Sung Birds: Music, Poetry, and Nature in the Later Middle Ages (review)

In Sung Birds, Elizabeth Leach argues that rationality lay at the heart of many definitions of music in the Middle Ages and, on this basis, sounds like the calls of birds were excluded as musical utterances. But Leach goes further, demonstrating that there existed in medieval musical culture, on one hand, an inherent tension between the conventional definition of music as a rational art and, on the other hand, the repeated use of references to the natural world as a means of articulating cultural subjectivity and locating musical creativity. Sung Birds consists of six chapters and five appendices that serve the preceding discussion. Chapter 1, "Rational song," argues that birdsong occupies an ontological status that exists outside conventional definitions of music articulated during the Middle Ages. Chapters 2 and 3, "Birdsong and Human singing" and "Birds Sung," examine the nature and use of birdsong and references to birdsong in medieval musical theory and song. Chapter 4, "Silent Birds," extends the discussion of the status of different non-musical sounds like birdsong by studying examples of texts and musical settings from the trecento that includes sounds of dogs barking, and voices of shepherdesses and falconers calling their charges. Chapter 5, "Feminine birds and Immoral Song," continues a thread of discussion established in the previous chapter by examining constructions of femininity in music and the moral status of such constructions. The final chapter, "Bird Debates Replayed," moves beyond the subject material of the Middle Ages to discuss the ontological position of music in modern and post-modern societies.

Leach's text demonstrates a cross-disciplinary approach that develops contextual readings of musical culture and its artifacts through the examination of not only music and music theory but also close readings of contemporary literature, both theoretical and literary, that she injects with approaches from gender and sexuality studies. A significant merit of Leach's scholarship is fresh approaches to well-known texts. Rather than perpetuating the accepted reading of Eustaches Deschamps's L'art de dictier (1392), which concludes that the author of this treatise favors poetry over music, Leach demonstrates that Deschamps advocates the marriage of text and music as sung text (p. 59). The author achieves this reading by situating Deschamps's categories of natural and artificial music within the dialectic of John of Salisbury. Similarly a close reading of Arnulf of St. Ghislain's music theory in conjunction with Alan of Lille's De plantu naturae reveals in the former text what may be termed Bahktian textual polyphony. This serves to articulate different levels of meaning, the most learned level reliant on intertexts directed to Christian moral truths.

Readers might find the book's sudden digressions into sexuality and psychosexual readings of texts odd at times. It is regrettable that there is no concerted attempt to construct a discussion of sexualities in medieval music in a more orderly fashion. Such a discussion might have begun with the concepts of sexuality such as those narrated far too late on page 267. Instead, we are left with rather general, often jarring interjections that leave the reader wondering what the writer actually means. What are the possible sexual connotations of Giovanni da Firenze's Per larghi prati (p. 202)? Does the piece stage lesbian delight or Bacchic frenzy? Similar questions abound concerning the appropriateness of psychosexual readings (p. 230) heavily indebted to Freud's Three Essays on Sexuality.

One difficulty encountered by this reviewer is the author's statement that she wants "to explore the ontology of music in the middle ages" (p. 14). Leach sets out two premises in chapter 1 on the status of music in the Middle Ages as a rational art. The first of these is that the Neoplatonic concept of the three species of music—musica mundana, musica humana, and musica harmonica—resides in a human-based rationality of Pythagorean natural proportionality. The...