Bakhtin and the discourse of late medieval music theory

Abstract

In his lucid discussion of genre in medieval treatises on music, Lawrence Gushee states that: The main part of Gushee's discussion is taken up with documents written up to the thirteenth century; for that reason he pays only a brief visit to treatises written thereafter, recognizing, however, a generic category in ‘works of the later thirteenth and fourteenth centuries which can be classed together merely by virtue of their size and synthetic character’. Among these he counts the treatises of Jacques de Liège, Walter Odington, Engelbert of Admont, Marchettus of Padua and Jerome of Moravia. One could add a few others to this list, such as the Tractatus de musica of Magister Lambertus and the work largely derived from that one, the Quatuor principalia musicae. These are ‘synthetic’, to use Gushee's word, in that they attempt a comprehensive treatment of their subject – they cover both theoretical and practical aspects of pitch and rhythm, and usually begin with a mythic/historic overview of music and a classification scheme that situates it within the sphere of other disciplines.