Emma Dillon - Böcker

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.

This book explores the role of music in an early fourteenth-century French manuscript (BN, fr. 146). The musical repertories found in this manuscript, particularly those interpolated into the Old French satire, the Roman de Fauvel, are frequently used to illuminate the wider history of French medieval music. This study sets the manuscript against the wider culture of Parisian book-making, showing how in devising new systems of design and folio layout, its creators developed a new kind of materiality in music: it illustrates how music is expressive in ways that are unperformable apart from its visual representation. This study is primarily concerned with the workings of fr. 146; however, it also argues that the new attitudes to (material) music-making embodied in that manuscript serve as a model for exploring other music manuscripts to emerge in late-medieval France.