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The Modern Invention of Medieval Music: Scholarship, Ideology, Performance.

Article Excerpt
By Daniel Leech-Wilkinson. (Musical Performance and Reception.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. [xi, 335 p. ISBN 0-521-81870-2. $65.] Music examples, illustration, bibliography, index.

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...

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