The Modern Invention of Medieval Music: Scholarship, Ideology, Performance (review)

The Modern Invention of Medieval Music is devoted to scholarship over the last two centuries concerning the relative use of voices and instruments in late medieval polyphony (thirteenth to fifteenth centuries) and the consequences of that scholarship for modern performance. It is no narrow study but surveys a wide range of musicological, historical, social, and ideological issues, as well as the careers and personalities of many individuals concerned with editing and performing medieval music. The present book joins many others published in recent years in reexamining the aspect of musical scholarship that has come to be called "historically informed performance" and formerly known as "performance practice."

Daniel Leech-Wilkinson is a distinguished British musicologist whose publications include an edition and study of the Mass by the fourteenth-century composer Guillaume de Machaut and scholarly articles on Machaut's music. The title of the present book immediately presents the reader with a challenge since we do not readily think of medieval music as a "modern" invention. At one point in the book the author offers as an alternative term "reinvention" (p. 215). Other possibilities suggest themselves: "interpretation," "understanding," "perception," "discovery," all of which also pose difficulties.

The notation of pitch and rhythm had become fairly stabilized by the late Middle Ages and our current knowledge of those musical parameters rests on documentary evidence, i.e., the written music and treatises dealing with its realization. Other aspects of medieval performance, however, such as scoring, pitch level, tempo, dynamics, phrasing, articulation, etc., remain largely undocumented and their modern interpretation is based heavily on cultural fashion and the subjective judgment of scholars and performers. Surveying the history of transcription, publication, performance, and reception of this music over the past two hundred years, Leech-Wilkinson's real subject is the modern reinvention of the music as heard, shifting from performances by mixed vocal and instrumental ensembles common in the recent past to the current fashion of voices alone. He presents his thesis from a skeptical, highly personal point of view, invoking both objective historical evidence and subjective views about how the music should sound to support his argument.

The book is divided into four lengthy chapters framed by an introduction and conclusion: (1) "The Invention of the Voices-and-Instruments Hypothesis," (2) "The Re-invention of the A Capella Hypothesis," (3) "Hearing Medieval Harmonies," and (4) "Evidence, Interpretation, Power and Persuasion." Leech-Wilkinson's starting point is the awakening awareness of medieval polyphony in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the writings of antiquarians and early music historians such as Sir John Hawkins, Martin Gerbert, Charles Burney, Johann Nicolaus Forkel, Raphael Georg Kiesewetter, Charles-Edmond-Henri de Coussemaker, and August Wilhelm Ambros. Some of these writers, especially Burney and Ambros, reacted positively to music of the late fifteenth century, but none found much of artistic value in earlier music. They began, however, with the unquestioned assumption that music with text was entirely sung. This view began to change with the appearance of modern editions of substantial amounts of the music, one of the earliest being that drawn from Oxford MS Canonici 213 (c. 1430) by J. F. R. and C. Stainer (Early Bodleian Music: Dufay and His Contemporaries [New York, London: Novello, 1898; reprint, Amsterdam: F. A. M. Knuf, 1966]),followed byeditions and studies of fourteenth-century music by Hugo Riemann, Friedrich Ludwig, and Johannes Wolf in the first decade of the twentieth century. The Stainers drew attention to the fact that only the cantus parts in the Oxford manuscript were consistently texted and suggested that the tenors and contras may have been instrumental. As fourteenth and early-fifteenth-century music with its disjunct contratenors and complex, often irregular rhythms (judged to be in an "instrumental" style) became better known, this hypothesis gained strength and a following. Bolstered by the visual...