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

Embodied in a handful of manuscripts, the central evidence for Dillon's book consists of several hundred short polytextual motets composed in late thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century France. The distinctive feature of this new genre was the overlapping of (usually three) voices, each with its own words, which arguably gave rise to an effect that made the sense of the words subordinate to the sounds that accompanied them.¹ The crux of Dillon's argument is that these musical sounds themselves conveyed a range of supplemental, "supermusical" meanings that had a demonstrable relationship with other, nonmusical, sounds that had meaning for people at the time—including city sounds, the noise of charivari, the nonsense of the madman, and the sounds of public and private prayer.

Methodologically, Dillon draws on theoretical insights from the field of sound studies (a still-developing discipline that "listens" to the "soundworlds" of particular societies and individuals), combining them with the techniques that cultural historians and musicologists now use to interrogate medieval manuscripts.² The twist, however, is that she is not trying to recover past sounds, but following Bakhtin's dialogical model, to explore how sound entered into the cultural production of artists (musicians, poets, illuminators, and manuscript makers) who constructed the sense for sound in the act of representing it.³ Some of these representations are reproduced in the book (black and white images, verses, and musical examples) and on a companion website (color pictures), but presumably, and regrettably, for reasons of cost and copyright, no recorded interpretations of the motets that are central to Dillon's argument are available.

Dillon's methods are exemplified in the second chapter, which explores how artists represented the soundscape of medieval Paris in various media. One source is the illuminated manuscript Vie de Saint Denis (1317), some of the magnificent images of which portray civic hubbub and song as constitutive of the city's life. Next she examines four texts describing Paris and its commonplaces, showing how various rhetorical techniques vividly convey and give meaning to the chaotic sounds of the city. Among the most notable are the cries of street vendors, an audible trace of which finds its way into one of the few motets that refer explicitly to Paris. According to Dillon, this contrived musical effect recalls and idealizes the sounds of the city and suggests that the artists involved recognized an affinity between urban sound and song that "contrives words to clash and cancel out their semantic content" (90).

This strategy of juxtaposing sources that are not normally considered to be related is repeated to good effect in subsequent chapters, which gradually attune readers' attention to more aspects of sonic experience in the Middle Ages. Dillon's new way of imagining the past and will hopefully "encourage others to turn an ear to the acoustic past" (328), including those who have no idea what a motet sounds like.