Songs in British Sources c. 1150–1300 ed. by Helen Deeming (review)

The aim of this collection of songs transmitted in British manuscripts from the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries is to compensate for a major defect in the history of medieval music of the British Isles. Most of the pieces edited in Helen Deeming’s Songs in British Sources c. 1150–1300, monophonic songs in particular, have been so far neglected by musicological inquiry, in contrast with the greater consideration accorded to polyphonic music from the same period and provenance. The ambition of this volume, as clearly stated in the preface, is to make “a significant contribution to our knowledge of musical activity in Britain before 1300” (p. xxi). The task is essentially accomplished, as the edition provides good quality transcriptions and translations of early British songs that in most cases have remained silent in their sources for centuries, and have not been accessible before. The volume comprises three main sections: an introduction with concise descriptions of methodologies, repertory and its sources, and editorial criteria (pp. xxv–lv); the transcriptions and translations of the songs (pp. 3–160); and a textual commentary with brief discussions on the contents of individual sources, and information on individual pieces (pp. 165–224). In addition, a valuable highpoint of this work is certainly the companion online resource in the Digital Image Archive of Medieval Music (http://www.diamm.ac.uk/resources/sbs/, accessed 27 August 2014) that offers highly defined digital reproductions of the original sources, and in-depth analyses of their musical notations.

Admittedly, the edition does not seek to be comprehensive: the term song itself, though rather general, limits the range to music that sets poetry (in English, French, and Latin) with no liturgical destination or context. In addition, Deeming further narrows the field to exclude certain categories of compositions, as for instance motets, which are essentially set to liturgical chants and have their own separate tradition. It is worth noting that other omissions include the Later Cambridge Songbook (Cambridge, University Library, Ff.1.17) and the thirteenth-century Notre Dame collection W₁ (Wolfenbüttel, Herzog-August-Bibliothek, 628 Helmst.): the songs transmitted in these sources, as Deeming explains, have already been edited in existing publications (The Later Cambridge Songs: An English Song Collection of the Twelfth Century, ed. John Stevens [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004]; Notre Dame and Related Conductus: Opera Omnia, ed. Gordon A. Anderson, 9 vols., Collected Works = Gesamtausgaben, 10 [Henryville, PA: Institute of Mediaeval Music, 1979–88]). The result is an edition of 115 songs (127, when considering contrafacta, which are provided with their own separate transcriptions) transmitted in forty-two manuscripts, all of which are miscellanies that include music as later and occasional additions or as fragments reutilized in the bindings of unrelated volumes (pp. xxxi–xxxii). Latin texts represent the majority of the repertory, which is almost entirely anonymous. The context of these songs, as Deeming proposes, is probably clerical, since the subjects of the poems are mostly devotional or moral, but not explicitly liturgical, with very few secular occurrences, predominantly limited to the French songs (pp. xxv, xxxiii, xxxviii). The corpus edited here is largely monophonic and syllabic, with some pieces for two and three voices, plus a six-part song, the famous English canon Sumer is icumen in with its Latin counterpart Perspice Christicola (marked as songs 85a and 85b, respectively; pp. 125–28).

The sources are grouped in three approximate chronological clusters: 1150–1200, 1200–1250, and 1250–1300, and the edition follows this order, providing transcriptions of...