The Sense of Sound
Musical Meaning in France, 1260-1330
ISBN13: 9780199732951ISBN10: 0199732957
Hardback,
400 pages
Mar 2012,
In Stock
Price:
$55.00 (06)See more from the series
Description
Among the most memorable innovations of music and poetry in thirteenth-century France was a genre that seemed to privilege sound over sense. The polytextual motet is especially well-known to scholars of the Middle Ages for its tendency to conceal complex allegorical meaning in a texture that, in performance, made words less, rather than more, audible. It is with such musical sound that this book is concerned. What did it mean to create a musical effect so potentially independent from the meaning of words? Is it possible such supermusical effects themselves had significance? The Sense of Sound offers a radical recontextualization of French song in the heyday of the motet c.1260-1330, and makes the case for listening to musical sound against a range of other potently meaningful sonorities, often premised on non-verbal meaning. In identifying new audible interlocutors to music, it opens our ears to a broad spectrum of sounds often left out of historical inquiry, from the hubbub of the medieval city; to the eloquent babble of madmen; to the violent clamor of charivari; to the charismatic chatter of prayer. Drawing on a rich array of artistic evidence (music, manuscripts, poetry, and images) and contemporary cultural theory, it locates musical production in this period within a larger cultural environment concerned with representing sound and its emotional, ethical, and social effects. In so doing, The Sense of Sound offers an experiment in how we might place central the most elusive aspect of music's history: sound's vibrating, living effect.Features
- Presents a new model for ascribing meaning to musical sound in medieval France, and especially for understanding the motet
- Widens the scope of sonic evidence usually considered by historians
- Illustrates a large body of new source evidence relating to imagery of sound in prayer books
- Companion website offers an innovative means of making the visual evidence accessible to the reader
About the Author(s)
Emma Dillon is Professor of Music and Department Chair at the University of Pennsylvania, and specialist of medieval music. She is author of Medieval Music-Making and the Roman de Fauvel (2002).
Companion Resources
The following resources are available from the "The Sense of Sound" companion site:
