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Sung Birds: Music, Poetry, and Nature in the Later Middle Ages.

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Sung Birds: Music, Poetry, and Nature in the Later Middle Ages. By Elizabeth Eva Leach. Ithaca: Cornel University Press, 2007. [xiii, 345 p. ISBN-10 0801444908; ISBN-13 9780801444913. $55.] Illustrations, music examples, bibliographical references, index, appendices.

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...

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