Medieval.
The
broadest definition of the medieval period encompasses all the centuries
between ‘antiquity’ and the ‘Renaissance’. The earliest writer to evoke this
intermediary phase was Filippo Villani, who observed in a treatise
of 1382 that the islands in the Mediterranean had borne different names in
‘ancient, middle and modern times’ (priscis mediis modernisque temporibus;
see McLaughlin). Such a division of the past into antiquity, the present and
the times in between may seem unremarkable, but the Trecento discernment of
‘middle times’ has shaped Western conceptions of the past for 600 years. The
need to acknowledge a comprehensive shift somewhere between 1350 and 1550 that
affected the arts, technology and the large political configurations of states
and nations has rarely been disputed, but the appropriateness of the terms
‘medieval’ and ‘Renaissance’, with the value judgments they imply, has been
contested many times. Music historians now have a complex transaction with
them, for the discernment of ‘medieval’ and ‘Renaissance’ phases in the
continuous tradition of Western music is a legacy from the 19th century when
few compositions from either period had been made available for study. Those
interested in the history of music were not then in a position to challenge the
views that historians of the Italian visual arts and culture, notably Jakob
Burckhardt, had developed so persuasively, especially since Burckhardt and
others expounded them with materials that had been fundamental to the
experience of educated men and women in Europe since the days of the Grand
Tour.
1. Terminology.
2. Historiography.
3. Defining ‘medieval
music’.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
CHRISTOPHER PAGE
Medieval
1. Terminology.
The
adjective ‘medieval’, formed on the basis of the neo-Latin medium aevum
(‘the middle age’), was slow to gain currency in English. As late as 1874 the
distinguished Anglo-Saxonist Henry Sweet still referred to ‘middle-age Latin’,
but by the 1880s the rule of ‘medieval’ had begun. In English this put an end
to a flexibility of terminology that reached back to the Trecento in neo-Latin.
Medium aevum, first recorded in 1604, was one of many different nouns
used between the 14th and 18th centuries to denote the ‘middle’ period; others
included media tempora (1382), media tempestas (1469), media
aetas (1518), media antiquitas (1519), medium tempus (1586)
and medium saeculum (1625). The corpus of terms employed in the European
vernaculars grew from the neo-Latin and shares its movement between singular
and plural. Singular forms include the German Mittelalter, Italian medioevo,
Spanish edad media, Greek mesaionas (demotic form), Danish and
Norwegian middelalderen and French moyen âge, while plural forms
include the English ‘Middle Ages’ (first recorded in the singular, however, in
1611), Dutch middeleeuwen and Icelandic miðaldir. Robinson deemed
it ‘almost providential’ that the English language uses a plural form, but it
would be fanciful to suggest that the plural forms express or encourage a
relatively nuanced view of the medieval centuries.
Medieval
2. Historiography.
The Mappa
mundi at Hereford Cathedral, drawn around 1300 by Richard of Haldingham,
shows the Emperor Augustus commanding his officials to chart the Roman
dominions. Long after its decline and fall the Roman Empire lived in the memory
of literate men such as Richard of Haldingham, reminding them that a single
language and polity had once been imposed on most of the charted world. Their
remembering of Rome can often be traced in what may be called a ‘literary
humanism’. The term ‘humanism’ resists concise definition, but a form of
literary humanism may be said to exist wherever classical Latin is admired and
imitated; there is no taste for such Latin that is not also a potentially
transforming esteem for the civilization that Virgil and Cicero express (see
also Humanism). The medieval centuries, as conventionally understood,
included many times when clerics were conscious of the need to improve
standards of Latin. Sigebert of Gembloux (d 1112) revised an earlier
Life of St Maclovius and found the Latin ‘archaic, disordered, confused with
barbarisms and solecisms, fit for the ears of nobody and thus forgotten’ (PL,
clx, 729). Many of the chant composers, like Sigebert, who were active in the
great monasteries and cathedrals of France, Lotharingia and Germany between 800
and 1100 were probably impelled to compose as much by their proud sense of
improving upon Merovingian Latin as by any other motivation. However, the
period when Italian writers, conscious of their renewed connoisseurship of
classical Latin style and civilization, first distinguished media tempora
deserves to be regarded as exceptional among these phases of revival. Villani's
evocation of those tempora was made during a formative stage in the
process that Lévy and others have called the ‘bifurcation’ of Europe. Placed
between 1300 and 1500, when Europe began to separate from other civilizations
participating in the world system, this stage brought new technology (the
shipbuilding of the Venetians and Genoese is a striking example), opened new
commercial channels and hastened the expansion of many cities. The profound
significance of these developments gives exceptional potency to the Trecento
discernment of media tempora in the heart of the bifurcation period, and
in the place where so many of its effects were felt at an early date. As Stock
observes, the potency was such that the humanists established a vital point of
reference in Western thought:
The
Renaissance invented the Middle Ages in order to define itself; the
Enlightenment perpetuated them in order to admire itself; and the Romantics
revived them in order to escape from themselves. In their widest ramifications
‘The Middle Ages’ thus constitute one of the most prevalent cultural myths of
the modern world.
In
Protestant countries such as England this ‘cultural myth’ drew strength not
merely from ‘rediscovered’ Latin texts but also from the upheavals of the
Reformation. As early as 1580–90 Roger Martin, a member of a gentry family,
compiled a book detailing what he could remember about the church at Long
Melford in Suffolk ‘as I did know it’, before the assaults of the reformers.
The dissolution of the monasteries, hospitals and other religious houses was
accompanied by what John Bale called a ‘lamentable spoyle of the lybraryes of
England’ (Scriptorium illustrium Maioris Brytanniae catalogus, Basle,
1559/R) impelling a tide of medieval manuscripts into the hands of parish
priests, higher clergy and landed gentlemen throughout England. The great
collections of men such as John Stow (d 1605), Robert Cotton (d
1631) and Robert Harley (d 1724) began here, and once deposited in the
British Library were of great value to the Enlightenment pioneers of music
history in Britain, Charles Burney and Sir John Hawkins. The scholarly Itinerary
of John Leland, appointed ‘King's antiquary’ in 1533, is justly famous, and is
paralleled somewhat later by the travels of continental Catholic scholars in
religious orders. These monks were sustained by a sense of continuity that
stimulated their interest in the medium aevum as a phase of their
order's history, and perhaps as the period when that history began. Linked by
the traditional bonds of monastic friendship, enhanced by shared antiquarian
interests, they were animated by the passion for manuscripts, inscriptions,
seals and architectural remains that is such a striking feature of European
culture from the late 16th century onwards. The Maurists Jean Mabillon and
Edmond Martène were particularly outstanding as travelling antiquaries. In 1717
Martène and Ursin Durand published the results of their visits to hundreds of
religious houses, many of them medieval, noting details of architecture, copying
inscriptions on tombs and ‘blowing the dust off the archives’ to gather
material for a revised edition of Gallia Christiana, still an important
source of information for music historians. By 1676 it was already possible for
a compendium such as Cristoph Keller's Nucleus historiae inter antiquam et
novam mediae to treat historia media, ‘middle history’, as a
rudiment of historical thought, while two years later Du Cange consolidated the
field with his monumental Glossarium ad scriptores mediae et infimae
latinitatis. The reference to a ‘middle Latin’ on the title-page of this
prestigious (and still indispensable) dictionary inspired other scholars such
as Polycarp Leyser (Historia Poetarum medii aevi, 1721) and Fabricius (Biblioteca
latina mediae et infimae aetatis, 1734–46). Together with the Glossarium
of Du Cange, citation of these works by title accounts for a high proportion of
references to the medium aevum and media aetas in Enlightenment
scholarship.
Medieval
3. Defining ‘medieval music’.
(i) Scholarship and
chronology.
(ii) Geopolitical
influences.
(iii) Musical
developments.
(iv) Current
approaches.
Medieval, §3: Defining
‘medieval music’
(i) Scholarship and chronology.
The
titles of the works cited above are a reminder that in the 17th and 18th
centuries scholars frequently (perhaps mostly) referred to the medieval period
when they were editing or studying Latin texts whose spelling, vocabulary and
cultural reference constituted, in their judgment, a specific project: the
study of writers from the medium aevum. This emphasis is apparent in
Gerbert's collection of Latin music treatises published in 1784, Scriptores
ecclesiastici de musica sacra potissimum. This collection, of seminal
importance for the subsequent image of music from the medium aevum, is
resolutely philological, alluding to all the 16th- and 17th-century scholars
mentioned above but making almost no reference to musical sources. Until the
end of the 19th century the scholarly study of medieval music owed much to
Gerbert and the tradition of Latin scholarship to which he assimilated the
subject. The account of music between the 12th century and the 15th given by
Burney is essentially a history of theory, while the greatest single
contribution of the 19th century, at least before the final decade, was
Coussemaker's Scriptorum de musica medii aevi nova series (1864–76).
This collection names Gerbert on the title-pages and extends his work of
editing the theorists. At that time the number of medieval compositions,
excluding chant, known to scholars cannot have exceeded 50 or so. Seminal
figures at the dawn of medieval musicology possessed a relatively extensive
knowledge of theory but little access to the music that the theory addressed.
The French Ars Nova, for example, was unknown before about 1900.
The
extraordinary work of scholars after 1900 towards establishing ‘medieval music’
as a field of knowledge and study contributed to a major change in the
structure of thought about the musical past. The art of composed, written
polyphony is generally regarded as the principal glory of Western musical
history, but after its birth its practitioners experienced something of a
disintegration of historical sense in relation to their craft. Music theorists
of the 15th and 16th centuries had at their disposal very little information
about the history of polyphony, scarcely knowing (or caring to know) any music
composed more than a generation before their own time. In a sense, this
reflects a positive aspect of European culture, for the changeableness of
polyphonic music and its notation reveals the desire for technical innovation
that is a characteristic feature of the West. Nonetheless, the speed of
stylistic and notational change could make older music all but unintelligible,
leaving musicians with a very feeble sense of the history of polyphony. To
compare a late 15th-century writer such as Tinctoris, baffled by the polyphonic
compositions of an earlier age, with Berno of Reichenau (d 1048), who
may have sketched the history of the psalms and psalmody from David to his own
time, is to realize how few materials were available to connoisseurs of
polyphony who might wish to frame the kind of historical picture they were
capable of devising in other fields of enquiry, including the study of
plainchant.
As
this want of primary materials, in the form of musical compositions, was
gradually remedied after 1900 it became apparent that the history of music in
the later ‘medieval’ period could not be readily accommodated to the kind of
narrative presented in Burckhardt's highly influential Die Kultur der
Renaissance in Italien (1860). There can be no assessment of the
Renaissance as a periodization that does not also stir the ‘medieval’ question
to some degree, if only by implication, and it has generally been in
discussions of the Renaissance that the Middle Ages have been renogotiated as a
period in music history. Burckhardt, who duly noted the importance of Flemish
music and musicians in 15th-century Italy, contrasted a conservative,
scholastic northern Europe with a humanistic, individualistic Italy.
Dissatisfaction with this model (here somewhat crudely described) increased in
the 20th century as the number of editions of compositions increased. Besseler
published his formative study Die Musik des Mittelalters und der Renaissance
in 1931; by 1966, when monumental series such as Corpus Mensurabilis Musicae,
to which Besseler was an early and distinguished contributor, and Polyphonic
Music of the Fourteenth Century were in progress, Besseler reflected that
he had given insufficient attention to the problem of periodization and
remarked, perhaps with some exaggeration, that the Renaissance is ‘certainly
the most problematic epoch-designation in the history of culture’. More recently
Owens has argued that ‘our present understanding of the Renaissance appears to
have as one of its cornerstones an accident of historiography: Ambros's attempt
to apply Burckhardt's notion at a time when there was no adequate understanding
of music before 1450’. She proposes ‘a single period extending from about 1250
or 1300 to 1550 or 1600’ united by the use of the mensural system and the
cultivation of counterpoint.
Although
Owens does not emphasize the fact, a periodization of this kind, which
undermines the medieval-to-Renaissance model, can be tied into many strands of
20th-century thought. The Italian humanists' conception of a medium aevum
has provided a broad and tempting target for ‘medievalists’ (a word of recent
origin) for many years (see Ferguson), but since the 1960s such assaults have
become easier to mount with each passing decade, especially if the target
chosen is the central point of Italian Renaissance humanism, the encounter with
classical literature. The gradual decline of classics as a subject in schools
and universities after World War II made the humanists' connoisseurship of
Latin style seem increasingly remote. At the same time, social and political
changes from the 1950s quenched the imperialist spirit that was fired
throughout the period of European colonialism by an admiration for Roman
literature, government and conquest. Developments in critical theory,
especially from the 1960s onwards, make it seem almost indefensible for Hale to
declare that the humanists allowed the voices of ancient authors ‘to speak
clearly again … their personalities restored’; it is striking that a book
seeking to constitute the Renaissance in a broad and authoritative way should
make a claim about the central activity of the Italian humanists that many literary
critics would reject out of hand. Most recently, the debate about the validity
of acknowledging a postmodern phase in 20th-century culture has prompted the
most stealthy attack of all, namely the suggestion that the old narrative of
‘antiquity to Middle Ages to Renaissance’ can no longer serve any kind of
historical thinking unless a fourth term, ‘postmodernism’, be added. In an
influential essay, Nichols argued that ‘modernity has had to come to grips with
its own historical identity. Its patterns are being surveyed, limits assigned’.
Thus the postmodern observer who engages with the medieval centuries finds that
the ‘Modern’ period has become the new ‘middle age’. There now seems little
room for a triumphalist account of Western achievement from the Greeks onwards
in which the Middle Ages and Renaissance are ‘links in a chain which includes
the Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment, the Industrial
Revolution, and so on’ (Burke).
Whatever
it is to be called, there exists a body of notated music that has certain
consistent features that underwent major changes as the bifurcation period
1300–1500 proceeded and that developed in relation to political and cultural
circumstances that themselves underwent major changes in the same period.
Medieval, §3: Defining
‘medieval music’
(ii) Geopolitical influences.
Certain
aspects of human geography are particularly important. Abu-Lughod has proposed
that most of Europe's competitors in the world system declined after 1300 and
that this was the principal source of the subsequent European hegemony. This is
convincing in some respects, but the ascent of western Europe owes something to
a friction between different languages, customs and jurisdictions in a space
that presents no major barrier to the circulation of people and ideas. In
western Europe no city is very far from the coast, a major river or a valley;
no mountain range is impassable and much of the territory is verdant plain.
After 1100 the whole area was free from the external threats that could impel
an empire such as the Ottoman to become centralized and militarized. The
evolution of a common musical language in the period 1380–1500, comprehensively
studied by Strohm, reflects in part the gradual emergence of larger political
configurations making intensified or enhanced use of Europe's natural channels
of communication. The corridor of the Rhine–Alps–Po river plain, for example,
began to supersede the Meuse–Saône–Rhône highway, one of the great pathways of
medieval civilization; it was the former that led to the great conciliar venues
of Basle and Konstanz, whose importance in the rise of a ‘European’ musical
language in the 15th century has been urged by Strohm. The medieval period
reveals many configurations of space, power and musical repertory that differ
from those described by Strohm. It would be difficult to find a more intensely
localized relation between these three factors, and one with broader
consequences, than the case of Paris in the late 12th century, for the creation
of the Notre Dame organum repertory (see Notre Dame school), which is the matrix of the
motet and of much else besides in later music history, is hard to imagine
without the decision of the Capetian kings to establish a royal capital in the
best natural fortress in their domains. Paris lies at the centre of a series of
concentric escarpments that provide good natural defences to the east (where
the contested borders with the counts of Flanders and with the Empire lay) and
that can draw upon a fertile hinterland. By the 16th century, when the domain
of the French kings was much larger, there were many more defensive options.
It
is possible to expand such considerations to distinguish three medieval
Europes, and so three musical zones whose distinctiveness is perhaps most
easily shown by reference to courtly song. One, in the south, comprises
northern Spain, Languedoc, Provence, Italy and Sicily. Another lies in what are
now France and Germany. The third, to the north, comprises the lands of the
present United Kingdom and Ireland, Scandinavia and the Baltic seaboard. The
southernmost territory was a pluralist zone where the song culture of the
troubadours in Old Occitan (see Troubadours, trouvères) was admired and shared by
Catalan, Gallego, Italian and Sicilian poets who either wrote in a literary
form of Old Occitan or used a high-status form of their native Romance
language. Until the late 14th century the influence of this southern territory
upon the development of polyphonic song was slight. In the northernmost
territory, in the Atlantic or around the Baltic, many languages were in use,
mostly either Celtic or Germanic, but there is no evidence that any written
tradition of monophonic or polyphonic courtly song was developed there. The
exception is England, annexed to the French heartland by the Normans in 1066,
but the very scant remains of vernacular song in English and Anglo-Norman
provide a clear illustration that a written tradition of courtly monody arose
only when a prestige form of the vernacular was available or could plausibly be
created on the basis of a recognized ‘court’ usage. It is part of what makes
the ‘medieval’ music history of this northern zone that no vernacular achieved
this status. In contrast, the sacred polyphony in British sources before 1400,
an astonishingly rich and self-contained repertory, absorbed influences from
abroad but transmitted very few, and appears to have been associated with a
fundamentally different sense of the basic materials of composition (see below
on the use of just intonation in England). The vogue for English polyphony
abroad between approximately 1420 and 1440 is an exceptional departure and of
primary importance in the rise of a ‘European’ music (see Discant,
§II).
This
leaves the ‘central’ zone: the area between the Loire and the Rhine, understood
to form a corridor that reaches down to embrace northern Italy, has many claims
to be regarded as the metropolitan area of medieval civilization before the
15th century (see Bartlett). The desire to live the eremetical life in the
desert, so important to the monastic life of the 12th century, was first
strongly registered in northern Italy where the rapid process of incastellamento
had been proceeding apace throughout the 11th century. This is where the
fundamental technology of Western music, the staff (see Notation,
§III), was
invented by a monk, Guido of Arezzo, whose contacts with the
eremetical movement of his day were close. To the north-west, on the European
Plain, lay the heartland of heavy cavalry, castles and superior ballistics.
From here the French language, originally the Romance dialect of the royal
domains around Paris, expanded its territories as the Capetian kings pursued a
vigorous policy of enlarging what they (like most medieval kings) regarded as a
family domain. By 1500, 80% of Europe's kings and queens were French in the
broadest sense of the word, and already in the late 13th century Martino da
Canal wrote his history of the Venetians in French because ‘the French language
runs through the world’. The gradual decline of monophonic song in the
pluralistic southern zone – there are no musical sources of this art in any
southern Romance language after about 1350 – has as much to do with the complex
geopolitical changes that advanced the hegemony of French as with single, often
cited causes such as the Albigensian Crusade or the rise of polyphonic secular
repertories in Italy and France. By the later 14th century, French had become
the language of polyphonic art song in the south, as Ars
Subtiliorsources
such as the Chantilly Manuscript (F-CHd 564), associated with the court
of Foix, and the various early 15th-century sources from the Veneto, plainly
show, (see Sources, ms, §§II–VIII).
Medieval, §3: Defining
‘medieval music’
(iii) Musical developments.
There
are other criteria which impart a special significance to musical developments
in the period 1300–1500.
(a) Construction on a tenor.
There
has been much debate about the compositional procedures of late medieval
musicians, especially concerning the method of simultaneous as opposed to
layered composition. Leech-Wilkinson and Bent represent the current axes of the
discussion in English. There seems no need to enforce a firm distinction
between these methods, since it is possible to imagine a composer foreseeing
and drafting at least the occasional possibility for third- or even
fourth-voice counterpoint while composing an indispensable and self-sufficient
superius-tenor duet. Nonetheless, composition upon a tenor part is fundamental
to all medieval music. The gradual evolution of the contratenor bassus
in the later 15th century, and subsequently of a functioning bass, modified the
sonorous and eventually the contrapuntal structure of polyphony, altering the
play of harmonics in the sound and introducing contrasting vocal colours and
techniques of production (see Cantus firmus; Counterpoint; Tenor,
§2).
(b) Exploration of tessitura.
In
England the irruption of something akin to the modern bass voice into written
polyphony appears to have taken place between the death of Dunstaple in 1453
and the compilation of the Eton Choirbook (GB-WRec 178) around 1500. The
evidence of contratenor bassus parts in continental music suggests a
broadly similar chronology. Although the compass exploited by composers of
polyphony had been gradually expanding throughout the 14th century, the
decisive quality of the later 15th-century developments is shown by the
unprecedented response of instrument makers. Towards the last quarter of the
15th century craftsmen began to scale down various kinds of musical
instruments, creating alto, tenor and bass sizes so that consorts might play
vocal music. Again, the evidence suggests a considerable evolution in the sound
world of composed polyphony in the second half of the 15th century.
(c) Pythagorean tuning.
Before
the mid-15th century (that date is somewhat arbitrary) polyphony was based on
the way the notes of the diatonic scale strike the ear when sounded
simultaneously in pairs (‘diads’), some diads being judged more stable than
others and the criteria of judgment lying principally with Pythagorean
intonation.
Treatises on the monochord and other instruments explain how the seven naturals
A, B, C, D, E, F, G and B
are established, in the Pythagorean manner, in steps
of pure octaves and 5ths. This must be the scale that boys learning chant heard
repeatedly when set to study at the monochord or organistrum. Contrasted with
the intervals offered by equal temperament, the Pythagorean tone appears
slightly wide (204 cents not 200), the major 3rds more strikingly so (408 cents
not 400, far from pure), as are the major 6ths (906 not 900, again far from
pure). The minor 3rds are comparatively narrow (294 cents rather than 300) and
so are the semitone steps medieval polyphony exploits most (the diatonic
semitone, 90 cents not 100).
There
is evidence in musical compositions that French and Italian musicians conceived
their intervals in Pythagorean terms. The cadential patterns of Ars
Nova
polyphony, both in French practice (ex.1a–c) and in Italian (primarily
ex.1a), clearly exploit the straining effect of wide major 3rds, and the
familiar rule requiring a perfect consonance to be approached by the nearest
imperfect one suggests that this tension and release was regarded as an
indispensable source of impetus in the flow of sound. English usage appears to
have been somewhat different: Walter Odington (Summa de speculatione
musice, c1300; ed. CSM, xiv, 1970), report that Pythagorean 3rds are
not consonances, but ‘the voices of men, through their subtlety, draw them into
a sweet and thoroughly consonant mixture’ (Hammond, 70–71). This may be
construed as a reference to the just tuning – or at least to the adjusted
tuning – of 3rds, and it may be possible to argue for a ‘mixed’ intonation in
England. The anonymous Singularis laudis digna (ex.2), a virtuoso composition in
honour of King Edward III (d 1377), begins with the kind of precocious
gesture sometimes found in the English repertory, and one may imagine the 3rds
in the two initial chords ‘drawn into a sweet and thoroughly consonant
mixture’, in Odington's phrase, for no traction outwards seems required. In the
third bar, however, the parts move towards the 6-3 established in bar 4 (the f
' is signed in the
source), which resolves conventionally. Here the major 3rd and 6th would surely
have been widened to Pythagorean size or beyond.
Pythagorean
tuning gradually waned during the later 15th century (see Lindley for an
investigation of the process on the basis of both practical and theoretical
sources and with special reference to music for keyboard, where in polyphonic
playing, the implications of any tuning system chosen are necessarily
far-reaching; see also Temperaments). The theoretical evidence is clear: a
sheet appended to the manuscript of Henri Arnaut de Zwolle (F-Pn
lat.7295, c1440), for example, gives a recipe for establishing a just
scale with pure 3rds. Other evidence might be cited, both from treatises and
from musical compositions, and it is tempting to suppose that an impression of
English tuning, among other things, is embodied in the famous reference by the
poet Martin le Francto a contenance angloise.
Medieval, §3: Defining
‘medieval music’
(iv) Current approaches.
A
central preoccupation of later 20th-century thinking in the humanities, perhaps
its most significant legacy to the 21st, was the impulse to historicize current
codes of understanding, exploring the penumbra of meanings around current ways
of reasoning and explaining. This legacy is apparent in the far-reaching
changes that have affected the transcription into modern notation of music from
the 12th to the 16th centuries, probably the fundamental way of constituting a
repertory as a source of critical, historical and aesthetic issues to be
addressed. There has been an erosion of confidence in certain notational
conventions primarily associated with later music, particularly the reduction
of note values, barring in accordance with modern practice and the transference
of music notated without measure into a mensural form on the grounds that it
must have been that way even though the scribes did not, or could not, record
it so. This last convention, which often entailed the first two, has greatly
affected the appearance of early monophonic song, both in Latin and in the
vernacular, and of organum. The tide of change is beginning to reach the Notre
Dame conductus. For these and many later repertories, the possibilities offered
by computer setting of music and computer graphics will surely prove to be of
seminal importance.
In
retrospect, the rise of interest in historical performance may count as one of
the most significant developments in modern and (if there is such a thing)
postmodern negotiations with medieval music (see Performing
practice, §I, 2–3). Medieval harmony, which proved so distressing to many scholars
until at least the 1930s, has now become a fairly familiar corner of the vast
landscape of commercially recorded sound; establishing the concept of
‘medieval’ music throughout the world, it has been allied to social and
cultural changes. These plainly include the developments of Modernism in music,
which make medieval harmony seem less shocking than it did two generations ago,
but it is also important to cite the increase in standards of living since
World War II, which is ultimately responsible for the proliferation of domestic
sound reproduction equipment and the large body of journalism now associated
with home listening.
The
increasing familiarity of an entity on record that is performed, marketed and
reviewed as medieval music has caused a certain uneasiness among scholars.
Sometimes regarding themselves, with justice, as the ones best equipped to
interpret the historical, critical and aesthetic issues presented by the
shifting phenomenon of ‘medieval’ music, they will surely continue to raise the
important philosophical question of whether medieval music in modern
performance, or in a modern edition, really is ‘medieval’ music in any
appreciable sense. It remains impossible to predict whether the terms and
concepts ‘medieval’ and ‘Renaissance’ will be retained in the long term. Only
now are the materials widely available to assess them. It is noteworthy,
however, that the most sophisticated treatment of these issues yet written
avoids the terms ‘medieval’ and ‘Renaissance’ wherever possible, both in its
title and in much of its discussion, preferring for the former The Rise of
European Music, 1380–1500.
Medieval
BIBLIOGRAPHY
AmbrosGM
CoussemakerS
GerbertS
MGG2 (‘Mittelalter’; M.
Haas)
J. Burckhardt: Die Kultur
der Renaissance in Italien (Basel, 1860; Eng. trans. in numerous edns, incl.
London, 1944; Oxford, 1945; New York, 1958)
G. Gordon: Medium Aevum
and the Middle Age (Oxford, 1925)
H. Besseler: Die Musik
des Mittelalters und der Renaissance (Postdam, 1931/R)
G. le Cerf and E.-R. Labande, eds.: Instruments
de musique du Xve siècle: les traités d'Henri-Arnaut de Zwolle et de diverses
anonymes (Paris, 1932/R) [incl. partial facs., transcr. and Eng. trans.]
N. Edelmann: ‘The Early Uses of Medium Aevum, Moyen Age, Middle
Ages’, Romanic Review, xxix (1938), 3–25;
xxx (1939), 327–30
W.K. Ferguson: The
Renaissance in Historical Thought: Five Centuries of Interpretation (Boston, 1948)
R.L. Crocker: ‘Pythagorean Mathematics and Music’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, xxii
(1963–4), 189, 325; repr. in Studies in Medieval Music Theory and the Early Sequence (Aldershot, 1997)
A. Johnstone: Enchanted
Ground (London, 1964)
H. Besseler: ‘Das Renaissanceproblem in der Musik’, AMw, xxiii (1966), 1–10
J. Voss: Das
Mittelalter im historischen Denken Frankreichs (Munich,
1972)
M. Lindley: ‘Fifteenth-Century Evidence for Meantone Temperament’, PRMA, cii (1975–6), 37–51
J. Le Goff: Pour un
antre Moyen Age: temps, travail et culture en Occident
(Paris, 1977/R; Eng.
trans., 1980, as Time, Work and Culture in the Middle Ages)
R. Pernoud: Pour en
finir avec le Moyen Age (Paris, 1977)
M. Lindley: ‘Pythagorean Intonation and the Rise of the Triad’, RMARC, no.16 (1980), 4–61
T. Burrows: ‘Unmaking the Middle Ages’, Journal of Medieval History, vii (1981), 127–34
J. Alsop: The Rare Art
Traditions (London, 1982)
B. Stock: The
Implications of Literacy: Written Language and Models of Interpretation in the
Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (Princeton, NJ, 1983)
F.C. Robinson: ‘Medieval, the Middle Ages’, Speculum, lix (1984), 745–56
C.V. Palisca: Humanism in
Italian Renaissance Musical Thought (New Haven, CT, 1985)
M.L. McLaughlin: ‘Humanist Conceptions of Renaissance and Middle Ages in the Tre- and Quattrocento’, Renaissance Studies, ii (1987), 131–42
J.L. Abu-Lughod: Before
European Hegemony: the World System A.D.1250–1350 (New
York, 1989)
M. Camille: The Gothic
Idol (Cambridge, 1989)
D. Leech-Wilkinson: Machaut's
Mass (Oxford, 1990)
J.A. Owens: ‘Music Historiography and the Definition of “Renaissance”’, Notes, xlvii (1990–91), 305–30
S.G. Nichols: ‘The New Medievalism: Tradition and Discontinuity in Medieval Culture’, The New Medievalism, ed. M.S. and K. Brownlee and S.G. Nichols (Baltimore, 1991), 1–26
D. Aers: ‘A Whisper in the Ear of Early Modernists, or Reflections on Literary
Critics Writing the “History of the Subject”’, Culture and History 1350–1600: Essays on English Communities,
Identities and Writing (New York, 1992), 172–202
M. Camille: Image on the
Edge: the Margins of Medieval Art (London, 1992)
R. Bartlett: The Making
Of Europe: Conquest, Colonization and Cultural Change 950–1350 (London, 1993)
W.D. Paden: ‘Is there a Middle in this Road? Reflections on the New Philology’,Towards a Synthesis? Essays on the New
Philology, ed. K. Busby (Amsterdam, 1993), 119–30
C. Page: Discarding
Images: Reflections on Music and Culture in Medieval France (Oxford, 1993)
R. Strohm: The Rise of
European Music, 1380–1500 (Cambridge, 1993)
L.J. Workman, ed.: Medievalism
in Europe, i, Studies in Medievalism, v (Cambridge, 1993)
J. Hale: The
Civilization of Europe in the Renaissance (New York, 1994)
K. Verduin, ed.: Medievalism
in North America, Studies in Medievalism, vi
(Cambridge, 1994)
J.A. Owens: ‘Was there a Renaissance in Music?’, Language and Images of Renaissance Italy, ed.
A. Brown (Oxford, 1995), 111–25
R.H. Bloch and S.G. Nichols, eds.: Medievalism
and the Modernist Temper (Baltimore, 1996)
J. Lévy: Europe: une
géographie (Paris, 1997)
M. Bent: ‘The Grammar of Early Music: Preconditions for Analysis’, Tonal Structures in Early Music, ed. C.C. Judd (New York, 1998), 15–59
P. Burke: The European
Renaissance: Centres and Peripheries (London, 1998)