With Voice and Pen: Coming to Know Medieval Song and How It Was Made (review)

Abstract

With Voice Pen: Coming to Know Song How It Was Made. By Leo Treitler. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. [xxx, 506 p. ISBN 0-19-816644. $145.] Music examples, facsimiles, illustrations, bibliography, index, compact disc. This is a book by arguably most influential North-American musicologist of late twentieth century on Middle Ages, Leo Treitler. We encounter here celebrated trademarks of Treitler's prose: dense, thought-riddled sentences which pull reader into a startling juxtaposition of medieval detail contemporary, sometimes personal anecdotes-in a word, to younger generation of musicologists nourished on Treitler, inimitable. How often does a medievalist combine a recent table conversation with Notre Dame polyphony, or Goethe with Gregory Great (pp. 55-56 188-189)? As either a review or introduction to a prominent writer on medieval music, this handsome tome of Treitleriania is indispensable. All seventeen of these chapters previously appeared over a thirty-three year period. It is frequently practice in such a collection to leave original essays just as they were, often with their original pagination; not so for present volume. To begin with, each essay been refitted to Oxford University Press' house style. Each is preceded by an introduction in smaller font ranging from a half a page (chap. 3) to twenty-one pages (chap. 6) that contextualizes often amplifies each essay. The introduction to chapter 13, for example, is comprised of five sections that briefly comment on different aspects of music writing. Within each essay proper, textual alterations range from slight changes in phrasing to lengthier inserted material-a labor Treitler shared with book's editor Bonnie Blackburn, as stated on p. xiii. The result is a honed text that first chapter, Medieval Improvisation, illustrates well. Of smaller changes, one telling instance is removal of and improvising from following sentence (words in brackets were removed): Even in late Middle composing performing [and improvising] could [all] be thought of as a single act (p. 12). Small changes of this sort are found on every page of book. In same chapter, we find larger additions: a one-page discussion of a recent book (pp. 22-23) an entirely new section treating gradual Scient gentes (pp. 26-32). Only one paragraph was excised on p. 34. Throughout book not only have all musical examples tables been refurbished but some figures as well, such as relief sculptures in plates V-VI. To these refinements author added a sixteen-track compact disc in a sleeve on book's inside back cover. Its most inspired track to my mind is Lightnin' Hopkins' blues tune Goin' Away (track 10), with its rich timbre subtle melody. The remaining performances presumably demonstrate what Treitler does not find in singing of Solesmes their followers: the vocal virtuosity, versatility, sensuousness implicit in written record made by notators of Middle Ages (p. xxiii). Listeners mayjudge for themselves. The significance of Treitler's contribution in late twentieth century is partly to have anticipated postmodern anxiety over beholder's influence. One of this book's most poignant moments comes in introduction to chapter five where Treitler ponders his ambivalent relationship to postmodernism, he whose lifetime has spanned shift, as he puts it (p. 104), from modernism to its alter ego. For Treitler never doubted possibilityas early as 1968 as late as 2001-of a better understanding of medieval music, as he reiterates throughout this book. For over three decades, he been reminding us of need to unlearn our own perspective in order to try to grasp a medieval perspective, each essay here contributes in its own way to this end. He begins in first two chapters by sensitizing reader to problematic notion of improvisation its post-medieval associations. …