The Sense of Sound: Musical Meaning in France, 1260–1330 by Emma Dillon (review)

This groundbreaking book develops medieval musicology from the perspective of historical cultural studies. Plucking medieval song from its traditional disciplinary shrine, Emma Dillon inserts it into a medieval soundscape reconstructed from literary and art-historical sources. Music is situated rather than haloed; and while its sonority may be intensified in the process, it can also be complicated and contested by dissonant or distracting noises. Indeed, song becomes its own source of dissonance and distraction as the sense of the sung text(s) is subordinated to the sonority of a pre- or nonlinguistic surge of sound. Characteristic of the musical period on which Dillon focuses is the polyphonic motet, instances of which are discussed regularly throughout her exposition. Motets have been the object of exquisite dissection, but (following the work of Christopher Page) Dillon encourages us to see them not only as complexly performed texts, or sets of texts in meaningful tension, but also as soundscapes that make competing and sometimes incompatible claims on the listener’s ear. This superabundance of musical sound into which individual melody and text both fold she felicitously calls ‘supermusicality’, a term that is reiterated and refined as her study advances from vernacular works that evoke the sounds of the city or court (Chapters 1–4) through to works of private devotion and prayer (5–9). One of the strengths of this book is the way it shows how complex sonorities bind together realms traditionally thought of as distinct. In the main her listening is guided by a kind of homespun phenomenology (‘Let’s walk’, ‘Let’s listen’, ‘Imagine . . .’) and by faith in the many ‘witnesses’ that the past provides to its practices, but a theoretical steer to the resources of supermusicality is imparted by Bakhtin’s concept of heteroglossia, or ‘the primacy of context over text’ (p. 46). The exuberance of Bakhtinian discursivity readily translates into the hubbub of medieval street cries, the ruckus of charivari, or the ravings of the dervé in Adam de la Halle’s Jeu de la feuillée, and helps capture the subversive energy of marginal images in devotional books. Despite this being an illuminating study of an important period of French culture, the book’s main weakness is its French. Although Dillon references some francophone critical writings, she is much more reliant on anglophone scholarship, and, except when the medieval texts she quotes have been reliably translated by others, her renderings are at best approximate, at worst plain wrong. Especially in Chapters 2 and 3, Middle French verb forms are translated seemingly at random, and expressions are misconstrued to an extent that is hair-raising in a work that OUP has presumably subjected to rigorous external and internal vetting. Dillon’s engaging subordination of sense to sound is impressive; her book’s cavalier treatment of the sense of French texts is not.