The Sound of Medieval Song: Ornamentation and Vocal Style According to the Treatises by Timothy J. McGee (review)

338 letters in canada 1999 poem. Lee writes of the poem, in short, as he taught it: `I know from years of conducting this kind of critical reading with students that there is no better way to help them get their minds and imaginations inside the Old English poem.' Lee's method of working makes one regret that the book has no index of passages cited so that one could easily find what it has to say about a given line. Lee may well be right that there is no better way of introducing Beowulf to students and readers than through close readings of its text; but there are other ways that are equally good. In his critical practice, he admits as much by drawing heavily on Frye's theory of romance and its various stages. His general purpose in adducing this theory, to remind readers that there is much in Beowulf that partakes of the marvellous and thus resists the claims of strict realism, seems valuable to me. But the longer excurses about Frye's criticism seem out of place in a book about Beowulf, perhaps because there is an awkward fit between the poem and the mandarin, system-building intelligence that brought forth Anatomy of Criticism. That Beowulf does not figure largely in that book suggests Frye may have suspected as much himself. Beneath its always lucid, always courteous manner, Gold-Hall and EarthDragon reads as a polemic against those who would stray too far from the text and its web of language. The best way to read Lee's book, I think, is to surround it with as many texts of Beowulf as one's desk will hold B with Klaeber, Wrenn, Jack, Mitchell and Robinson, Zupitza's facsimile B for that is the critical company that it desires and deserves. (NICHOLAS HOWE) Timothy J. McGee. The Sound of Medieval Song: Ornamentation and Vocal Style According to the Treatises Clarendon. 1998. xx, 196. $101.50 The verbal description of non-verbal phenomena has long remained a difficulty for musicians who attempted to convey the sound music makes to other musicians and listeners. And the interpretation of such passages, with their circumlocutions, non-technical vocabulary, and subjective statements, is correspondingly difficult. What, for example, is a smooth sound? or a round one? Different listeners may well possess different conceptions of what such descriptions mean. For music before about 1900, we do not have the advantage of recorded sound to provide some kind of sonic reference in support of written accounts. When we ask, `What did Gould/Callas/Heifetz sound like?' we can answer that question, with greater or lesser fidelity, by turning to the recordings they left behind. But what about Johannes Ockeghem's bass voice, or G.F. Händel's organ improvisations? No CDs or DVDs of which to avail ourselves there! Timothy J. McGee constructs a synthetic picture of medieval singing techniques and vocal production from the written descriptions of singing humanities 339 that have survived from the period. The book is wide-ranging and, to the best of my knowledge, comprehensive in terms of the authors and works consulted. In sum, McGee has examined virtually every passage from the medieval written record that discusses singing. He characterizes these authors, surely for economy, as music theorists, and, although many do fit the description, it is certainly not accurate to assign this appellation to writers such as Bernard of Clairvaux (twelfth-century theologian and homilist) and John the Decon (ninth-century biographer of Gregory the Great). McGee prints the passages in the original language in a useful appendix, together with concise biographical and bibliographical identification . When they are discussed in the main text, McGee gives translations newly made by Randall A. Rosenfeld. So, readers have at their disposal an anthology of the pertinent passages in Latin and English. And they exemplify all of the difficulties adumbrated in the opening paragraph above, with the result, therefore, that they require the kind of interpretation McGee here offers. His discussion is organized around themes, such as `Vocal Style' and `Graces,' for which he collects and interprets the appropriate passages. The translations are clear and accurate, for the most part...