the correct relation between musical vox, grammar, and being a rational human.

Chapter bibliography

• Adcock, Fleur, The Virgin and the Nightingale (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1983).
• Amalarius of Metz, ‘Liber officialis’, in Jean-Michel Hanssens (ed.), Amalarii episcopi opera liturgica omnia  (Vatican City: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 1948), 25-565.
• Aristotle, De Anima (On the Soul), trans. Hugh Lawson-Tancred (London: Penguin, 1986).
• Augustine, Saint, ‘On Music’, trans. Robert Catesby Taliaferro, in Robert Catesby Taliaferro (ed.), Writings of Saint Augustine, Volume 2 (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press in association with Consortium Books, 1977), 151-379.
• Aurelius Augustinus, De musica, Bücher I und VI: Vom ästhetischen Urteil zur metaphysischen Erkenntnis, trans. Frank Hentschel (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 2002).
• Ax, Wolfram, Laut, Sinne und Sprache: Studien zu 3 Grundbegriffen der antiken Sprachtheorie, eds Albrecht Dihle, et al. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1986).
• Berger, Karol, ‘The Hand and the Art of Memory’, Musica Disciplina, 35 (1981), 87-120.
• Bernhard, Michael, ‘La summa musice du Ps.-Jean de Murs: Son auteur et sa datation’, Revue de musicologie, 84/1 (1998), 19-25.
• ———, ‘Parallelüberliefungen zu vier Cambridger Liedern’, in Günter Bernt, Fidel Rädle, and Gabriel Silagi (eds.), Tradition und Wertung: Festschrift für Franz Brunhölzl zum 65. Gerburtstag (Sigmaringen: Jan Thorbecke, 1989), 141-5.
• Botterill, Steven (ed.), Dante: De Vulgari Eloquentia, ed. Peter Dronke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
• Bower, Calvin M., ‘Sonus, vox, chorda, nota: Thing, Name, and Sign in Early Medieval Theory’, in Michael Bernhard (ed.), Quellen und Studien zur Musiktheorie des Mittelalters, 3 (Munich: Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften and C. H. Beck, 2001), 47-61.
• Bragard, Roger (ed.), Jacques de Liège’s Speculum Musicae 7 vols. (Rome: American Institute of Musicology, 1955-73).
• Caldwell, John, The Oxford History of English Music, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991).
• Crocker, Richard, ‘Alphabet Notations for Early Medieval Music’, in Charles Williams Jones, Margot H. King, and Wesley M. Stevens (eds.), Saints, Scholars, and Heroes: Studies in Medieval Culture in Honor of Charles W. Jones, 2 (Collegeville, Minn: Hill Monastic Manuscript Library Saint John’s Abbey and University, 1979), 79-104.
• Desmond, Karen, ‘Sicut in grammatica: Analogical Discourse in Chapter 15 of Guido’s Micrologus’, Journal of Musicology, 16/4 (1998), 467-93.
• Gushee, Lawrence, ‘Questions of Genre in Medieval Treatises on Music’, in Wulf Arlt, Ernst Lichtenhahn, and Hans Oesch (eds.), Gattungen der Musik in Einzeldarstellungen: Gedenkschrift Leo Schrade (Bern: Francke, 1973), 365-433.
• Herlinger, Jan W. (ed.), The Lucidarium of Marchetto of Padua: A Critical Edition, Translation, and Commentary (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1985).
• Holsinger, Bruce W., Music, Body, and Desire in Medieval Culture: Hildegard of Bingen to Chaucer (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001).
• Hucke, Helmut, ‘Toward a New Historical View of Gregorian Chant’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 33/3 (1980), 437-67.
• Hughes, David G., ‘Evidence for the Traditional View of the Transmission of Gregorian Chant’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 40/3 (1987), 377-404.
• Huglo, Michel, ‘Deux séquences de musique instrumentale’, Revue de Musicologie, 76/1 (1990), 77-82.
• Irvine, Martin, The Making of Textual Culture; ‘Grammatica’ and Literary Theory, 350-1100 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
• Keil, H. (ed.), Grammatici Latini 8 vols. (Leipzig: Teubner, 1855-80).
• Klopsch, Paul, ‘Carmen de Philomela’, in Alf Önnerfors, Johannes Rathofer, and Fritz Wagner (eds.), Literatur und Sprache im europäischen Mittelalter: Festschrift für Karl Langosch zum 70. Geburtstag (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1973), 173-94.
• Law, Vivien, Grammar and Grammarians in the Early Middle Ages (London and New York, 1997).
• ———, The Insular Grammarians (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 1982).
• Leach, Elizabeth Eva, Sung Birds: Music, Nature, and Poetry in the Later Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007).
• Levy, Kenneth, Gregorian Chant and the Carolingians (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998).
• Lindsay, W. M. (ed.), Isidori Hispalensis episcopi Etymologiarum sive originum libri XX 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1911).
• MacCulloch, F., Medieval Latin and French Bestiaries (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1960).
• Marcovich, Miroslav, ‘Voces animantium and Suetonius’, Živa Antika / Antiquité vivante, 21 (1971), 399-416.
• Mariotti, Italo (ed.), Marii Victorini Ars grammatica: Introduzione, testo critico e commento (Florence: F. Le Monnier, 1967).
• McKinnon, James (ed.), The Early Christian Period and the Latin Middle Ages (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1998).
• Page, Christopher (ed.), The Summa Musice: A Thirteenth-Century Manual for Singers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
• Pesce, Dolores (ed.), Guido D’Arezzo’s Regulae Rithmice, Prologus in Antiphonarium, and Epistola ad Michahelem: A Critical Text and Translation (Ottawa: Institute of Mediaeval Music, 1999).
• Robert-Tissot, Michel (ed.), Johannes Aegidius de Zamora: Ars Musica (np: American Institute of Musicology, 1974).
• Santosuosso, Alma Colk, Letter Notations in the Middle Ages (Ottawa: Institute of Mediaeval Music, 1989).
• Stevens, John, Words and Music in the Middle Ages: Song, Narrative, Dance and Drama, 1050-1350 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
• Sullivan, Blair, ‘Alphabetic Writing and Hucbald’s Artificiales notae’, in Michael Bernhard (ed.), Quellen und Studien zur Musiktheorie des Mittelalters, 3 (Munich: Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften and C. H. Beck, 2001), 64-80.
• ———, ‘The Unwritable Sound of Music: The Origins and Implications of Isidore’s Memorial Metaphor’, Viator, 30 (1999), 1-13.
• Treitler, Leo, With Voice and Pen: Coming to Know Medieval Song and How it was Made (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).
• Yapp, Brundson, ‘Birds in Captivity in the Middle Ages’, Archives of Natural History, 10 (1981), 479-500.
• Ziolkowski, Jan M. (ed.), The Cambridge Songs (Carmina Cantabrigiensia) (Tempe, Arizona: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1998).

I’m just back from two days at the inaugural meeting of the Music and Philosophy Study group of the RMA. Taking place at King’s College London, this was certainly the best attended RMA event I’ve ever been to. I hadn’t offered a paper because the theme had been advertised as ‘Opera’, which excludes a medievalist (unless they resort facetiously to Latinist literality and offer something like ‘Music and Philosophy in the opera omnia of John of Salisbury’ or some such oblique interpretation). However, if there was one group of people at the conference not talking about opera it was the philosophers — at least, not the analytic philosophers, whose definition of ‘music’ seemed like a blast from the musicological past: the great masterworks (this phrase was used!) from Bach to Brahms provided they were ‘purely instrumental’. Having thus restricted their definition of music, the philosophers I heard proceeded to talk magisterially about it.

Luckily I was constantly reassured that I hadn’t stepped through a door in time back into some period before the 1980s by the fact that I had volunteered to be one of the conference’s live-tweeters. Anyone interested in the thread can read it on Twitter under the hashtag #MPSG11, which includes tweets from me and several others, thereby covering most of the parallel sessions of the conference. I kept my tweets fairly neutral, but by the end of the first day I was really quite depressed at what seemed to me to be the failure of the idea of the conference, especially given the buzz it had obviously generated as reflected in the level of attendance. The entire idea seems imperilled by the inequality of the two disciplines involved. In short, all of the musicologists attending had read at least some philosophy but very few of the philosophers speaking seemed ever to have read any musicology at all, and their very understanding of what the study of music writ large might entail — or what ‘music’ might encompass in these terms — was generally lacking.

Obviously I didn’t go to everything, so perhaps the parallel sessions were full of musicologically engaged philosophers. But the sole exception to my comments above–and the only example of a philosopher treating opera that I heard — was the single co-authored talk of the conference: David B. Levy and Julian Young’s ‘Wagner and his philosopher-critics’. This paper, which to me exemplified everything that a music and philosophy study group meeting might profitably be doing, was generated from a jointly taught course that these two men — the first a musicologist, the second a philosopher, both with 19thC interests — had been teaching on Wagner. Their agreements and disagreements were productive rather than sterile because they were offering interpretations of music through a historical and critical consideration of the works of dead philosophers and composers. The uncertainty of interpretation and its own awareness of its historical situatedness was in stark contrast to the unequivocal pronouncements about ‘music’ (narrowly defined) and its relation to emotion (not defined at all) made elsewhere in the conference. This, of course, is because Julian Young, while trained as an analytic philosopher, has spent his career writing about continental philosophy.

Was there anything for a medievalist (or any historical musicologist)?

In a question session, one of the members of the Study Group’s committee, Nick Zangwill, declared himself proud of his lack of interest in history. Fair enough, but this means that anyone engaged in historical musicology, not just medievalists, but anyone treating musical works, practices, musicians or musicking of any kind from a historical perspective, probably has little to learn from Zangwill’s kind of philosophy. Having read quite a bit of Zangwill’s stuff when I was asked to do the Darwin lecture on Beauty (since Zangwill has a book about beauty), you will note that I did not find any of it at all useful for my historically orientated talk. I would actually like to see Zangwill and others interested in the more presentist account of certain concepts that music might embody engage with empirical musicologists. Analytical philosophers and empirical musicologists often treat the same kinds of questions but using entirely different methodologies and thus might offer more profitable disagreements (unfortunately I missed Daniel Leech-Wilkinson’s session, so I don’t know what engagement went on there, if any). It is clear, however, from asides in another talk I went to that while analytical philosophers might be merely uninterested in history, they actively scorn scientific experiments in psychology or neuroscience. John Sloboda, for example, was singled out for his ‘poor science’ (he wasn’t present to defend himself) while the philosophers argued over whether music aroused emotion,  expressed emotion, or was merely expressive of emotion…

I don’t want in any way to detract from the achievement of the conference organization (which was expertly handled) or suggest that other people weren’t having a great time (it’s always fun meeting up with colleagues one hasn’t seen for ages), but I do want to suggest that as long as the group is called ‘Music and Philosophy’ it will remain a group about the Philosophy of Music, a subsection of the discipline of philosophy, with the musicologists being the junior partners (even though they actually have more expertise in more kinds of music and musical practice). If it were called ‘Musicology and Philosophy’ instead, it might aid the bringing together of two sets of disciplinary practitioners and their associated scholarly discourses rather than being merely a forum to which musicologists can go to learn the truth about the object of their discipline as pronounced by the practitioners of another.

For me, the highlights were hearing a beautiful composition by Jason Dixon involving two hurdy-gurdies, a great bass recorder, voice, and electronics and meeting several early music people to whom I could vent my frustrations. The low points were having to go without food or drink because the breaks were consistently eroded by the inability of most academics — from graduate level to the most senior speakers –to time their papers, not heeding what I always tell my graduate students: more is not always, in fact rarely, more. Stick the logic of that in your philosophical pipe and smoke it!