Home | Business News | Browse by Publication | P | Philological Quarterly

Nota Bene: Reading Classics and Writing Melodies in the Early Middle Ages.

Article Excerpt
Nota Bene: Reading Classics and Writing Melodies in the Early Middle Ages by Jan M. Ziolkowski. Publications of the Journal of Medieval Latin 7. Turnhout: Brepols, 2007. Pp. xvi + 362. $81.

Medieval musical notation--stereotypically with large notes (neumes), perhaps in staves--involves considerably more than liturgical passages. As we learn from Jan Ziolkowski's rewarding new book, neumation occurs not only in liturgical works but also in select passages of classical writings, in manuscripts from "the late tenth to the end of the twelfth century" (5), which originate from the Ottonian rather than the Carolingian period, as some had thought (105). Ziolkowski's aim is ambitious: "to seek to understand which texts were chosen for the notation of melodies, what can be known of the persons who composed, noted, consulted, and performed the melodies, how the melodies may have related to the form and content of the texts, what inspirations and analogues the composers, notators, and performers could have found for their activities, and why the notation ceases after a couple of hundred years in which it became widespread" (1-2). A medieval literary historian and Medieval Latin philologist, Ziolkowski is chiefly interested in the cultural context of neumed texts; as he puts it, his project is "ultimately literary-historical, paleographico-codicological, and ethnomusicological" rather than musicological (2-3).

Ziolkowski divides Nota Bene into five chapters, beginning with the scope of the project and important definitions (Introduction) and developing the arguments through "The Recording and Use of Neumes" (chapter 2), which concerns interlinear...

View this article FREE - Now for a Limited Time, try Goliath Business News
Free for 3 Days!