Dante's Journey to Polyphony (review)

The role of music in Dante's life and his Divine Comedy has fascinated and perplexed generations of scholars. In his Trattatello in laude di Dante XX, Boccaccio writes that Dante was musically literate: "In his youth, he [Dante] delighted himself with music and songs. And he befriended the finest singers and players of his day. He composed many lyrics that were then embellished by pleasant and masterful melodies." Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, in the second of his introductory sonnets to his 1895 translation, even described the Divine Comedy as music: "What passionate outcry of a soul in pain / Up rose this poem of the earth and air / This medieval miracle of song!" Though no work by Dante was set to music in his lifetime, Nino Pirrotta, the renowned trecento musicologist, published a paper bestowing on Dante the title "Dante, Musicus" (Pirrotta, "Dante 'Musicus': Gothicism, Scholasticism, and Music," Speculum 43, no. 2 [April 1968]: 245).

To this rich scholarship of Dante and music, Francesco Ciabattoni, assistant professor in the Department of French at Dalhousie University, contributes his insightful Dante's Journey to Polyphony, in which his primary focus is "the manner and meaning of musical performance as represented in Dante's poem" (p. 4). Ciabattoni sets out to demonstrate that music is a structural pillar of the Commedia and that it evolves, or morphs, from "infernal music" to monophony in the Purgatorio, to polyphony in the Paradiso. Ciabattoni makes an important contribution to the field of Dante and music by suggesting that many of the vocal performances mentioned by Dante were sung by people singing separate parts. The addition of improvised melodies above sacred melodies was certainly practiced in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Italy and other parts of Europe, and Ciabattoni applies rather recent scholarship by Timothy McGee and Randall Rosenfeld to support his argument (The Sound of Medieval Song: Ornamentation and Vocal Style According to the Treatises [New York: Clarendon Press, 1998]). Musical transformation, or the evolution from musical noise to polyphony, as a metaphor for salvation in the Divine Comedy is an imaginative and enticing idea. A smooth musical progression, however, is at times difficult to follow.

To be persuaded by Ciabattoni's claim of musical transformation in the Commedia, the scholar must take as fact that cacophony is music and that polyphony was improvised in the early trecento. Let us begin with sounds in the Inferno, which musicologists have traditionally refused to characterize as music (Pirrotta, p. 253). In fact, one of the reasons that the Inferno is hell is that it's so noisy. Giotto's Last Judgment in Padua may be seen as a parallel visual example. In the Giotto fresco, angels blare on trumpets, while the miserable are dismembered to the soundtrack of noisy gurgles. Ciabattoni cleverly, though perhaps not completely persuasively, argues that ten or so rather oblique references to songs and/or instruments constitute "infernal music." For instance, Ciabattoni cites "This hymn they gurgle in their gullets, / for they cannot get a word out whole" (Inf. VII.125-26) and "Off they set along the left-hand bank, / but first each pressed his tongue between his teeth / to blow a signal to their leader, / and he had made a trumpet of his asshole" (Inf. XXI.136-39; Ciabattoni consistently uses the translation by Robert and Jean Hollander, published in three volumes [New York: Doubleday, 2000, 2003, 2007]). For Ciabattoni, Dante's cacophonies are "perversions" of music. John Cage might even have agreed with Ciabattoni on this point, because Cage believed that everything was music, even silence—it all depends on how one listens to ambient sound. In Ciabattoni's reading of the Inferno, it's how one reads the musical references that determines whether the noises are, in fact, music.

Ciabattoni makes a brilliant contribution to the field of music by arguing that Dante must be referring to an improvised multi-voiced polyphonic style of singing in many instances in the Commedia. Ciabattoni introduces the...