research about music of medieval period

• Subject List
• Take a Tour
• For Authors
• Subscriber Services
• Publications
• African American Studies
• African Studies
• American Literature
• Anthropology
• Architecture Planning and Preservation
• Art History
• Atlantic History
• Biblical Studies
• British and Irish Literature
• Childhood Studies
• Chinese Studies
• Cinema and Media Studies
• Communication
• Criminology
• Environmental Science
• Evolutionary Biology
• International Law
• International Relations
• Islamic Studies
• Jewish Studies
• Latin American Studies
• Latino Studies
• Linguistics
• Literary and Critical Theory

Medieval Studies

• Military History
• Political Science
• Public Health
• Renaissance and Reformation
• Social Work
• Urban Studies
• Victorian Literature
• Browse All Subjects

How to Subscribe

• Free Trials

In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section Medieval Music Theory

Introduction, general overviews.

• Dictionaries and Encyclopedias of Music
• Latin Dictionaries
• General Encyclopedias
• Medieval Music and Music Theory
• Musical Notation
• Anthologies in Latin
• Anthologies in English and Other Vernaculars
• Bibliographies
• Fundamentals of Music
• Chant and Mode
• Counterpoint
• Musica Ficta
• Mensuration
• Music Theory in Philosophical and Scientific Contexts
• Miscellaneous Topics
• 9th through 12th Centuries
• 13th Century
• Early 14th Century
• Late 14th Century
• Early 15th Century

Related Articles Expand or collapse the "related articles" section about

About related articles close popup.

Lorem Ipsum Sit Dolor Amet

Vestibulum ante ipsum primis in faucibus orci luctus et ultrices posuere cubilia Curae; Aliquam ligula odio, euismod ut aliquam et, vestibulum nec risus. Nulla viverra, arcu et iaculis consequat, justo diam ornare tellus, semper ultrices tellus nunc eu tellus.

• Latin and Vernacular Song in Medieval Italy
• Medieval Songs
• Pythagoreanism in the Middle Ages
• Religious Lyrics
• Thirteenth-Century Motets in France

Other Subject Areas

Forthcoming articles expand or collapse the "forthcoming articles" section.

• Chronicles (Anglo-Norman and Continental French)
• Chronicles (East Norse, Rhymed Chronicles)
• Middle English Lyric
• Find more forthcoming articles...
• Export Citations
• Share This Facebook LinkedIn Twitter

Medieval Music Theory by Jan Herlinger LAST REVIEWED: 25 March 2020 LAST MODIFIED: 25 March 2020 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780195396584-0128

Medieval music theory encompasses technical writing on music from roughly 500 to 1450  CE —from the transmission to the West of ancient Greek music theory via the writings of Boethius and his contemporaries to the development of printing. It was disseminated principally in Latin (the primary language of intellectual discourse in the West) through handwritten documents, which remain its principal witnesses. The subjects of medieval music theory include fundamentals of music, notation of both pitch and rhythm, counterpoint, musica ficta , and modes. Medieval music theory has strong relations to other disciplines of the quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, astronomy); to the institutions within which it flourished (church, monastic and cathedral schools, and—during the later Middle Ages—universities). It has strong ties to philosophy and theology and, of course, to music in practice. During the later Middle Ages, English, German, French, Italian, and other vernaculars became increasingly common in discourse on music, but they never overtook Latin.

Chapter 11 of Everist and Kelly 2018 provides a brief, comprehensive survey of medieval music theory, touching on its nature, its classical legacy, and its sources. Pesce 2011 provides a concise survey of the development of music theory from about 500 to 1450; Herlinger 2001 focuses on the period 1300–1450, covering the topics of music theory in greater detail. Riemann 1962 is an updated translation of the 1920 work that laid the foundation for subsequent study of medieval music theory; though marred by biases prevalent in the author’s time (and only partially ameliorated by the translator’s interventions), the work is still useful for orientation and remains a document of crucial importance in the reception of medieval music theory. Zaminer, et al. 1984–2006 provides the most extensive overview of the subject. Christensen 2002 , the only single-volume treatment of Western music theory from Antiquity to the present in English, includes eight chapters dealing with medieval music theory. Gushee 1973 , groundbreaking in its account of the typology of medieval music treatises, set the stage for many later studies; Meyer 2001 extends Gushee’s work, providing a broader typology to a greater range of medieval music treatises.

Christensen, Thomas, ed. The Cambridge History of Western Music Theory . Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

DOI: 10.1017/CHOL9780521623711

Rather than a synoptic history of music theory, this is a series of studies of various topics, each by an authority on the topic, each with its own bibliography of primary and secondary sources. Chapters 4–6, 10, 11, 15, 17, and 20 pertain to medieval music theory.

Everist, Mark, and Thomas Forrest Kelly, eds. The Cambridge History of Medieval Music . 2 vols. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2018.

A comprehensive history of medieval music, with chapters written by authorities on their subjects. Chapter 11 is devoted specifically to medieval music theory, but references to the subject appear also in chapters 15, 22, 26, and 27.

Gushee, Lawrence A. “Questions of Genre in Medieval Treatises on Music.” In Gattungen der Musik in Einzeldarstellungen: Gedenkschrift Leo Schrade . Edited by Wulf Arlt, Ernst Lichtenhahn, and Hans Oesch, 365–433. Munich: Francke, 1973.

An incisive taxonomy of medieval music treatises, c . 500 to c . 1300, based on their authors’ intellectual styles, the institutions in which they worked, and the types of music they treated. The sophistication of its typology remains a model for scholarship.

Herlinger, Jan. “Music Theory of the Fourteenth and Early Fifteenth Centuries.” In Music as Concept and Practice in the Late Middle Ages . Edited by Reinhard Strohm and Bonnie J. Blackburn, 244–300. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.

An introductory survey of music theory during the late Middle Ages—organized by topics (fundamentals, mode, counterpoint, mensuration, speculative music theory)—touching as well on earlier theory. Bibliography of primary sources, editions, reference works, and studies.

Meyer, Christian. Les traités de musique . Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2001.

Classification of medieval musical treatises by type. Table of contents provides a ready outline of the subject, which is worked out through exegesis. Annotated lists of editions of theory treatises organized by subject matter, by authors, and by series in which the editions appear. In French.

Pesce, Dolores. “Theory and Notation.” In The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Music . Edited by Mark Everist, 276–290. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011.

DOI: 10.1017/CCOL9780521846196

An introductory survey of music theory (covering the scale system, modes, musica ficta , and mensuration) and musical notation from c . 500 to c . 1450, clearly and concisely written and with bibliographic citations in the notes.

Riemann, Hugo. History of Music Theory, Books I and II: Polyphonic Theory to the Sixteenth Century . Translated by Raymond H. Haggh. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1962.

Translation of parts of Geschichte der Musiktheorie im IX – XIX. Jahrhundert , 2nd ed. (Berlin: Hesse, 1920; first ed., 1898). Though dated, this is useful as an introductory overview. The author’s misconceptions are somewhat ameliorated by the translator’s comments and appendixes. Updated, annotated bibliography.

Zaminer, Frieder, Thomas Ertelt, and Heinz von Loesch, eds. Geschichte der Musiktheorie . 11 vols. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1984–2006.

Volumes 3–5 of this comprehensive history of Western music theory deal, respectively, with the reception of ancient music theory, the doctrine of monophonic liturgical chant, and the doctrine of polyphony (comprising mensural notation and counterpoint); each chapter is by an authority on the subject. In German.

back to top

Users without a subscription are not able to see the full content on this page. Please subscribe or login .

Oxford Bibliographies Online is available by subscription and perpetual access to institutions. For more information or to contact an Oxford Sales Representative click here .

• About Medieval Studies »
• Meet the Editorial Board »
• Aelred of Rievaulx
• Alcuin of York
• Alexander the Great
• Alfred the Great
• Alighieri, Dante
• Ancrene Wisse
• Angevin Dynasty
• Anglo-Norman Realm
• Anglo-Saxon Art
• Anglo-Saxon Law
• Anglo-Saxon Manuscript Illumination
• Anglo-Saxon Metalwork
• Anglo-Saxon Stone Sculpture
• Apocalypticism, Millennialism, and Messianism
• Archaeology of Southampton
• Armenian Art
• Art and Pilgrimage
• Art in Italy
• Art in the Visigothic Period
• Art of East Anglia
• Art of London and South-East England, Post-Conquest to Mon...
• Arthurian Romance
• Attila And The Huns
• Auchinleck Manuscript, The
• Audelay, John
• Augustodunensis, Honorius
• Bartholomaeus Anglicus
• Benedictines After 1100
• Benoît de Sainte Maure [113]
• Bernard of Clairvaux
• Bernardus Silvestris
• Biblical Apocrypha
• Birgitta of Sweden and the Birgittine Order
• Boccaccio, Giovanni
• Bokenham, Osbern
• Book of Durrow
• Book of Kells
• Bozon, Nicholas
• Byzantine Art
• Byzantine Manuscript Illumination
• Byzantine Monasticism
• Calendars and Time (Christian)
• Cambridge Songs
• Capgrave, John
• Carolingian Architecture
• Carolingian Era
• Carolingian Manuscript Illumination
• Carolingian Metalwork
• Carthusians and Eremitic Orders
• Cecco d’Ascoli (Francesco Stabili)
• Charlemagne
• Charles d’Orléans
• Charters of the British Isles
• Chaucer, Geoffrey
• Christian Mysticism
• Christianity and the Church in Post-Conquest England
• Christianity and the Church in Pre-Conquest England
• Christina of Markyate
• Chronicles of England and the British Isles
• Church of the Holy Sepulchre, The
• Cistercian Architecture
• Cistercians, The
• Clanvowe, John
• Classics in the Middle Ages
• Cloud of Unknowing and Related Texts, The
• Constantinople and Byzantine Cities
• Contemporary Sagas (Bishops’ sagas and Sturlunga saga)
• Corpus Christi
• Councils and Synods of the Medieval Church
• Crusades, The
• Crusading Warfare
• da Barberino, Francesco
• da Lentini, Giacomo
• da Tempo, Antonio and da Sommacampagna, Gidino
• da Todi, Iacopone
• Dance of Death
• d’Arezzo, Ristoro
• de la Sale, Antoine
• de’ Rossi, Nicolò
• de Santa Maria, Cantigas
• Death and Dying in England
• Decorative Arts
• delle Vigne, Pier
• Drama in Britain
• Dutch Theater and Drama
• Early Italian Humanists
• Economic History
• Eddic Poetry
• England, Pre-Conquest
• England, Towns and Cities Medieval
• English Prosody
• Exeter Book, The
• Family Letters in 15th Century England
• Family Life in the Middle Ages
• Feast of Fools
• Female Monasticism to 1100
• Findern Manuscript (CUL Ff.i.6), The
• Folk Custom and Entertainment
• Food, Drink, and Diet
• Fornaldarsögur
• French Drama
• French Monarchy, The
• French of England, The
• Froissart, Jean
• Games and Recreations
• Gawain Poet, The
• German Drama
• Gerson, Jean
• Glass, Stained
• Gower, John
• Gregory VII
• Hagiography in the Byzantine Empire
• Handbooks for Confessors
• Hardyng, John
• Harley 2253 Manuscript, The
• Hiberno-Latin Literature
• High Crosses
• Hilton, Walter
• Historical Literature (Íslendingabók, Landnámabók)
• Hoccleve, Thomas
• Hood, Robin
• Hospitals in the Middle Ages
• Hundred Years War
• Hungary, Latin Literacy in Medieval
• Hungary, Libraries in Medieval
• Illuminated Manuscripts
• Illustrated Beatus Manuscripts
• Insular Art
• Insular Manuscript Illumination
• Islamic Architecture (622–1500)
• Italian Cantari
• Italian Chronicles
• Italian Drama
• Italian Mural Decoration
• Italian Novella, The
• Italian Religious Writers of the Trecento
• Italian Rhetoricians
• Jewish Manuscript Illumination
• Jews and Judaism in Medieval Europe
• Julian of Norwich
• Junius Manuscript, The
• King Arthur
• Kings and Monarchy, 1066-1485, English
• Kings’ Sagas
• Knapwell, Richard
• Lancelot-Grail Cycle
• Late Medieval Preaching
• Latin Arts of Poetry and Prose, Medieval
• Latino, Brunetto
• Learned and Scientific Literature
• Libraries in England and Wales
• Lindisfarne Gospels
• Liturgical Drama
• Liturgical Processions
• Lollards and John Wyclif, The
• Lombards in Italy
• London, Medieval
• Love, Nicholas
• Low Countries
• Lydgate, John
• Machaut, Guillaume de
• Magic in the Medieval Theater
• Maidstone, Richard
• Malmesbury, Aldhelm of
• Malory, Sir Thomas
• Manuscript Illumination, Ottonian
• Marie de France
• Markets and Fairs
• Masculinity and Male Sexuality in the Middle Ages
• Medieval Archaeology in Britain, Fifth to Eleventh Centuri...
• Medieval Archaeology in Britain, Twelfth to Fifteenth Cent...
• Medieval Bologna
• Medieval Chant for the Mass Ordinary
• Medieval English Universities
• Medieval Ivories
• Medieval Latin Commentaries on Classical Myth
• Medieval Music Theory
• Medieval Naples
• Medieval Optics
• Mendicant Orders and Late Medieval Art Patronage in Italy
• Middle English Language
• Mosaics in Italy
• Mozarabic Art
• Music and Liturgy for the Cult of Saints
• Music in Medieval Towns and Cities
• Music of the Troubadours and Trouvères
• Musical Instruments
• Necromancy, Theurgy, and Intermediary Beings
• Nibelungenlied, The
• Nicholas of Cusa
• Nordic Laws
• Norman (and Anglo-Norman) Manuscript Ilumination
• N-Town Plays
• Nuns and Abbesses
• Old English Hexateuch, The Illustrated
• Old English Language
• Old English Literature and Critical Theory
• Old English Religious Poetry
• Old Norse-Icelandic Sagas
• Ottonian Art
• Ovid in the Middle Ages
• Ovide moralisé, The
• Owl and the Nightingale, The
• Papacy, The Medieval
• Persianate Dynastic Period/Later Caliphate (c. 800–1000)
• Peter Abelard
• Pictish Art
• Pizan, Christine de
• Plowman, Piers
• Poland, Ethnic and Religious Groups in Medieval
• Pope Innocent III
• Post-Conquest England
• Pre-Carolingian Western European Kingdoms
• Prick of Conscience, The
• Pucci, Antonio
• Rate Manuscript (Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Ashmole 61)
• Regions of Medieval France
• Regular Canons
• Religious Instruction (Homilies, Sermons, etc.)
• Robert Mannyng of Brunne
• Rolle, Richard
• Romances (East and West Norse)
• Romanesque Art
• Rus in Medieval Europe
• Ruthwell Cross
• Sagas and Tales of Icelanders
• Saint Plays and Miracles
• Saint-Denis
• Saints’ Lives
• Scandinavian Migration-Period Gold Bracteates
• Schools in Medieval Britain
• Scogan, Henry
• Sex and Sexuality
• Ships and Seafaring
• Shirley, John
• Skaldic Poetry
• Slavery in Medieval Europe
• Snorra Edda
• Song of Roland, The
• Songs, Medieval
• St. Dunstan, Archbishop of Canterbury
• St. Peter's in the Vatican (Rome)
• Syria and Palestine in the Byzantine Empire
• The Middle Ages, The Trojan War in
• The Use of Sarum and Other Liturgical Uses in Later Mediev...
• Theater and Performance, Iberian
• Thomas Aquinas
• Thornton, Robert
• Tomb Sculpture
• Travel and Travelers
• Trevisa, John
• Troubadours and Trouvères
• Troyes, Chrétien de
• Umayyad History
• Usk, Thomas
• Venerable Bede, The
• Vercelli Book, The
• Vernon Manuscript, The
• Von Eschenbach, Wolfram
• Wall Painting in Europe
• Wearmouth-Jarrow
• Welsh Literature
• William of Ockham
• Women's Life Cycles
• York Corpus Christi Plays
• York, Medieval
• Privacy Policy
• Cookie Policy
• Legal Notice
• Accessibility

Powered by:

• [66.249.64.20|185.66.14.133]
• 185.66.14.133

Early Music Muse

early music performance and research

Medieval music: a quick guide to the middle ages

This article features 4 illustrative videos of medieval music and several links to further articles (click on blue text).

When were the middle ages?

The mediaeval or medieval period, or the middle ages, covers a huge stretch of time, from 476 CE, following the fall of the Roman Empire, to the start of the renaissance in the 14 th and 15 th centuries, so that’s around a thousand years.

Some historians have latterly taken to splitting the medieval period in two: the dark ages until the 10 th century; and the middle ages from the 11 th century. This split is an ahistorical view which ignores how the term middle ages was originally conceived by those who minted it. More oddly, proponents of the dark/middle ages split will often equate the dark ages with the period before the Norman invasion of 1066, when the language in England was Old English, and the middle ages with the period between the Norman conquest and the renaissance, during which the language evolved into Middle English, as if the terms dark ages, middle ages and renaissance were based upon events in England: the historical reality is that the terms arose from an understanding of events in Italy.

It was Italians of the 14 th and 15 th century, primarily Francesco Petrarca or Petrarch, Leonardo Bruni and Flavio Biondo, who defined themselves and their generation as bringing about a renaissance or rebirth of classical Roman and Greek wisdom. Thus, for the people of the self-defined Italian renaissance who delineated the middle ages, the term meant precisely and explicitly the same as the dark ages: it was a whole millennium of cultural darkness in the middle period between the fall of the Roman Empire and Italian culture’s rediscovery of its treasures.

The Italian idea of this rediscovery of classical Roman and Greek art and wisdom was demonstrably false: in reality, surviving manuscripts show that writers of the so-called middle ages were very well aware of classical Rome and Greece. For example, a manuscript of 1289 (Bibliothèque nationale de France, Latin 15158) includes copies of Catonis disticha ( Cato’s couplets ), an anonymous book of 3 rd or 4 th century proverbial wisdom; Liber Theodoli ( Book of Theodulus ), a 9 th century dialogue or debate between classical myth and Christian truth; Remedia Amoris ( Cures for Love ) by Roman poet, Ovid (43 BCE–17 CE); and Psychomachia (psychomachy is a conflict between soul and body) by the Roman Christian poet, Prudentius, early 5 th century.

Nonetheless, the idea of the renaissance took hold of Italy before then spreading internationally through Europe. This gradual adoption of the idea makes it impossible to give a precise date for the end of the middle ages and the beginning of the renaissance, so a nominal latest date of 1400, 1450 or 1470 is often given.

The recovery of medieval music

Medieval music is not immediately accessible for a modern musician. There were different systems of musical notation, none of which indicated precise rhythm until the 12 th century. Square notation is now the best known system developed in this period, and once you know square notation some of the music is easy to read. At times, though, it wasn’t written very accurately, or was written with a poor pen and so had vague or indecipherable note values, which is adequate if you know what it’s supposed to sound like, which they did, but we don’t.

It is extremely rare for us to have any idea what the intended instrument was to accompany a voice (if at all) or to play for dances, so we have to make our own choices from the scant available information and our own sense of what sounds right. (For more detail on this question, see the article here .)

There are some treasure troves of medieval music. One of the most notable is the Cantigas de Santa María , a book with 420 songs in praise of the Virgin Mary, compiled during the reign of Alfonso X, “The Wise”, 1221-1284, who was King of eight regions in modern day Spain and one in Portugal. During his reign, Alfonso composed, compiled and edited a large number of books, with subjects ranging from art and literature to scientific texts translated into Castillian from the Arabic originals. The melodies of the Cantigas were adapted from sacred sources or popular melodies from both sides of the Pyrenees, including some derived from troubadour songs in Provençal and others that have striking affinities with Arab music. One of the four Cantigas manuscripts, compiled 1257–1283, is beautifully illustrated with pictures of musicians, giving us much information about the instruments of the day, and its music notation is admirably clear.

The Cantigas were heavily influenced by the lyrics and music of the troubadours , the poets and singers of Occitania, what is now southern France. From the late 11 th century to the end of the 13 th century, the troubadours developed several styles of song, most famously fin’amor, refined or perfect love. Their influence was widespread and considerable, extending well beyond Occitania and long after the lifetimes of troubadour writers.

The earliest songs in English

Secular medieval music in English is completely unknown to us until the first half of the 13 th century, when Mirie it is ( Merry it is ) was written down, a song complaining about the cold winter weather. It is well to remember when listening to this song how dangerous this season was in the 13 th century: inadequate storage of winter provisions meant starvation.

This is closely followed by Sumer is icumen in ( Summer has come in ) from around 1250, another song about the weather, but on a happier note, rejoicing in the sights and sounds of summer: the ewe bleating and the buck farting (honestly, I’m not making this up). Sumer is icumen in is two songs in one, since the text includes a Christian song, Perspice christicola , to the same tune.

Medieval instrumental and dance music

No clear medieval dance instructions survive, only hints and fragments. The earliest complete choreography is from 15 th century Italy, well past the beginning of the Italian renaissance. (To read more about this, click here .) Outside Italy, in England, for example, the earliest surviving choreography is in the Gresley manuscript of 1480–1520, found in Ashford, Derbyshire in 1984. Since we know so little about how medieval dances were performed, we have to bring our own artistic and creative sense to bear, interpreting the clues found in iconography and brief scattered references in writing.

In terms of form, there were two kinds of medieval instrumental music (whether danced or not): either each section had different material but with the same open and close ending (the equivalent of today’s first and second time bars), as we find in la rotta, the French estampie , the royal dance, and the ductia; or sections were cumulative, built up by including a previous section and adding new material, followed by an open and close ending, as in the trotto, saltarello, and the Italian istampitta (estampie). An example of the latter is Ghaetta , from British Library Add. 29987, c. 1400. With x as an open ending and y as a close ending, it is in the complex form: ABCx ABCy; DECx DECy; FECx FECy; GBCx GBCy. The nota is the only exception. Parisian music theorist, Johannes de Grocheio (or Grocheo, or Jean de Grouchy), wrote Ars musicae ( Art of music ), in c. 1300, in which he described the nota as having four double puncta (sections), indicating that each section was to be repeated, though it lacks an open and close ending. It is, he wrote, “either a form of ductia or an incomplete estampie”.

In the video above, Ian Pittaway on citole and gittern uses medieval-style plectrums , made from antler and a gut string, to play a polyphonic instrumental from British Library Harley 978, folio 8v-9r, c. 1261-65. In the manuscript, this piece is untitled. It partially fits the description of a ductia given by Johannes de Grocheio in c. 1300. He describes the ductia as an instrumental – “it lacks letter and text” – to be danced to – “they arouse the spirit of man to move decorously according to the art which they call dancing”. The ductia is light and joyful – “the [liturgical] sequence is sung in the manner of a ductia , so that it may lead and give joy”, composed in two voice polyphony – “The Pater noster is a cantus having two parts in the manner of a punctus [point, i.e. section] of a ductia ”. Contrary to the piece in Harley 978, which has 6 puncta , Grocheio states that “the number of puncta in a ductia they placed at 3 … There are also some ductia having 4 puncta such as the ductia Pierron .” However, on this point, Grocheio is probably not a reliable witness, as he puts the number of puncta in an estampie at 6 or 7, whereas the estampies written in the Manuscrit du Roi contemporaneous with Grocheio have variously 4, 5, 6 and 7 puncta . It is therefore still likely that the Harley 978 piece is a ductia.

It is commonly asserted in modern commentaries that the estampie was a dance. However, as this article explains, no primary medieval source states this, and indeed the medieval evidence is that the estampie was for listening, not dancing. The estampie was marked out from other musical forms by having sections of varying lengths, as we hear in the example below: La Sexte estampie Real ( The Sixth Royal estampie ) from Manuscrit du Roi , a manuscript of troubadour songs written c. 1250, with instrumental pieces such as this estampie added c. 1300.

Why does medieval music sound so different to today’s?

There are several reasons why medieval music has such a distinctive sound which is different to modern music.

The instruments were different. Strings were made of gut (sheep’s intestines) or wire (brass, iron, bronze, silver or gold), not steel or nylon as today’s strings tend to be. Many instruments, such as the simfony, citole and the gittern , have no modern equivalents. Even instruments which we still play versions of today – the harp and the recorder, for example, and the modern oboe, which is descended from the shawm – were made to different specifications resulting in a quite different tonal quality.

The scales or modes were different. Briefly, all modern major and minor scales work to the same musical principles, with identical gaps between the 8 notes of the scale, but pitched differently: so C major and D major sound the same, except that D major starts a tone higher. It is not so with modes. The modes of medieval music lack sharps and flats, which means that the relationship between notes for a mode starting on D (dorian) is different to a mode starting on E (phrygian). In addition, each medieval mode has a returning note which plays a key role in the melody, this note known as the tenor, tuba, dominant, repercussa, or reciting note; and each mode has its own characteristic figures or melodic clusters of notes. Add to this the fact that some modes started and ended in the same place, known as authentic modes, and others started on one note and finished on another, known as plagal modes, and we see that the medieval conception of sound was unlike ours.

What this means in practical terms is that a medieval psaltery or harp is potentially a problem for a player of modern music since they are diatonic, lacking the permanent availability of sharps and flats. But the medieval soundworld was different, and a diatonic instrument was perfectly suited to medieval diatonic music. (A more detailed examination of medieval modes, and the circumstances under which flats and sharps were added to modes, can be found by clicking here .)

Medieval polyphony

The harmonies were different, too. Today ‘harmony’ usually means a single lead melody line with other notes complementing it to form supporting chords. Medieval harmony didn’t work like this, so much so that we should give it a different name: polyphony, meaning many voices, with each voice often having elements of horizontal independence as well as vertical consonance.

Medieval music was (i) monophony, a single melody line; or (ii) a melody with a drone; or (iii) organum, which variously meant a melody with a second line that tracks the first with longer notes, or with a parallel octave, fourth or fifth, or two parts in contrary motion, or an additional line with fast-running notes; or, (iv) as with Sumer is icumen in , a melody on top of a pes (foot), ground or ground bass, a short repeating phrase which continues through the whole piece. Don’t let the term ‘ground bass’ give you the wrong idea: this wasn’t ‘a bass part’ in the modern sense of the pitch range soprano, alto, tenor and bass (SATB), but a repeated phrase to ‘ground’ the music. Sumer is icumen in is the earliest surviving example of an English round, where voices sing the same line but start at different times, meaning that no one sings ‘lead’ and each individual’s line is as important as the other. For a detailed and practical explanation of medieval forms of polyphony, click here .

Until the end of the middle ages, polyphonic parts were pitched close together, their notes sometimes inter-weaving. We hear this in the three pieces in the video below: Miro genere ( By a wondrous birth ), Astripotens famulos ( Kind ruler of the stars ), and Mater dei ( Mother of God ), each sung in two or three voices as in the manuscript ( Lambeth Palace MS 457 ), then played polyphonically on citole or gittern. 

It wasn’t until the compositions of the English musician John Dunstaple (or Dunstable) in the 15 th century that we have voices pitched wide apart, a new practice which was hugely influential and became known in Europe as “the English countenance”, marking the beginning of what was to be a post-medieval, renaissance style of music.

© Ian Pittaway. Not to be reproduced in any form without permission. All rights reserved.

Share this:

• Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Pocket (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on WhatsApp (Opens in new window)
• ← Songs that grow like trees: an appreciation of Sydney Carter (1915–2004)
• The lute: a brief history from the 13th to the 18th century →

4 thoughts on “ Medieval music: a quick guide to the middle ages ”

The biggest thought I had while reading this article was how much of an influence religion would have on medieval music. It did not surprise me that there were religious songs (note the Cantigas de Santa Maria,) but there were also quite a few secular songs as well. While reading about the medieval era and the divide between different religions and the power of religion in general, secularism often fell low on the ladder. I tried to compare these songs back to our original medieval readings, but could not. Our readings often put God or gods above secular culture, in general. However, these songs only had one thing in common that I could see, which was to keep people stable, calm, and joyful at heart. While the clergy was the organization that wrote down most of the music, both religious and secular music kept people entertained and calm during harsh winters and wonderful dances. There seemed to be no comparison, or higher or lower stature, holding God or gods above the “secular.” This music brought people together.

Hello, Grace, and thank you for your comment.

It makes sense to divide songs into religious and secular in the modern world, presupposing that one might believe or disbelieve in God (or any particular god, depending on the culture). In the medieval period, it didn’t make sense in the same way, as belief in the Christian God was presupposed by Christians, hence the idea that Jews and Moors were somehow being perverse by believing differently, deliberately denying The Truth in Christian terms.

The lack of a medieval division between religious and secular had other ramifications. While there were, of course, songs in praise of the Virgin and songs in praise of a woman who was an object of love, these two genres were not entirely separate. In the latter type of song, typified by the troubadours and trouveres, religious belief was still presupposed, and indeed the same language was used to praise the Virgin and praise an earthly woman (as demonstrated in this article https://earlymusicmuse.com/edi-beo-thu-hevene-quene/ and this article https://earlymusicmuse.com/troubadours-cantigas/ ).

All the best.

How can I. Find the. Book of Ian Christians that presents the development of classical music through the centuries from medieval times till today?

Hello, Constantine.

I’m unclear what you mean by the Book of Ian Christians and I don’t know of a book that shows the development of music across the centuries. I would imagine that would not be a book, but a library! I would be very wary of the idea that classical music is the end point that medieval music led to, as each era of music needs to be seen in its own terms, not as an earlier version of what came later. For example, modern harmony is completely different to medieval polyphony and a modern guitar is not a version of any medieval instrument.

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Notify me of new posts by email.

Music Theory Academy

Medieval music.

Monophonic Music

The vast majority of medieval music was monophonic – in other words, there was only a single melody line. (“mono-phonic” literally means “one sound”) . The development of polyphonic music (more than one melody line played at the same time (“poly-phonic” means “many sounds”)) was a major shift towards the end of era that laid the foundations for Renaissance styles of music.

Gregorian chant

Gregorian chant, consisting of a single line of vocal melody, unaccompanied in free rhythm was one of the most common forms of medieval music. This is not surprising, given the importance of the Catholic church during the period. The Mass (a commemoration and celebration of The Last Supper of Jesus Christ) was (and still is to this day) a ceremony that included set texts (liturgy), which were spoken and sung.

Have a listen to this example of Gregorian Chant:

Play Procedamus in Pace By Paterm (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons]

The chants were also based on a system of modes , which were characteristic of the medieval period. There were 8 church modes – (you can play them by starting on a different white note on a piano and playing a “scale” of 8 notes on just the white notes. For example, if you start on a D and play all the white notes up to the next D an octave higher, you will have played the “Dorian Mode”) .

The Development of Polyphonic Music

As the Medieval Period progressed, composers began to experiment and polyphonic styles began to develop.

Organum was a crucial early technique, which explored polyphonic texture. It consisted of 2 lines of voices in varying heterophonic textures . The 3 main types of organum are:

Parallel organum (or “strict organum”) One voice sings the melody, whilst the other sings at a fixed interval – this gives a parallel motion effect. Have a listen to this synthesised example of parallel organum: Parallel Organum audio example

Free organum The 2 voices move in both parallel motion and/or contrary motion. Have a look at this example of free organum and listen to the track of the beginning being played on a synthesised choir sound:

Free Organum audio example

Melismatic organum An accompanying part stays on a single note whilst the other part moves around above it. Have a listen to this synthesised example – notice how the 2nd voice stays on the same note whilst the 1st voice “sings” the melody: Melismatic Organum audio example

Sheet Music in the Medieval Period

The Catholic Church wanted to standardise what people sung in churches across the Western world. As a result, a system of music notation developed, allowing things to move on from the previously “aural” tradition (tunes passed on “by ear” and not written down) .

As the medieval period prgressed, nuemes developed gradually to add more indication of rhythm, etc..

Instruments of the Medieval Period

There were a number of characteristic instruments of the Medieval Period including:

Other medieval instruments included the recorder and the lute.

The period was also characterised by troubadours and trouvères – these were travelling singers and performers.

Secular Styles of Medieval Music

Ars Nova (“new art”) was a new style of music originating in France and Italy in the 14th century . The name comes from a tract written by Philippe de Vitry in c.1320 . The style was characterised by increased variety of rhythm, duple time and increased freedom and independence in part writing. These experimentations laid some of the foundations for further musical development during the Renaissance period . The main secular genre of Art Nova was the chanson . Examples of Art Nova composers include Machaut in France and G. Da Cascia, J. Da Bologna and Landini in Italy.

Recommended Medieval Music Listening

It is quite difficult to find many recorded albums of medieval music, which offer a range of styles. There is an album called “Discover Early Music” that has some fantastic recordings of plainchant and organum in particular. You should be able to find the album by searching on the amazon store. Hope this helps.

Share this post: on Twitter on Facebook on Google+

About The Author

Ben Dunnett LRSM is the founder of Music Theory Academy. He is a music teacher, examiner, composer and pianist with over twenty years experience in music education. Read More

Related Posts

Baroque Music

• < Previous chapter
• Next chapter >

7 The Middle Ages

Elizabeth Eva Leach, University of Oxford

• Published: 15 December 2020
• Cite Icon Cite
• Permissions Icon Permissions

This chapter outlines some of the varied relationships between music and philosophy in the Middle Ages. As one of the disciplines of the mathematical quadrivium, musica concerns issues of acoustics but the notation and ontology of music additionally relate to grammar, logic, and rhetoric. Furthermore, music is related to the boundaries between human and non-human animals and overlaps with, while not being completely subsumed by, sonic practices. Medieval music was also implicated in writings on ethics, which give evidence of music’s role in gendered and political identity formation. Finally, the chapter considers what sort of knowledge musical knowledge was in the Middle Ages and why modern thinking might struggle with various aspects of music’s relation to philosophy in this period.

The rather large and ill-defined time period that is problematically lumped together as the Middle Ages is far from monolithic in its attitudes to both philosophy and music. It also differs significantly from later periods in that music and philosophy are not radically separated but were tightly related and mutually informing, even if the relative neglect of medieval music and philosophy in recent musicological and philosophical scholarship obscures our contemporary understanding of that connection. The medieval discipline of musica occupies a conceptual field that overlaps with yet differs from that of the modern term “music,” being specifically a speculative science of music theory that forms a significant subset of philosophical inquiry. As I stress in the Conclusion, this means that medieval music should not be understood through the commodity filter of modernity since its definition lies beyond the sonic; and it is never acousmatic since its producers shared the same space as its listeners. 1

In the early medieval period especially, some of the key texts on both musica and other, more widely applicable branches of philosophy, are by the same writers, notably Augustine and Boethius (see Dyer 2009 ; Rico 2005a ). Moreover, the huge stylistic and institutional changes in music across the medieval period, and the highly various socio-political formations within which it flourished, are matched by the changing institutional locations of philosophical inquiry, so that eventually philosophical preoccupations surface clearly in genres of song, its interpretation, and its notational precepts. Although traces of notation specifically for music in the West only begin in the ninth century, there are frequent references to music from before this period, especially in regard to its ethical aspects. Classical authorities continued to be copied and cited throughout the Middle Ages and were highly influential as they become refocused and reinterpreted in the newly Christian environment of Western Europe.

Despite the prominence of music in the writings of medieval philosophers, modern histories of medieval philosophy very rarely mention music. When they do, it is in passing as one of the disciplines of the mathematical quadrivium. Modern accounts of medieval music theory often treat musica only as a discussion of acoustics, which they consider as belonging not to philosophy, but rather to an early and speculative form of music theory, the more interesting parts of which focus on practical matters of notation, modal classification, rhythm, and so on, as they relate to the actualities of musical practice. Nonetheless, even ostensibly acoustic treatises, such as Boethius’s De Musica , discussed below, yield insights beyond the merely scientific and numerical.

As I am by training a musicologist and not a philosopher, what follows evaluates how musicology has understood the relation of philosophical writings—both those of the Middle Ages and, in the final section, those of later periods—to musica as a theoretical field and to surviving pieces of medieval music. In each section, I begin by outlining the current work of scholars of philosophy and music theory, and then turn to my own engagement with both primary and secondary texts from these diverse disciplines, their synthesis, and their application to seemingly unrelated themes and practices. Other treatments of this theme might have organized the reflections chronologically around particular authors of the particular branch of music theory that treats music as a part of philosophy: musica . Such an account might start with the Platonism of Augustine’s writings on music, then Boethius’s, before proceeding to the Aristotelian treatises of the later Middles Ages. I prefer, instead, to treat the issues thematically, and to include not only writing directly on musica , but also to extend the argument to aspects of musical thought and practice that can be read as having been indirectly influenced by other branches of medieval philosophy. I start, therefore, with a section on music’s definition and being, noting the implications that its numerical and rational underpinnings had for sounding musical practice. The second section treats the ethics of music, which involves a double-edged discussion. It considers, firstly, the anxieties that sounding music could elicit, anxieties that took a specific form relating to human gender, and which from time to time enabled certain strictures to be placed upon musical practices, even if these were seldom effective. It then considers, conversely, the positive uses adduced for music, from its evangelical power, through its association with good governance (of both self and polity), to its role as consolation in late medieval courts. In the third section, I adduce various ways that contemporary scholars have posited an indirect relation between medieval musical materials and discourses in medieval philosophy that do not specifically mention music. This covers innovations in grammar, logic, and dialectic, as well as the impact these appear to have had on musical notation, and the meaning inherent in specific “cross-over” genres like the motet, which seem to combine incompatibly sacred and secular materials. 2 My synthesis of these materials within the present chapters suggests the potential for future directions in thinking about philosophy and music which attempt to range beyond the mere listing of musica as a subject of the medieval university’s mathematical quadrivium.

Unsound Studies: The Medieval Ontology of Music

Medieval writings on musica frequently start with definitions that tend towards to the etymological, based not on scientific etymology as we would recognize it today, but on similarity of word sound. These do not talk, as definitions might today, about music as sonic or as relating to human musical performance. Rather, music is typically linked to the muses (citing the encyclopedist Isidore of Seville), or to “moys,” which, various authors explain, means “water” (Swerdlow 1967 ). Given that the literate tradition for music in the Middle Ages is exclusively for vocal music, and that grammatica et cantus were taught together in the medieval song-school as children learned Latin by singing the Psalms, many music treatises unsurprisingly use grammar as a model for their own pedagogy (Desmond 1998 ; Leach 2009a ; Boynton and Rice 2008 ). Grammar treatises typically start with a definition of vox (voice or note), the fundamental element of grammar and only a subset of the larger field of sonus (sound). Definitions of vox are thus useful in revealing the place of music as it intersects with a more general group of sounds in the Middle Ages.

In mainstream medieval opinion, music is perforce a rationally engaged human production. Excluded are the writable but meaningless voices of birds and other animals, but also the music-like sounds made by human agents who are acting merely imitatively and thus not employing the reason that would distinguish their production from that of animals (Leach 2007 , especially 11–54). Thus the ontological status of music as music is placed squarely in the domain of production: neither its immanent sonic properties nor the opinions of those listening have the ultimate determination, and much energy is spent in urging those listening to ascertain the source of the music in order to judge it correctly. On the one hand the emphasis on production befits a philosophical position that recognized the importance but unreliability of the senses in gaining knowledge and the elevation of God-given rationality as the defining part of the human soul. On the other hand, the emphasis on production fits the general definition of music in which audible sound ( musica instrumentalis ) was one of three subdivisions, the others, which drew on Classical definitions, being musica mundana (the universe’s harmonious proportions, or “music of the spheres”) and musica humana , the relation of body and soul (Ilnitchi 2002 ). Platonic views, for example, replicated the idea that number was at the root of musical harmony/concord. While Plato’s Republic excludes most sounding human music-making, his entire universe is animated by the sung notes of celestial sirens (Fritz 2000 , 146–149).

The idea that music’s existence is defined poietically, that is, from the perspective of its domain of production, also fits a period before acousmatic transmission was the norm, since close contact with the humans producing the music (who were normally in the same physical space as the listeners and often under their command) was usual; there was also a far smaller section of the audience who were not also the performers, since much music-making was communal, whether in various ecclesiastical spaces or in court dances. In such settings, the intention and formation of the performers was readily available to those listening, since they were often also singing: effectively they were being urged to ensure their own rational engagement and understanding. This definition of music thereby placed a strong burden on performers—mainly singers, in the literate tradition at least—to understand their practice as rational, not least because that rationality was a unique feature of the human soul that signalled humanity’s special place in the divine creation, and these singers were often involved in Christian religious duties. Those who failed were no better than beasts, as the widely copied opening metrum of Guido of Arezzo’s Regulae stresses:

Musicorum et cantorum magna est distancia Isti dicunt illi sciunt que componit musica Nam qui facit quod non sapit diffinitur bestia Ceterum tonantis vocis si laudent acumina, superabit philomelam vel vocalis asina.

[Between musicians and singers there is a vast distance: the latter perform; the former know what music comprises. For he who does what he does not understand is termed a beast. Furthermore, if one praises the loudness of a thundering voice, even a jenny [she-ass] in full bray will surpass the nightingale.] (Guido d’Arezzo 1999 , 330–333)

This precept was taught to boys in the medieval choir schools of Europe not just through music theory but through the practice of singing itself. The widely copied Latin song “Aurea personet lira clara modulamina”, in the same metre as Guido’s opening metrum, served similarly as a memorable means of teaching boys the correct situation of their own musical practice within a world of music-like noises. While ostensibly praising the nightingale and comparing its song to human music-making of various kinds, its ending implies the supremacy of the boys’ human voices even over that of the nightingale. At the end of the song, the singers speak about their own act of singing:

[Now we have rendered you enough splendid services which are pleasant in sound and rhythmic in wording, worthily proper to young scholars and their pastimes. The time is at hand to end our harmonic song, lest the length of the songs should tire the plectrum of the tongue, lest the attentive ear should grow indifferent to the single notes. 3 ] (Ziolkowski 1998 , 46–47)

The nightingale, as the singing boys claim in their praise of it, excels two of the three subdivisions of sounding music ( musica instrumentalis ), that is, musica ritmica (instruments made to sound by striking) and musica organica (made by wind instruments). Moreover, the nightingale is the equal and mirror of the monochord, the instrument used to teach the intervals of the scale. The third division of musica instrumentalis , the music of the human voice ( musica harmonica ), however, is even better than the nightingale. The boys can sing the nightingale’s praises, having learned the discrete notes of the diatonic scale present in the nightingale’s song from that song’s fitting peer, the monochord. But singing praise requires words, and of all the kinds of music named in this song, the joining of “rhythmic” words and “pleasant” notes is “worthily proper” only to the “young scholars” (for a longer discussion see Leach 2009a , 207–211). In short, the proper taxonomization of sounding music places human language sung by human voices to correctly tuned notes at the pinnacle of sublunary achievement.

The proper use of music was the subject of discussion in the field of ethics, since what music was for was tightly connected to theories of its affective power over the listener. Music conceived of in Platonic terms—that is, as rational proportion, which could be rendered in sound, rather than being by definition sonic—was deemed to have a character that could accord or discord with the character of the person exposed to it, emphasizing similarity and challenging difference, and, if powerful enough, changing the listener so as to became more similar to the character of the music. (On music and Platonism, see Hicks 2017 .) Boethius ( 1989 , 1–8) gives examples of warlike music making a warlike person more warlike and of an angry and vengeful lover being calmed down by music of a pacific kind. Music’s ability to act on a person’s constitution through the fact of it sharing proportions with the body–soul music of musica humana explained its efficacy as medicine, as in the biblical example of David healing Saul even though medieval authorities argued over the exact mechanism of the cure (see discussion in Hentschel 2000 ).

These positive examples given in Boethius form the credit side of medieval discussion of musical ethics, but music’s valence was variable and twin discourses of proposal and detraction permeate its entire history, including the Middle Ages. Medieval philosophers took both sides, some, like Augustine and Boethius, representing both positions, sometimes even within the same work.

The Dangers of Musical Seduction

Various medieval authorities worried about music’s power over human listeners, but its chief dangers seem to draw on worries about the interrelation between gender and sexuality, in the light of the opposition between passive and active aspects of the definitions of both these concepts. 4 If singers failing to deploy due rational control over their music-making were no better than beasts, listeners who similarly failed to engage active rational control became passive and, in line with the understanding of sexual relations as something an active male partner did to a passive female one, feminized. While this might not be a problem for female listeners, most writing addresses male listeners, who are expected to resist such aural misgendering. 5 The basic set-up for this problematic is present in Augustine’s Confessions , in which, led by his senses running ahead of his reason, Augustine worries that the pleasure he takes in hearing liturgical singing in church is a sin of the flesh. Having admitted that he sometimes desires the extreme austerity of banning singing from the Church entirely, he remembers the tears it caused him to weep when he found his faith originally, and is forced to admit that, in terms of its power to convert, singing is useful “so that by the delights of the ear the weaker minds may be stimulated to a devotional mood. Yet when it happens that I am more moved by the singing than by what is sung, I confess myself to have sinned wickedly, and then I would rather not have heard the singing” (10.33.49; emphasis mine). 6

In De Musica , Boethius, summarizing Plato’s strictures in the Republic , defines music of the highest character as “temperate, simple, and masculine ( modesta, simplex, mascula ),” rather than “effeminate, violent, or fickle ( effeminata, fera, varia )” (Boethius 1989 , 3). These binaries are repeated verbatim by a vast array of subsequent theorists (see Leach 2006a , 2009b ). In terms of medieval rhetorical tropes which insisted that gender categories were biologically determined and immutable, producing good music meant de-emphasizing passive appreciation of music’s beauty as something feminine, seductive, de-rationalizing, effeminizing, in favour of an active engagement with music’s rationality as something masculine, numerical, quantifiable, and part of the active mental engagement of a performer. This was especially the case in the Christian Middle Ages when the sung liturgy of the Church was necessary to the everyday praise of God—banning music in church was simply impractical. To ensure that it was the right kind of music, the teaching and study of music—the discipline of musica —developed a specific pedagogy in which the very definition of what was and was not music was based on music’s expression of a rationality that belongs only to humans and not to other animals. Most typically in theoretical and pedagogical contexts, this rationality expressed itself in the ability to understand the mathematical ratios that underlie the correct tuning of musical intervals with the range of notes used in chant.

Many later writers sought to impose strictures on what they viewed as feminine and feminizing excesses in performance. The twelfth-century writer John of Salisbury criticizes the “lightness and dissolution of dainty voices designed to achieve vain glory in the feminine manner” when singing the Divine Office. “You would think,” John cautions, “that these were the most delicious songs of very pleasing sirens—not of men—and you would marvel at the lightness of voice, which cannot be compared in all their measures and pleasing melodies to those of the nightingale or parrot, or any other more clear sounding bird that might be found” (John of Salisbury 1993 , 48–49; see also discussion in Leach 2006b , 188–189, and 2007 , 153, 203–209). The effeminacy and feminizing powers attributed to these male singers are stronger and all the more worrisome on account of their virtuosity. John describes the singers as more eloquent than two natural avian practitioners, but says that their sound would make a listener mistake them for sirens—women–bird hybrids—rather than men. Rationality is the defining feature of the human soul, masculinity, and musica alike, and differentiates men both from beasts (including birds) and from women. In this example, by contrast, vocal prowess and the kind of music sung to exhibit it are understood to deprive the singers of both their humanity and their masculinity, making them effeminate, monstrous, unnatural.

From Conversion to Consolation Via Politics

Music’s positive power was noted by earlier writers and singing was a daily part of Christian worship, but that was precisely why its practice was so tightly regulated by theorizations that emphasized rationality. While being mainly anxious, Augustine also noted music’s positive effect (albeit on weaker listeners), who would be moved to Christian conversion. Augustine stresses, however, that reason must lead the senses rather than the other way round, with reason residing in the words of the chant and accessed through the sense of hearing. Many church authorities were concomitantly suspicious of untexted music, especially that used for dancing.

Elsewhere in his writings, however, Augustine talks more positively about the textless, musical element of singing in his discussion of the jubilus melisma that closes the Alleluia of the Mass. The Alleluia as a whole is not entirely without text, but this long melisma at the end is so much an extension of a single syllable of text (“-a”) that it seems, according to Augustine, to give acceptable expression to pure emotion:

One who jubilates does not speak words, but it is rather a sort of sound of joy without words; for the voice of the soul is poured out in joy, showing as much as it is able the feeling without comprehending the sense. A man joying in his exultation, from certain unspeakable and incomprehensible words, bursts forth in a certain voice of exultations without words, so that it seems he does indeed rejoice with his own voice, but as if, because filled with too much joy, he cannot put into words what it is in which he delights. (Augustine, Enarrationes in psalmos , Ps. 99 (100), 4; translation in Holsinger 2001 , 76)

The heart rejoicing in the praise of God is acceptable to Augustine, although it should be noted that he speaks of the performer’s perspective: ethics, like ontology, is a matter of production.

The rise of Aristotelianism in the University of Paris in the thirteenth century saw many challenges to Platonic views of music and a broadening of its ethical uses. As university-trained clerics began to serve in larger numbers in secular court administrations, Aristotle’s Politics (translated into Latin in the later thirteenth century and into French in the fourteenth), contained ideas that could be used to argue that music might form an important part of the moral education of the elite. While Plato and Aristotle exhibit remarkably similar views on the proper ends of music and its ethical role in education and politics, their main difference concerns the emphasis on music’s pleasurable qualities. For Plato—at least in the Republic —nearly all kinds of music must be banned, since musical pleasures were entirely subordinated to moral goodness. For Boethius, too, the personification Lady Philosophy could only console the sorrowing narrator of The Consolation of Philosophy when the Muses were dismissed from the narrator’s bedside in Book 1, Prose 1 as “theatrical tarts.” For Aristotle, conversely, more modes and instruments could be permitted, with the proviso that a proper education would allow correct judgement of them, because he considers pleasure an integral part of a fulfilled life, provided that it is not seen as an end in itself (see Schoen-Nazarro 1978 ).

In Book 8 of his Politics , Aristotle notes music as proper to the early education of free men, an idea he explores further in his Nichomachean Ethics . Some of the precepts which apply to music’s suitability as a form of virtuous princely relaxation were already present in the Middle Ages in the works of Augustine and Isidore. 7 But after the translation of Aristotle’s ethical works in the later thirteenth century, music theorists were not slow to exploit the power of Aristotle’s authority in praise of music’s virtuous power. The Prologue of Jean de Murs’s Musica speculativa in particular, a book designed to explain Boethius’s music treatise to a world that Jean alleges has deliberately forgotten the old learning it now finds too demanding, cites Aristotle on matters that pertain to issues of sensation, pleasure, relaxation, and virtue:

Although we have reason to reprove the excesses of voluptuous bestiality by which the unbridled passions of taste and touch ruin the intellect (according to Aristotle, [ Nichomachean ] Ethics Book 1 “many savages elect to live like beasts”), we do not at all, however, condemn the ordered and moderate pleasures afforded by vision and audition, which, being filled with a purer and more generous function, are subservient to the intellect (as Aristotle says in [ Nichomachean ] Ethics Book 3, on the matter of the moderate man who “pursues existence with moderation as must all who wish for health and a good constitution”). Vision attracts more praise than audition “because it is the principal instrument of knowing and shows us all the diversity of things.” However, experience shows us that voices and all the subtlest sounds composed by human artifice bring to the intellect, through the intermediary of audition, the sweetest joys. Once the work which occupies all serious affairs and which human nature may not neglect without discontinuing is finished, music offers to those whose ears are prepared, the benefit of a perfectly honest repose. And this is perhaps what Ulysses wanted to say in poetry according to Aristotle’s account in the Politics Book 8[.3] when he said that he said the best leisured pursuit is when men, congregated under one roof, listen, rejoicing, to the nightingale [ Odyssey 9.7–8]. (Murs 2000 , 134) 8

While an extensive discussion of the proper role of pleasure in promoting virtue is contained in Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics , it is his Politics that discusses the role of music in the education of the young and in governance specifically. Book 8 of the Politics outlines a programme of education for the young, which should feature letters and drawing, because they are useful, as well as gymnastics, because it gives health, courage, and vigour. Education should also involve music, although the reasons for, and role of, music in education are so problematic that of these four it is discussed at greatest length. Aristotle comments that although most people learn music (learn to listen to it, not play it) for pleasure, it is also potentially a form of noble leisured activity or leisured pursuit ( scholē ). Despite children not being capable of truly leisured pursuits, the habit of music appreciation learned young would benefit them in adulthood, allowing them to relax in a way that promotes good living. 9 Everyone gains natural pleasure from music, which is why people of all ages and characters enjoy it.

Nicole Oresme, who translated the Politics into French in the fourteenth century at the behest of Charles V of France, glosses this statement by citing Macrobius’s comments that even beasts and birds appreciate the delectation naturele that music has (Menut 1970 , 348). But it is not just this common pleasure that makes music suitable in the education of the young; music’s nature goes beyond usefulness to something far more laudable. First, audible music gives the listener occasion to consider inaudible kinds of music, such as the music of the spheres, preparing the soul for contemplation. 10 Second, as in Plato, it affects its listener’s character and soul because rhythms and melodies contain “likenesses of the components of character.” As virtue is “a matter of enjoying, loving, and hating in the right way, it is clear that nothing is more important than that one should learn to judge correctly and get in to the habit of enjoying decent characters and noble actions” (Aristotle 1998 , 235; cf. Menut 1970 , 349). Music alone among perceptible objects contains such “likenesses of character ( imitations ou similitudes de meurs )” (Menut 1970 , 350; cf. Aristotle 1998 , 235) and so teaching proper judgement of music is a way of teaching judgement of character, useful for assessing both others and the self. 11 Music is therefore ideal for education and its natural sweetness enables children to learn it, even though they are as yet too young for truly leisured pursuits.

Aristotle’s ethical works legitimized the pleasures of certain courtly recreations (notably hunting and listening to music), provided that self-control was exercised, and, as noted above, was formative of the views of those university-trained clerics who entered newly enlarged secular courts as administrators in increasing numbers during the long fourteenth century. 12 As well as Aristotle’s works, the other key philosophical text reworked in the secular courtly context in the long fourteenth century was Boethius’s Consolation . Given that Boethius’s text is effectively a philosophical treatise with songs, this central literary activity served to relate music and philosophy within the court context (Huot 2002 ; Kay 2008 ). The reinterpretation of Boethius’s Consolation for an audience who were not only Christians serious about the state of their souls, but also nobles committed to cultural and sporting activity was considerably aided by the Aristotelian idea of leisured pursuit ( scholē, scholazein ).

In the translated versions of Boethius’s Consolation , particular focus was given to book 2, in which Philosophy ventriloquizes the allegorical figure of Lady Fortune and suggests ways to combat her vagaries and constant inconstancy. The twin roles of Guillaume de Machaut ( c .1300–77) as an important composer of music and writer of poetry is significant here. Sylvia Huot ( 2002 ) has noted that Machaut’s narrative poem Le Remede de Fortune might be subtitled the “Consolation of Poetry,” with the art of love allied to the art of poetry and a full programme of courtly music copied in situ in the narrative poem to substitute for the songs in verse ( metra ) that had punctuated the prose of Boethius’s original. As such, the countering of Fortune’s ills through the complete dismissal of the muses in Boethius’s Consolation is recast as Machaut’s narrator learns to use the right kinds of music ( ars nova notated, refrain-form lyric for communal performance) to sublimate his desire (Leach 2011a , 82–131). Gace de la Buigne’s even more widely copied mirror-of-princes and hunting-debate poem, Le Roman des Deduis , specifically cites one polyphonic piece by each of Denis le Grant and Philippe de Vitry in support of an argument for the need for aural discernment and, ultimately, as a way of proving the admonitory narrative point that that which is most pleasurable is not always that which is most noble. This last point has, however, been wilfully misunderstood by modern scholars wishing to see it as auguring modern commodified musical culture by promoting purely sonic pleasure (Leach 2007 , 175–237; I return to this theme in the Conclusion). Thus, it seems that writers in the fourteenth century chose to relegitimate musical pleasure under carefully controlled circumstances, using a combination of earlier philosophical texts, refracted through contemporary vernacular literary works.

Medieval Philosophy, Modern Musicology

Aside from treatises on musica and other medieval philosophical discourses that specifically mention music, several other central philosophical fields in the Middle Ages can be perceived to have had an indirect influence on contemporary musical practice, even while the musical practices themselves were not directly treated. In the thirteenth-century period of systematic analysis and speculation that corresponded to “a new degree of rationalization in politics and society,” fields which saw significant development and change by later medieval thinkers included grammar, logic, mathematics (especially the tension between the arithmetic and geometric explanations of the universe), and radical nominalism (Marrone 2003, 10). Modern musicologists have adduced that these fields influenced late medieval music with particular reference to music’s highly literate aspects—the signs that make up the notation, and elite reading practices that offer interpretations of musical works that cannot be gleaned simply from hearing the music performed. As I discuss in the Conclusion, modern scholarly attitudes to literate music’s high seriousness and elite character in this period have shifted in parallel with the changes in the academy’s attitudes to elitism and popular culture. Nonetheless, I claim in this section that late medieval musical pieces were able to enact a kind of thinking, giving access to knowledge by demanding interpretation. This involved both sonic expression and auditory pleasure, but was neither defined nor limited by them. Rather, it relied on vision (reading) and memory such that music can function as itself a kind of philosophy.

Grammar, Logic, and Mathematics: Notation and the Construction of Ideas in Music

Musicology has traditionally described the history of medieval musical notation as plotting a course from a mere aide-memoire of neumes that do not show even relative pitches to ever more precise, square-drawn, heighted notations showing relative pitch and, eventually, relative duration (for an accessible summary, see Kelly 2014 ). While one may now prefer a less triumphalist and teleological narrative, noting that increased notational prescription was accompanied by elements of loss and resistance, and that older notational styles persisted well after more accurate (in our terms) notations were available, the basic outlines of a trend from non-rhythmic notation, through notation in fixed rhythmic patterns (modal notation), to mensural notation can be accepted broadly for what follows here. Accepted, too, is the fact that the earliest explicit notations of non-ternary rhythmic relations between notes is a phenomenon of what has come to be called the ars nova (for binary relations) and ars subtilior (for relations in other proportions).

It is in this ability to notate relative duration (often loosely referred to as rhythm) that the indirect operation of philosophical speculation can be observed. Max Haas ( 1982 ) has noted that the influence of grammar on basic medieval rhythmic pedagogies, which worked relatively well for modal rhythm, worked less well for later, mensural notation so that ars nova theorists began to adopt a frame of philosophical reference drawing instead from Aristotelian metaphysics. Late medieval philosophical interest in the meaning of signs, language, and representation has been held to have been reflected in the proliferation of musical signs (that is, musical notations) in the fourteenth century, especially in so far as such signs relate to rhythmic complexity. Dorit Tanay ( 1999 ) has argued that the rhythmic theories of the later Middle Ages reflect the pervasive influence of Aristotle (on quantity), of modal grammar (on ligatures), and of mathematics (especially in the eventual use of Arabic numerals). In particular, she claims that Ockhamist nominalism—the idea that universals are abstractions without extra-mental existence and that therefore only various individual particulars actually exist—fuelled “the quest to represent musical processes in all their possible temporal manifestations,” as, for example, in the work of Jean des Murs, a music theorist who was also a mathematician and astronomer (Tanay 1999 , 9; see also Gushee 1969 ).

For Tanay, “the context of the ontological and epistemological revolution of Ockhamist Nominalism” (Tanay 1999 , 8–9) serves to explain the radical changes in the goal of musical notation in the fourteenth century, towards utmost rhythmic variety represented by figures of the utmost simplicity and immediacy. Nonetheless, the practice of notation fell somewhat short of this programme (9). In practice, sub-minim values, in various heuristic and provisional notational forms, start to appear fairly early in the history of French ars nova notation. As I have argued elsewhere (Leach 2007 ), on the basis that many are associated with the depiction of birds’ voices, these sub-minim values illustrate a form of resistance from singers (and composers) who resented notational prescription and overly rationalist (as opposed to pragmatic) systematization. Such pragmatic and unrationalized notations might thus be linked instead with a more heuristic, empirical attitude, drawing on what Joel Kaye ( 1998 ) has identified as a new interest in approximation, estimation, and a more geometric, relational mathematics, which arguably influenced university speculation via its more pragmatic use in the increased economic activity of this time.

Tanay already diagnoses the notational puzzles of the so-called ars subtilior as part of a late medieval sophism and it seems possible to argue that several specific elements of fourteenth-century logical exercises might have cognate forms in musical pieces. The emphasis on the investigation of puzzles involving self-referentiality in the field of philosophical logic might readily be linked to the penchant for punning canons and picture notation in mid to late fourteenth-century music, such as Jacob Senleches’s La Harpe de melodie , notated in the form of a harp, the anonymous En la maison Dedalus , written as a maze, or those songs using some other graphic oddity to point, often obliquely, to a compositional oddity, such as the upside-down writing which accompanies the retrograde canon of Guillaume Machaut’s “Ma fin est mon commencement” (R14) (see Leach 2007 , 112–220). And just as the new logic extended into theology, opening up questions to new standards of proof, a theological impetus can arguably be detected behind the new logical puzzles of music: for example, Machaut’s R14 is a self-conscious song that voices the grounds for its own performance and has been read as a deep meditation on life as a Christian soul (Eisenberg 2007 ; Leach 2011a , 296–301; Cerquiglini-Toulet 2012 ; Bain 2012 ).

Literary scholars have long noted the medieval philosophical exercise of the disputatio , a more or less formalized debate, playing out in various literary debate genres, narrative and lyric (see summary in Cayley 2006 , 12–51). Some of the lyric debate forms are also musical, because they are songs, which means that troubadour tenso and joc-partit , as well as their northern French equivalent, the jeu-parti , could be said to represent a philosophically influenced musical form, associated with clerics active in northern puys (Saltzstein 2012 ). In my own work (Leach 2010 ), I have claimed the polytextual debate songs of Machaut and others as a similar staging of a quaestio (the specific question that was the subject of a given disputatio ) using music’s unique ability to voice both sides of the formal debate at once. 13 While no one has directly suggested that the specific form of “obligations,” where, according to Stephen P. Marrone (2003, 37), “the aim was to catch an opponent in contradiction as a result of accepting apparently quite consistent premises,” might have a musical outcome, what Thomas Brothers ( 1997 ) calls the “ musica ficta essay” might readily fit this bill. 14 In some of these musica ficta essays—songs where unusual or excessive placement of accidental signs triggers corollary pitch adjustments and requires solving correctly by the singer—differently notated pitches may end up sounding the same because of the logical constraints of the application of hexachordal signs (Marrone 2003, 37). Some of the “play” with musica ficta that I have diagnosed in Machaut arguably effects a smaller-scale version of such a technique, and might have served to provoke the same kinds of rational, argumentative conversation between those reading music in a court context as obligations or the afternoon philosophy lecture (the disputatio ) might have done in a university context (Leach 2002 , 493–495). Certainly the exploratory and performative practices of philosophy can be seen as radically congruent with similar practices in musica , itself—at least strictly and notionally—still a part of philosophy.

Philosophical Disputation, Exegesis, and the Motet: Music as Knowledge

By the thirteenth century, all university disciplines accepted the disputational form as a means of disseminating knowledge. 15 I have argued for the specific refraction of quaestiones and more puzzle-led forms such as obligations in polytextual music and play with the logic of notational signs above. In addition, the more general admission of contradiction and the extension of the either/or of Augustinian exegesis to include the both/and of later medieval logic, widely affected musical culture (on this shift see Newman 2013 , 7–12). The central polyphonic genre of the motet often explicitly presents voices singing erotic and worldly texts, literally grounded by the lower or lowest voice, which sings a piece of liturgical chant. Love songs ambiguously praise a lady that could be an idealized and erotic courtly one or might equally be the Virgin Mary. Extremely worldly songs are copied alongside devotional and even liturgical items, in manuscripts that we know to have been housed by, and even produced for, monastic libraries.

Modern musicology is polarized on the issue of how to explain the combination of apparently incompatibly sacred and secular elements in, for example, polytextual motets. One view claims that the sense of the texts is irrelevant, since they are obscured in polytextual performance, and emphasizes instead their sonic effects and pleasures (Page 1993a ; 2000 ). For commentators holding this view, most fully articulated by Christopher Page, the modern scholarly urge to ignore the sonic in favour of the textual and to deploy elite intellectual techniques to extract meaning from textual juxtaposition is driven by those scholars’ own position as intellectuals, not performers. 16 Page reacts specifically against Sylvia Huot’s ( 1997 ) approach to the motet in which she deploys sophisticated allegorical tools to diagnose medieval attempts to sacralize the secular and/or secularize the sacred. While it would be unwise to discount the possibility that the motet had an audience wider than the university-trained clerics who developed it, or that that wider audience (or anyone) could find pleasure in their purely sonic aspect, it is important to consider the way that motets’ compositional and performative contexts were inflected by scholastic philosophical norms. These norms might in fact nuance the more polarized positions in motet scholarship that have derived from the careful work of Page and Huot (Dillon 2012 ; Rothenberg 2011 ; for an attempt to bridge this gap, see Clark 2007 ). Such norms might at once legitimate textual reflection on oral performance (as seen, for example, in the written collections of both quaestiones and motets), and persuade us not to view the sacred and secular as a controlling binary that can be mapped onto others (Latin/vernacular; devotional/erotic, liturgical/courtly) in a simple act of allegoresis. Thinking from the perspective of medieval philosophy might demand instead that we see these elements not as contradictions, but as part of the same philosophical (and thus theological) understanding of the world, the universe, and human being. Barbara Newman’s ( 2013 , 7) idea of “crossover” within a default category of the sacred (or, in my terms, theology in particular or even philosophy in general) approaches this perspective, although simply refusing the very terms “sacred” and “secular” removes the necessity seen in Newman to specify that the category of sacred be considered the default one without being necessarily dominant, univocal, or even theologically serious. Once one views the semantics of a genre like the motet taking place in the broad field of philosophy, there is no sacred and secular, just as there is “neither male nor female; for ye are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28). Medieval theological hermeneutics allowed at least some scholars to view a Bible full of contradiction as Scriptural truth: truth does not need to eschew contradiction. Musical forms like polytextual motets and songs provide sonic proof of this knowledge by reconciling irreconcilable texts in a both/and (that is, sung simultaneously) of (literal) harmony, which is temporally animated (that is, it works contrapuntally) through its integration of dissonance. Music’s ability to concretize metaphor so powerfully lent it a special place in the cultural activity of those who found complex cogitation rewarding.

Conclusion: Modern Problems with Medieval Ideas

Explicit and focused musicological interest in music’s place within the broader field of medieval philosophy is relatively rare, and medieval philosophy, similarly, is not greatly prominent within philosophy as a discipline, so that medieval philosophy of music within philosophy barely registers. Nonetheless, this chapter has outlined how some knowledge of medieval philosophy might aid an understanding of (attitudes to) medieval music, and perhaps even vice versa.

Philosophy seems an irrelevance to music in the twenty-first century, largely because of music’s definition, use, and value in the modern world, in tandem with contemporary popular perception of philosophy’s own value. Music today is principally a commodity form, usually accessed purely sonically, mediated electronically, and used principally for pleasure and entertainment. Philosophy is none of those things and thus seems irrelevant to music. And relations to pleasure and entertainment are governed by a democratization of taste, deregulated by postmodern relativism, which will not brook elite university professors telling others what to listen to and how to understand it. The contrast between the present-day situation and the prevailing didacticism of, for instance, the long fourteenth century, and the idea that a reader must submit to having their mind enlarged, could not be starker (see Kay 2007 , 1–4). The tendency, therefore, is to attempt to modernize the Middle Ages and to seize on any strands of medieval thought that can be read as making medieval music, musicians, and listening more like our own.

Finding familiarity in the Middle Ages is not impossible because the Middle Ages is not a monolithic age. In particular, the coexistence of Platonic and Aristotelian ideas and their shifting relation, especially as new translations or more of the Aristotelian corpus became available from the thirteenth century onwards, should be recognized. This had implications for music’s ontology: Johannes de Grocheio, for example, dismisses musica humana , although his scorn is rather unique in music theory. It has nonetheless found favour with modern scholars wanting to find in medieval music and music theory something closer to the emotion-led understanding of later music (see Page 1993b ). More widespread was a new attitude to the harmony of the spheres, which Aristotle denied made any sound, forcing various writers to attempt a difficult “harmonization” between the authorities of Plato and “the Philosopher” (Rico 2005b ). 17 Aristotle’s work was absorbed in what was still at base a Platonic form of learning, and many remained critical of Aristotle, even at the height of his influence (Marrone 2003, 34). Led by the very scant evidence for university music curricula having any relation to, or influence on real music making (in Paris, for example), some have rejected the Boethian-Pythagorean strain of philosophical approaches to music as largely irrelevant, conveniently dropping its attendant ethical prerogatives and prescriptive ontology. As a result, those influenced by Aristotelian ideas produce statements that speak to our age well, with a debunkingly empirical attitude to music as anything other than sound, the very aspect that is not coincidentally music’s most saleable feature in the present period of mass-market electronically mediated music.

Modern anti-elitism and focus on the popular should be viewed for what it is: a late capitalist valorization of commodity, the commercial, and what can be monetized. Devaluing of expertise and the rejection of medieval seriousness about the correct judgement of the motivations of those producing what is heard is linked to the rejection of complicated reading practices as not really representing what “normal” people would think. Latent within this wish to equate medieval listening practices with our own popular listening practices is the idea of musical consumption of a fast turnover of works, listened to (or danced to) once without any explication. It seems more likely to me, however, that medieval musical pieces were appreciated over a longer time and cumulatively from many angles, including listening, performing, and discussion—perhaps even from seeing the written text, although a spoken text ( lecture ) is equally feasible. While nobles might lack formal training, they were apt for receiving informal (lay) instruction from their formally trained (clerical) servants at court. This is not to deny that individuals could show diversity of interest and degrees of understanding, but the prestige of elite culture was an aspirational interest of many medieval aristocrats.

Contemporary narratives that see the medieval court as a refreshingly enlightened secular space in a rapidly secularizing later Middle Ages are also questionable for the post-Enlightenment (and, ultimately, postmodern) attitudes to religion that they embody. Modern attitudes to theology, (the possibility of) truth, and the intellectual-emotional meaning of music affect what scholars pick and choose from medieval writings on music and philosophy. The modern appreciation of music as primarily gustative, for consumption and uncomplicated enjoyment (often physical) is partly useful (because medieval music accompanied movements in the liturgy, in dance—also sometimes liturgical!—and ceremonial), but mainly obscures the very real seriousness of music in elite discourse in the Middle Ages when it really was a branch of philosophy and could thus embody and prompt thought, even if it did so through pleasure. To claim that pleasure was not the (proper) end is not to say that medieval audiences did not enjoy music, but rather that they understood their enjoyment within a context that was distinctly pre-modern, pre-capitalist, and undemocratic. That this context was a fundamentally philosophical one did not limit it to philosophers.

I would like to thank Eleanor Giraud, Henry Hope, J. P. E. Harper-Scott, Jonathan Morton, and Emily X. X. Tan for their comments on earlier drafts of this chapter.

The term is taken from Newman 2013 .

See Ziolkowski 1998 , 196 for note on crusma , a single discrete pitch on the lyre.

Some of the arguments in this section were first presented in Leach 2006a , which was later challenged in Fuller 2011 . For my response to Fuller, see Leach 2011b .

The problem for female listeners was instead one of excessive gendering, which correlated, in line with medieval anti-feminism, with hyper-sexualization. See Leach and Zeeman, 2020.

The Latin text reads: “ut per oblectamenta aurium infirmior animus in affectum pietatis adsurgat. tamen cum mihi accidit ut me amplius cantus quam res quae canitur moveat, poenaliter me peccare confiteor et tunc mallem non audire cantantem.” Text is available at http://www.stoa.org/hippo/text10.html . Translation in Augustine 1955 . For a fuller exposition, see Leach 2013 and Holsinger 2001 , 61–83.

Augustine ( 1977 , 171) explains that noblemen properly use music to relax from their labours; Isidore, Etymologies 3.17 mentions that “music soothes the mind so that it can endure toil, and song assuages the weariness encountered in any task” (McKinnon 1998 , 40).

Homer’s text and Aristotle’s Greek refer to a human minstrel here, not a bird. Jean de Murs and Nicole Oresme probably used William of Moerbeke’s Latin translation, which has philomela at this point; see note for I, 7 in Jean de Murs 2000 , 134. Oresme notes that the citations from Homer at this point are not verse in their Latin translation, are obscure, and appear in variant versions in different sources (Menut 1970, 342–3).

“Leisured activity” ( scholē, scholazein ) is happiness as an end accompanied by pleasure. See Aristotle 1998 , 229. The fourteenth-century French translation by Nicole Oresme renders it as “vaquer, ce est a dire reposer en vie contemplative” (Menut 1970, 341).

“Et la musique sensible donne occasion de considerer de la speculative. Et ovecques ce, elle prepare l’ame a contemplation.” Menut 1970 , 348.

Aristotle allows that objects of sight admit faint representations of character but only by use of signs for, rather than direct imitations of, character.

While a far older tradition of Stoic rather than Aristotelian virtue ethics already tolerated courtly pursuits (see, for example, Moos 2012 ), the larger number of university-trained court administrators in the later Middle Ages, led to the predominant influence of Aristotle’s political and ethical works in this period. On the changing size and shape of court personnel, see Clanchy 1993; Vale 2001 .

More recently, Yolanda Plumley has noted that the dialogic exchanges formerly associated with the jeu-parti transferred to the updated ballade form of the fourteenth century; see Plumley 2013 , 268–269.

More specifically, the respondent in obligationes has to follow certain rules in answering questions about a hypothetical situation (usually a counterfactual one); the person posing the questions attempts to force the respondent into self-contradiction. While the situation with the musica ficta essay is not identical, the process is arguably analogous. The interactions between singers attempting to realize such pieces might be imagined regularly to have forced such contradictions as to bring the rehearsal process to a (temporary and humorous) standstill. For more on the musica ficta essay see Brothers 1997 , 138–142 and Lefferts 2007 .

See Marenbon 1987 , 14: “Gradually, the quaestio-technique became, not just a method for organizing the theological summae, but a way of thought which could be used in any subject and which shaped the practice of teaching in the medieval universities.”

For example, Page 1993a , 63–64: “It is possible to dwell in a learned paradise of documents, variant readings in chant manuscripts, and the other material deriving from clerical ‘high’ culture, forgetting all the while that medieval mechanisms for transmitting ideas and other intangible resources sometimes worked in ways that the modern bookish mind may never envisage.”

While the philosophical tradition inherited from the late antique schools already combined Aristotelianism and Platonism, the later Middle Ages is marked by the specific incoporation of a wider range of Aristotle’s works newly translated into Latin.

Works Cited

Aristotle . 1998 . Politics . Translated by C. D. C. Reeve . Indianapolis, IN: Hackett.

Google Scholar

Google Preview

Augustine . 1955 . Confessions . Translation by Albert C. Outler , available from http://www.ccel.org/ccel/augustine/confessions.txt .

Augustine . 1977 . “On Music.” In Writings of Saint Augustine , Vol. 2, edited by Robert Catesby Taliaferro , 151–379. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press.

Bain, Jennifer . 2012 . “ ‘…et mon commencement ma fin’: Genre and Machaut’s Musical Language in His Secular Songs.” In A Companion to Guillaume de Machaut , edited by Deborah L. McGrady and Jennifer Bain , 79–101. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill.

Boethius, Anicius Manlius Severinus . 1989 . Fundamentals of Music . Translated by Calvin M. Bower . Music Theory Translation. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Boynton, Susan , and Eric Rice , eds. 2008 . Young Choristers, 650–1700 . Woodbridge, UK: Boydell and Brewer.

Brothers, Thomas . 1997 . Chromatic Beauty in the Late Medieval Chanson: An Interpretation of Manuscript Accidentals . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Cayley, Emma . 2006 . Debate and Dialogue: Alain Chartier in His Cultural Context . Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Cerquiglini-Toulet, Jacqueline . 2012 . “ ‘Ma fin est mon commencement’: The Essence of Poetry and Song in Guillaume de Machaut.” In A Companion to Guillaume de Machaut , edited by Deborah L. McGrady and Jennifer Bain , 69–78. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill.

Clanchy, M. T.   1993 . From Memory to Written Record: England 1066–1307 . 2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell.

Clark, Suzannah . 2007 . “  ‘S’en dirai chançonete’: Hearing Text and Music in a Medieval Motet. ” Plainsong and Medieval Music 16 (1): 31–59.

Desmond, Karen . 1998 . “ Sicut in grammatica : Analogical Discourse in Chapter 15 of Guido’s Micrologus .” Journal of Musicology 16, no. 4 (Autumn): 467–493.

Dillon, Emma . 2012 . The Sense of Sound: Musical Meaning in France, 1260–1330 . New York: Oxford University Press.

Dyer, Joseph . 2009. “ Speculative ‘Musica’ and the Medieval University of Paris. ” Music & Letters 90, no. 2 (May): 177–204.

Eisenberg, Michael . 2007 . “The Mirror of the Text: Reflections in Ma fin est mon commencement .” In Canons and Canonic Techniques, 14th–16th Centuries: Theory, Practice, and Reception History , edited by Katelijne Schiltz and Bonnie J. Blackburn , 83–110. Leuven, Belgium: Peeters.

Fritz, Jean-Marie . 2000 . Paysages sonores du Moyen Âge: Le Versant épistémologique . Paris: Champion.

Fuller, Sarah . 2011 . “ Concerning Gendered Discourse in Medieval Music Theory: Was the Semitone ‘Gendered Feminine’? ” Music Theory Spectrum 33, no. 1 (Spring): 65–89.

Guido d’Arezzo . 1999 . Regulae rithmice . In Guido D’Arezzo’s Regulae Rithmice, Prologus in Antiphonarium, and Epistola ad Michahelem: A Critical Text and Translation , edited by Dolores Pesce , 327–403. Musicological Studies 73. Ottawa: Institute of Mediaeval Music.

Gushee, Lawrence . 1969 . “ New Sources for the Biography of Johannes de Muris. ” Journal of the American Musicological Society 22, no. 1 (Spring): 3–26.

Haas, Max . 1982 . “Studien zur mittelalterlichen Musiklehre. I: Eine Übersicht über die Musiklehre im Kontext der Philosophie des 13. und frühen 14. Jahrhunderts.” In Aktuelle Fragen der musikbezogenen Mittelalterforschung: Texte zu einem Balser Kolloquium des Jahres 1975 , edited by Hans Oesch and Wulf Arlt , 323–456. Forum Musicologicum 3. Winterthur, Switzerland: Amadeus.

Hentschel, Frank . 2000 . “Der verjagte Dämon: Mittelalterliche Gedanken zur Wirkung der Musik aus der Zeit um 1300, mit einer Edition der Quaestiones 16 und 17 aus Quodlibet VI des Petrus d’Auvergne.” In Geistesleben im 13. Jahrhundert , edited by Jan A. Aertsen and Andreas Speer , 395–421. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.

Hicks, Andrew . 2017 . Composing the World: Harmony in the Medieval Platonic Cosmos . New York: Oxford University Press.

Holsinger, Bruce W.   2001 . Music, Body, and Desire in Medieval Culture: Hildegard of Bingen to Chaucer . Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Huot, Sylvia . 1997 . Allegorical Play in the Old French Motet: The Sacred and Profane in Thirteenth-Century Polyphony . Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Huot, Sylvia . 2002. “ Guillaume de Machaut and the Consolation of Poetry. ” Modern Philology 100, no. 2 (November): 169–195.

Ilnitchi, Gabriela . 2002 . “ Musica Mundana , Aristotelian Natural Philosophy and Ptolemaic Astronomy.” Early Music History 21: 37–74.

Jean de Murs . 2000 . Musica speculativa . In Jean de Murs: Écrits sur la musique , edited by Christian Meyer , 133–193. Paris: CNRS.

John of Salisbury. 1993 . Policraticus . In Ioannis Sarisburiensis Policraticus I–IV , edited by K. S. B. Keats-Rohan . Corpus Christianorum Continuatio mediaeualis 118. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols.

Kay, Sarah . 2007 . The Place of Thought: The Complexity of One in Late Medieval French Didactic Poetry . Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Kay, Sarah . 2008 . “Touching Singularity: Consolation, Philosophy, and Poetry in the French dit .” In The Erotics of Consolation: Desire and Distance in the Late Middle Ages , edited by Catherine E. Léglu and Stephen J. Milner , 21–38. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.

Kaye, Joel . 1998 . Economy and Nature in the Fourteenth Century: Money, Market Exchange, and the Emergence of Scientific Thought . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Kelly, Thomas Forrest . 2014 . Capturing Music: The Story of Notation . New York: W. W. Norton.

Leach, Elizabeth Eva . 2002 . “ Death of a Lover and the Birth of the Polyphonic Balade: Machaut’s Notated Balades 1–5. ” Journal of Musicology 19, no. 3 (Summer): 461–502.

Leach, Elizabeth Eva . 2006a. “ Gendering the Semitone, Sexing the Leading Tone: Fourteenth-Century Music Theory and the Directed Progression. ” Music Theory Spectrum 28, no. 1 (March): 1–21.

Leach, Elizabeth Eva . 2006b. “  ‘The Little Pipe Sings Sweetly While the Fowler Deceives the Bird’: Sirens in the Later Middle Ages. ” Music & Letters 87, no. 2 (May): 187–211.

Leach, Elizabeth Eva . 2007 . Sung Birds: Music, Nature, and Poetry in the Later Middle Ages . Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Leach, Elizabeth Eva . 2009 a. “ Grammar and Music in the Medieval Song-School. ” New Medieval Literatures 11:195–211.

Leach, Elizabeth Eva . 2009 b. “Music and Masculinity in the Middle Ages.” In Masculinity and Western Musical Practice , edited by Ian Biddle and Kirsten Gibson , 21–39. Farnham, UK: Ashgate.

Leach, Elizabeth Eva . 2010. “ Music and Verbal Meaning: Machaut’s Polytextual Songs. ” Speculum 85, no. 3 (July): 567–591.

Leach, Elizabeth Eva . 2011 a. Guillaume de Machaut: Secretary, Poet, Musician . Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Leach, Elizabeth Eva . 2011 b. “ Reading and Theorizing Medieval Music Theory: Interpretation and Its Contexts. ” Music Theory Spectrum 33, no. 1 (Spring): 90–98.

Leach, Elizabeth Eva . 2013 . “The Sound of Beauty. ” In Beauty , edited by Lauren Arrington , Zoë Leinhardt , and Philip Dawid , 72–98. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Leach, Elizabeth Eva , and Nicolette Zeeman . 2020 . “Gender: The Art and Hermeneutics of (In)differentiation.” In The Edinburgh Companion to Literature and Music , edited by Delia da Sousa Correa, 125–144 . Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Lefferts, Peter M. 2007. “ A Riddle and A Song: Playing With Signs in a Fourteenth-Century Ballade. ” Early Music History 26 (October): 121–179.

Marenbon, John . 1987 . Later Medieval Philosophy (1150–1350): An Introduction . London: Routledge.

Marrone, Stephen P.   2003 . “Medieval Philosophy in Context.” In The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Philosophy , edited by A. S. McGrade , 10–50. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

McKinnon, James , ed. 1998 . The Early Christian Period and the Latin Middle Ages . Source Readings in Music History 2. New York: W.W. Norton.

Menut, Albert Douglas . 1970. “Maistre Nicole Oresme: Le Livre de Politiques d’Aristote , Published from the Text of the Avranches Manuscript 223.” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society , ns 60, no. 6 (November): 1–392.

Moos, Peter von . 2012 . “Du miroir des princes au Cortegiano. Engelbert d’Admont (1250– 1331) sur les agréments de la convivialité et de la conversation.” In Formes dialoguées dans la littérature exemplaire du Moyen Âge , edited by Marie-Anne Polo de Beaulieu , 103–162. Paris: Champion.

Newman, Barbara . 2013 . Medieval Crossover: Reading the Secular against the Sacred . Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press.

Page, Christopher . 1993 a. Discarding Images: Reflections on Music and Culture in Medieval France . Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Page, Christopher . 1993b. “ Johannes Grocheio on Secular Music: A Corrected Text and a New Translation. ” Plainsong and Medieval Music 2, no. 1 (April): 17–41.

Page, Christopher . 2000. “ Around the Performance of a Thirteenth-Century Motet. ” Early Music 28, no. 3 (August): 343–357.

Plumley, Yolanda . 2013 . The Art of Grafted Song: Citation and Allusion in the Age of Machaut . New York: Oxford University Press.

Rico, Gilles . 2005a. “Music in the Arts Faculty of Paris in the Thirteenth and Early Fourteenth Centuries.” Doctoral diss., University of Oxford. http://www.diamm.ac.uk/resources/doctoral-dissertations/rico/ .

Rico, Gilles . 2005 b. “‘Auctoritas cereum habet nasum’: Boethius, Aristotle, and the Music of the Spheres in the Thirteenth and Early Fourteenth Centuries.” In Citation and Authority in Medieval and Renaissance Musical Culture: Learning from the Learned , edited by Suzannah Clark and Elizabeth Eva Leach , 20–28. Woodbridge, UK: Boydell and Brewer.

Rothenberg, David J.   2011 . The Flower of Paradise: Marian Devotion and Secular Song in Medieval and Renaissance Music . New York: Oxford University Press.

Saltzstein, Jennifer . 2012 . “Cleric-Trouvères and the Jeux-Partis of Medieval Arras.” Viator 43 (2): 147–64.

Schoen-Nazzaro, Mary B.   1978 . “ Plato and Aristotle on the Ends of Music. ” Laval Theologique et Philosophique 34 (3): 261–373.

Swerdlow, Noel . 1967 . “ ‘ Musica dicitur a moys, quod est aqua. ’ ” Journal of the American Musicological Society 20, no. 1 (Spring): 3–9.

Tanay, Dorit Esther . 1999 . Noting Music, Marking Culture: The Intellectual Context of Rhythmic Notation, 1250–1400 . Musicological Studies and Documents 46. Holzgerlingen, Germany: Hänssler Verlag.

Vale, Malcolm . 2001 . The Princely Court: Medieval Courts and Culture in North-West Europe 1270–1380 . Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Ziolkowski, Jan M. , ed. 1998 . The Cambridge Songs (Carmina Cantabrigiensia) . Tempe, AZ: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies.

• About Oxford Academic
• Publish journals with us
• University press partners
• What we publish
• New features  
• Open access
• Institutional account management
• Rights and permissions
• Get help with access
• Accessibility
• Advertising
• Media enquiries
• Oxford University Press
• Oxford Languages
• University of Oxford

Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide

• Copyright © 2024 Oxford University Press
• Cookie settings
• Cookie policy
• Privacy policy
• Legal notice

This Feature Is Available To Subscribers Only

Sign In or Create an Account

This PDF is available to Subscribers Only

For full access to this pdf, sign in to an existing account, or purchase an annual subscription.

• Skip to search box
• Skip to main content

Princeton University Library

Medieval music: a guide to research and resources.

• Introduction
• Search Strategies
• Genres, Compositional Techniques & Repertoire
• Books & Catalogs

Key Journals

Music periodical databases.

• Sources & Editions
• Composers & Performers
• Performance Practice, Notation & Editing
• Databases, Organizations & Websites
• Musica disciplina Published since 1946. Recent print volumes shelved in Bound Periodicals ML5 .M962
• Plainsong & Medieval Music Published by the Cambridge University Press since 1992. Recent print volumes shelved in Bound Periodicals ML169.8 .P54
• Early Music Published by the Cambridge University Press since 1992. Recent print volumes shelved in Bound Periodicals ML5 .E18

Use these resources primarily to find print and online articles, reports, notices,  reviews, and other writings on the music industry published in music journals, trade publications, and magazines.

• RILM Abstracts of Music Literature with Full Text This link opens in a new window Covers all aspects of music, including historical musicology, ethnomusicology, instruments and voice, dance, and music therapy. If related to music, works in other fields, such as literature, dramatic arts, visual arts, anthropology, sociology, philosophy and physics are included. 1967+
• Music Periodicals Database This link opens in a new window Indexes music journals covering a broad scope of research from performance, theory and composition to music education, jazz and ethnomusicology. Provides selected full text coverage of the most important music journals, and both scholarly and popular publications.
• Music Index with Full Text This link opens in a new window Includes international music periodicals covering classical, popular and world of music. Comprehensively cites articles and news about music, musicians and the music industry as well as book and concert reviews and obituaries. 1970+ more... less... Print volumes covering 1949-1972 are available in Mendel Music Library: Reference (SV) ML 118 M84.
• << Previous: Books & Catalogs
• Next: Sources & Editions >>
• Last Updated: Jul 12, 2023 3:24 PM
• URL: https://libguides.princeton.edu/medieval-music

Music and the emotions of medievalism: The quest for identity

• Introduction
• Published: 16 January 2020
• Volume 10 , pages 411–422, ( 2019 )

Cite this article

• Helen Dell 1  

5257 Accesses

Explore all metrics

Avoid common mistakes on your manuscript.

In this special issue my co-editors Andrew Lynch and Elizabeth Randell Upton and I set ourselves a task whose complexity became more apparent as we proceeded. Writing this introduction, the task of considering the three components of our title – music, emotion, medievalism – in their various interrelations has been challenging, while at the same time convincing me of the value of scrutinizing them together.

Within the humanities, music has, until quite recently, been largely neglected in the study of medievalism. As a sounding art, it may have seemed less familiar in a field initially devoted more to sight-oriented activities, although it has been very much in evidence in a range of medievalist pursuits. Films, fiction, performances, recordings, and online games have created or adapted a range of musical tropes or their literary evocations that have become indissolubly associated with the ‘medieval.’ Possibly, the relative inattention music has received in medievalism studies is owing, as Claudia Gorbman noted, to the fact that film music tends to ‘mask its own insistence and saw away in the backfield of consciousness’ (Gorbman, 1987 , 1). Game players and film audiences may feel the results without noticing how they are produced. But trained musicologists, tuned to an awareness of music, with its narrative, ideological, and emotional implications, are able to notice and to draw these implications into the foreground. Since the early years of the present century, musicology has contributed significantly to the concept of medievalism, though not initially under that title. Musicologists’ work, perhaps as a result, did not receive the attention it warranted within the humanities. Karen Cook, Susan Fast, John Haines, Annette Kreutziger-Herr, Daniel Leech-Wilkinson, Elizabeth Randell Upton, Kirsten Yri, and Nick Wilson, among others, have produced much valuable work for students of medievalism.

A little more recently the gulf between medievalism in music on the one hand and the humanities on the other has begun to be bridged from the other side. Authors and editors have realized that music cannot be excluded when medievalism is the subject of enquiry – all the more so when the emotional aspects of medievalism are in question, as in fact they always are. As David Matthews affirms: ‘“Medievalism” (however it is defined) is always bound up, necessarily and intimately, with emotional responses to the premodern past’ (Matthews, 2018 , 209).

Essay collections on medievalism have been including chapters on music for a decade and more. In 2007, David W. Marshall edited Mass Market Medievalism , which includes three chapters devoted to musical medievalism. Bettina Bildhauer and Anke Bernau’s Medieval Film ( 2009 ) has a chapter on music in medievalist movies. In Medievalisms ( 2013 ), Tison Pugh and Angela Jane Weisl devote part of a chapter to recent performances of medieval and medieval-inspired music. There is a chapter on neo-medieval music in The Middle Ages in Popular Culture , edited by Helen Young ( 2015 ). A music chapter is included in the Cambridge Companion to Medievalism ( 2016 ), edited by Louise D’Arcens. More recently, three essays were brought together in the final section of Studies in Medievalism: Authenticity, Medievalism, Music XXVI ( 2018 ), edited by Karl Fugelso. Ruth Barrett-Peacock and Ross Hagen’s essay collection, Medievalism and Metal Music Studies: Throwing Down the Gauntlet , was published in May 2019. The Oxford Handbook on Music and Medievalism , edited by Stephen C. Meyer and Kirsten Yri, forthcoming in 2019, neatly embeds the association in its title. Some of the names associated with these writings are Ruth Barrett-Peacock, Alana Bennett, James Cook, Karen M. Cook, Helen Dell, Ross Hagen, Paul Hardwick, Alexander Kolassa, Aleks Pluskowski, Tison Pugh, Simon Trafford, Alison Tara Walker, Angela Jane Weisl, Adam Whittaker, and Kirsten Yri.

Our issue adds to this expanding conversation, with new work from both musicologists and literary scholars. Our three medieval musicologists, Karen Cook, Elizabeth Randell Upton, and Kirsten Yri, are also working on the broader questions of medievalism, that is, on questions of how the ‘medieval’ and its music have been invented, modified, received, interpreted, felt, and understood, enabling them to elucidate for the non-musically trained the various musical means by which the ‘medieval’ is transmitted in different genres. Of particular relevance in this issue is their understanding of the emotional pull of music and how it can guide or manipulate the listener.

On the literary side are three scholars who combine research in the humanities with a love for and experience of music as performers, listeners, students, and teachers: Louise D’Arcens, Helen Dell, and Andrew Lynch. There are, however, no strict demarcation lines between the essays, an indication, I believe, that the conversation has now spread across what once seemed an impassable disciplinary divide. This is also true of the two 2019 book collections mentioned above.

Perhaps one could say that (as in my bridge metaphor), it might still make a difference to our mode of writing which side we start out from. Our three musicologists have tended to begin with sound and then work outwards to more general insights into medievalism and the emotions it arouses. The humanities trio in the collection have tended to work more from the side of words written about music or words evoking music or drawing on its metaphoric power, whether in fiction or argument. And it must be remembered that words heard, in sound or in imagination, also have their music – in emphasis, in timbre, in intonation, in all of which emotion plays a part, transferred from speaker to listener.

For the musicologists, Elizabeth Randell Upton’s essay discusses how repetition in music, the backbone of medieval secular and liturgical song as it is for popular and folk song today, has been routinely ignored by composers, critics and musicologists brought up on classical music:

Repetition in song form, either popular or medieval, has not often been discussed, perhaps because it seems so straightforward and simple an element. But simplicity should not imply insignificance.

Upton responds to this scholarly neglect in her discussion of a song by Bob Dylan, ‘Tangled Up in Blue,’ modeled on Guillaume de Machaut’s fourteenth-century ballade form; Upton demonstrates how an accomplished and inventive singer/composer, by exploring the ‘subtle medievalism’ of form, can bring out the play of repetition and difference in a strophic song.

Kirsten Yri has written on the quixotic experiment by Rondellus, an Estonian medieval and Renaissance ensemble, to produce an album of songs by heavy metal band Black Sabbath, translated into Latin and using medievalist performance practices. The changes include abandoning electric for acoustic instruments – ‘fiddles, organistrum, recorder, and lute [with] muted onsets, a much narrower dynamic range, and thinner timbres than electric guitars and basses’ – and using trained, refined voices to replace the typical heavy metal vocal snarls and screams. Such a metamorphosis, Yri suggests, using the terminology of Monique Scheer, translates the language of ‘anger, aggression, and pain, viewed as beyond human control and positioned as largely “physical” and “exterior”’ into the language of ‘contentedness and reflection, carry[ing] little visual bodily expression or gesture, and […] typically received as intellectual and “interior.”’

In this context, to medievalize music is to raise and refine it aesthetically and emotionally. As I think Yri assumes here, the aesthetic response is not separable from the emotional. Footnote 1 Nor, for this reason, can the aesthetic response be disinterested. Music in particular has profound emotional effects on the listener, however they are theorized. These effects, sometimes unconscious, are implicated in various attitudes and agendas and erupt into arguments whose force cannot be understood unless the depth of emotional engagement is taken into account. And the reverse is also true: one’s attitudes and agendas are implicated in the way one hears and receives music. Music creates an emotional hotspot on many levels.

Rondellus’s ‘editorial process’ constitutes a reversal of the typical trajectory by which we progress from the barbaric Middle Ages to the civilized modern era. Differences in instrumental and vocal timbre, like those between Black Sabbath and Rondellus, communicate perfectly which ‘medieval’ is in question in any given context, without the medium of words. The word ‘medieval’ is flexible enough to cope with a range of implications: positive, negative, or oscillating between the two. Yri’s essay reflects the oscillating nature of medievalism by exploring the alternative forms it takes in the work of these two medievalist music groups.

As Karen Cook notes in her essay, such oscillations are ubiquitous in medievalism. Music provides copious illustrations:

[Medieval] stereotypes have permeated Western culture since the Middle Ages themselves: the medieval past is, on the one hand, pure, tranquil, simple, religious. […] On the other hand, it was barbaric, permeated by violence, torture, and inquisition, primitive and superstitious. […] Through supporting such attributes or emotional states, medievalist musical tropes took on a sort of bifurcated polyvalence, such that the same sound can act as a ‘connotative cue’ [for a particular meaning and also its inverse] (Gorbman, 1987 , 5). Footnote 2

Thus, as Cook elaborates, in her section, ‘The bell,’ a sound may create ‘divided emotional states: on the one hand tranquility, “joy, peace, or victory,” on the other “something sinister.”’ These differences depend on the sound’s position within the narrative and in the player’s situation, since ‘the player’s emotions can and will change depending on their familiarity with the game and their own success at achieving their goals.’

Cook uses a form of Topic Theory, that is,

the analysis of how certain musical figures become saturated with and therefore convey extra-musical meanings. Unlike the Western instrumental genres most often analyzed in topic theory, though, the medievalist tropes I discuss here have been aligned with explicit narratives constructed through visual, textual, musical, and other descriptive means. As such, their array of possible emotive meanings becomes both clarified and reified as they appear in a given context.

Narrative and emotional context is thus all-important in modifying the effects of medievalist musical cues in game-playing.

Nonetheless, Cook argues, in spite of the polyvalence of certain musical sounds, some musical tropes are difficult to detach from their dominant associations:

We cannot change how certain musical sounds have been associated with medievalist contexts in the past, nor […] completely eliminate their medievalist overtones from our aural memories. Yet when we continue to rely on those sounds to create or reinforce the emotional states with which they have become so closely linked, I suggest that we inadvertently imbue the new context with a mythological […] idea of the medieval past. For example, by almost exclusively using musical tropes clearly linked to the Christian church to depict the medievalist, do we not imply that those sounds alone can represent the past, and thus imply that that is because the past was solely, wholly Christian?

Medievalism and identity

Cook alludes here to what has turned out to be a vital question in this issue and, I believe, in medievalism studies generally: the question of identity for the medievalist player, listener, viewer, reader, academic, or enthusiast of any kind. (In the academy we study medievalism, but that does not mean we are immune to its influence.) Our essays demonstrate, some more than others, that questions of identity lie at the heart of medievalism and are a potent driving force in the forms it takes and in the reactions it produces. We project something of the selves we wish to be seen in our medievalist pursuits, to those by whom we wish to be recognized. A glance at Facebook or a range of forums, online and off, offers examples of these projections.

Music plays a significant role in the establishment and maintenance, sometimes the evolution, of an identity. The quest for identity can also be seen as a factor in determining which particular associations remain dominant in medievalist music. As Cook demonstrates, in Western performances, recordings, study, games, and films, musical sounds with their associations have played a significant role in the emotionally charged interior maps that those of European descent have drawn of the medieval world. Cook’s example centralizes a homogeneously white and Christian Europe within a boundary beyond which lurks the ‘other’ little-known, alien world to be reckoned with. When these already loaded musical associations are re-enforced by similar narrative and visual cues, they have the capacity to reach beyond the fictional universe and create havoc in the world we share. That shared world is, in any case, so heavily overwritten by a range of assumptions and their concomitant emotions that it is rendered virtually invisible.

On the literary side too, as in my essay, music plays a significant role in providing (or withholding) answers to the questions of identity – who am I? who are we? who is the other? what is my relation to the other? what distinguishes me from the other? – by which we construct ourselves and those we deem ‘other,’ shoring up the differences required to sustain an identity constructed on the basis of binary opposition. Other questions naturally follow: who is my friend? who is my enemy? or perhaps, as demonstrated in D’Arcens’s and Lynch’s essays: how can ancient enmities be healed and feuds ended? Yri’s essay reflects the oscillating aspect of medievalism by exploring the alternative forms of identity it offers in the work of two medievalist music groups: that exemplified by the ‘exterior’ emotional expression of Black Sabbath – raw, bodily, and unrestrained – and the more compressed and restrained ‘interior’ expression of Rondellus.

These questions of identity may be asked at a personal, group, or national level or at an even broader level, for instance that invoked by the terms ‘East’ and ‘West’ in D’Arcens’s essay. In my essay, the distinctness of national musical traditions is recruited as the key to national identity, just as, in Cook’s essay, the bell sustains an atmosphere of medieval Christianity. In the early twentieth-century world of collector Cecil Sharp, folk music was considered as specific to a particular nation, hence ‘its fitness to serve a national purpose follow[ed] as a natural consequence’ (Sharp, 1907 , x). Thus the children of England, by imbibing English folk song from an early age, would grow up ‘naturally’ English:

Folk-song is in verity the product of the people, rising as naturally out of its consciousness, expressing as truly its feelings and its aspirations, as the song of thrush and blackbird and ousel expresses the longings of the little hearts, and their rapture in spring sun and zephyrs (Sharp and Baring-Gould, ca. 1906 , iii).

Alternatively, in D’Arcens’s essay, music and literature are offered as evidence of – and as metaphors for – the

deep and complicated intertwining of these apparently opposed cultures [‘East and West’] across hundreds of years. The task in reading Boussole is to refrain from turning Franz’s fugue into plainchant. The contradictions, blind spots, and discomforts of this narrator are the novel’s point.

In the light of this comparison, ‘plainchant’ distinctions like Sharp’s and Baring-Gould’s analogies can perhaps be seen as endeavours to dismiss the kinds of ‘contradictions, blind spots, and discomforts’ which Franz’s ‘wakeful ruminations’ engender: those discomforts ‘in which desire, denial, fascination, guilt, and the weight of history all move in counterpoint.’ Nationalist rhetoric which excludes all voices but our own is one way to shut out ‘desire, denial, fascination, guilt, and the weight of history,’ but it seems, if possible, only to increase the offence when music is conscripted in that attempt.

Time written on space

Questions of identity are also posed in temporal terms; they have to be for an identity to be maintained through time. The loosely defined ‘medieval,’ our temporal other, standing in as both opposed to modernity and as its foundation, cannot choose but be caught up in these attempts. The medieval encompasses both continuity and rupture with the present, whenever ‘the present’ is situated. In Lynch’s essay, ‘last minstrels’ inhabit a tangled temporality:

As the conduit of an imagined, loosely ‘medieval,’ past, the modern poet-as-minstrel asserts long-term cultural continuity, or at least creates possibilities of rapprochement with that past. Yet in the guise of ‘aged’ and ‘last’ minstrels, archaic survivors in a latter age, modern poets both assert a ‘medieval’ identity for themselves and their work and acknowledge the impossibility of realizing that identity when the past has already gone.

In Upton’s essay, the strategy of how we hold the medieval in the present is different. Bob Dylan enacts the medievalist entangling of time by framing his song narrative of late twentieth-century meetings and partings as a medieval ballade. In ‘Tangled Up in Blue’, Dylan ‘def[ies] time,’ eliminating it by turning it into space and stretching identity across it, trying

to be somebody in the present time, while conjuring up a lot of past images […] I wanted to defy time, so that the story took place in the present and the past at the same time. When you look at a painting, you can see any part of it, or see all of it together. I wanted that song to be like a painting (Quoted in Heylin, 2001 , 370).

There seems no possibility of ever settling the question of our identity in relation to the medieval when the term itself carries the same ambiguity. The ‘medieval’ has gone beyond recapture yet it remains and cannot be banished. Whether asserted or disavowed, as D’Arcens recognizes in her essay, the past remains, as the temporal ‘Other within the self’ of the modern, and it takes different shapes. The past has different modes according to how it is approached, as Lynch’s essay demonstrates. In music, as in imaginative literature, historical change is inflected by aesthetic and emotional responses in ‘the […] layering of time that both a sense of place and reading from the past create in the experience of individual subjects’:

Yet at the same time as [Walter] Scott emphasizes the historical changes in religious culture, social organization, manners, and tastes that have made romance archaic, he suggests its power survives still in imaginative literature, according to a poetic timeline that constructs history along lines of aesthetic pleasure and emotional allegiance, through which modern subjects can still feel close to the heart of the past.

In Scott’s Lay of the Last Minstrel , poetry (in which we can include music, not literally heard but made present to us through the ‘soundscape’ created by words) does not ‘provide an authentic history, or undo historical change.’ Footnote 3 Nonetheless it can allow us ‘new alignments with the past over the course of time’ by ‘attention to its creative performance.’ As in music, passages of turmoil and enmity may find a degree of resolution through changes of key or peace-offering cadences. In D’Arcens’s essay a ‘cadence’ of words is chosen to end Boussole , with Franz ‘thinking at dawn of the Danube, flowing between the two compass points [East and West], and realizing, finally, that it’s “not shameful to give in […] to the warm sunlight of hope.”’

Time is also written onto spaces, reversing Dylan’s strategy in ‘Tangled Up in Blue,’ where he paints space onto time so he can ‘see all of it together.’ John M. Ganim has suggested that ‘geography is transmuted into history,’ as instanced in Raymond Schwab’s statement that ‘India was an “antiquity of today”’ (Ganim, 2005 , 7). Temporal tricks are the mainstay of medievalism. Some countries are still ‘medieval’ according to certain sources. In the language of the early twentieth-century folklorists cited in my essay, certain ‘races’ remain ‘in a state of arrested progress while others develop a highly-organized civilization’ (Burne, 1914 , 3). Some appear to do both at once, like Timothy Lynch’s ‘technologically sophisticated band of medieval barbarians [who] have declared war on America’ (quoted in Holsinger, 2007 , 8). Quite a degree of mental agility is required to strip technological sophistication of its typical associations with civilized modernity. But when an ethnic or national identity is forged on notions of superiority, that agility will be found.

In my essay, the nationalist anxieties evident in music revival rhetoric forbid any mingling of foreign influences with the ‘purity’ of English folk song or of English practices in the performance of medieval music, as opposed to those of continental Europe. But purity is also a temporal matter, since to remain so it must be maintained over time, as I write in my essay:

Lineage – a pedigree – paper[s] over with words the impossibility of regimenting the past to uphold a chosen identity. In the English medieval and folk music revivals, music and its performance are harnessed in an attempt to maintain Englishness as an intrinsic and constant quality, superior, in its unassuming way, to other national types.

‘Tradition’, the unbroken chain linking the present with the past, is invoked to construct and maintain a straight and continuous line through time, keeping secure a chosen identity.

The past is differently experienced yet again within what D’Arcens calls ‘the fugue-like structure’ of the narrator Franz’s ‘wakeful ruminations,’ where

this premodern time-place is best thought of as contrapuntal to Western modernity, a line entering, leaving and re-entering, running beneath and breaking across the main line in a kind of echoic structure. This contrapuntal relationship is witnessed in Franz’s identification of what he regards as narrative patterns across centuries of Eastern verse romance and Western music.

Here again, ‘geography is transmuted into history’ as it is in fugue – in both musical and narrative patterns – an indication of how well music figures the spatio-temporal nature of medievalism, as D’Arcens’s lines here enact. Footnote 4 In this ‘contrapuntal relationship [that] render[s] legends rhizomatic, their root systems horizontal and entangled,’ any idea of a pure textual or musical inheritance resting on an unbroken national tradition is as unsustainable as the claim of ‘pure’ lineage exemplified by the family tree. Footnote 5

Music and literature appear to offer but, when studied more closely, actually disrupt the comfortable distinctions on which, for many of us, a clear sense of identity relies. One could say that any identity is necessarily fugal, pieced together from different strands and patterns, or, to put it materially, it is like shot silk, ‘a fabric which is made up of silk woven from warp and weft yarns of two or more colours producing an iridescent appearance’ (Takeda and Spilker, 2010 , 49). And the present is shot through with the past – with many pasts, just as any identity, whether personal, familial, national, ethnic, or religious, is shot through with countless and changing others. As Walt Whitman wrote, we contradict ourselves: ‘Do I contradict myself? / Very well then I contradict myself, / (I am large, I contain multitudes.)’ (Whitman, 2015 , 83). How is it possible to pinpoint and maintain a sense of self under the weight of these multitudinous influences? Music can be seen as a promising yet ultimately disappointing resource in that endeavour.

If the ‘medieval’ of medievalism contains such a multitude of contradictions, it seems an unlikely supporter of identity, only to be sustained by cherry-picking on a massive scale – at least, that is, on the basis that identity is equated with unity or sameness. When identity is based on lineage, as in my essay, the past must be fossilized, corralled to stay forever in place, at least for those branded ‘restorative’ nostalgics by Svetlana Boym (and we may all be more ‘restorative’ than we know):

Restoration […] signifies a return to the original stasis, to the prelapsarian moment. The past for the restorative nostalgic is a value for the present; the past is not a duration but a perfect snapshot. […] Reflective nostalgia is more concerned with historical and individual time. […] Restorative nostalgia takes itself dead seriously. Reflective nostalgia, on the other hand, can be ironic and humorous (Boym, 2001 , 49).

‘Dead’ is the operative word here. Like the ‘perfect snapshot,’ the past – as guarantor of one’s identity – is not supposed to move about, but it nonetheless refuses to lie down and die. How could it do otherwise when the emotional baggage of so many is bound up in it? In fact the term ‘medievalism’ itself, with its connotations of mobility and playfulness, would need to be proscribed for a true ‘restorative.’

Perhaps, to pursue this idea a little further, the multiplicity of the ‘medieval’ suggests that if a pure and stable lineage is essential to the forging and maintenance of an identity – individual or group – then anxiety will be an intrinsic aspect of medievalism for many. The licence taken by the more freewheeling ‘reflectives’ will be a constant irritant, as the popularity of the term ‘authentic’ in debates around the correct performance of medieval music bore witness. Footnote 6 The required decorum of critical or academic debate might mask the open expression of aggression and anxiety. Similarly, it might be considered more decorous for readers to tactfully ignore their recognition of that anger and anxiety when not explicitly stated, but nonetheless we cannot be blind to it. And in many forums, of course, open derision is de rigueur .

We are often made aware of the ideologies in play in versions of the medieval in academic and non-academic circles. They are no less apparent in debates about medieval music and its performance. But if ideology is the armour then the living, feeling flesh of medievalism is emotion. Ideology speaks loudly but sometimes hides the pain of the flesh. The rancour apparent in debates about medieval music is one instance of the degree to which we cling to our own particular version of the authentic Middle Ages. It is as if the word ‘authentic’ is forced to bear the weight of our identity. To quote John Ganim, ‘The Medieval, almost by the root of its terminology, has always been imagined by the West as both ourselves and something other than ourselves’ (Ganim, 2005 , 5). If this is so, as our essays sometimes suggest, then the impossibility of the term comes to mirror the breakdown of the illusion of an undivided self.

The aesthetic emotions can be as turbulent as any. See Paul J. Silvia on some of the less-discussed aesthetic emotions, where he examines ‘knowledge emotions such as interest, confusion, and surprise; hostile emotions such as anger and disgust; and self-conscious emotions such as pride, shame, and embarrassment’ (Silvia, 2009 , 48).

Internal quotation from Gorbman ( 1987 ).

Lynch lists some of the musical ‘notes’ in Scott’s Lay : ‘“Sound,” in “voice,” “clang,” “din,” “clash,” “murmur,” “mutter,” “yell,” “cry,” “moan” and “shrill,” is a constant presence.’

Perhaps the psychological term ‘dissociative fugue,’ a form of amnesia in which identity is threatened, is also relevant here.

See Deleuze and Guattari ( 1988 , 3–28) for the idea of a rhizome as opposed to a tree. For instance, ‘[A]ny point of a rhizome can be connected to anything other, and must be. This is very different from the tree or root, which plots a point, fixes an order [proceeding] by dichotomy’ (7).

See the introduction and the three essays on music in the final section of Fugelso ( 2018 ). See the entire volume for a range of essays on the question of authenticity in medievalism.

Barratt-Peacock, R. and R. Hagen. 2019. Medievalism and Metal Music Studies: Throwing Down the Gauntlet . Bingley, UK: Emerald Publishing.

Book   Google Scholar  

Bildhauer, B. and A. Bernau, eds. 2009. Medieval Film. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press.

Google Scholar  

Boym, S. The Future of Nostalgia . 2001. New York: Basic Books.

Burne, C. 1914. The Handbook of Folklore . London: Sidgwick and Jackson.

D’Arcens, L., ed. 2016. Cambridge Companion to Medievalism. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari. 1988. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia , trans. B. Massumi. London: Athlone Press.

Fugelso, K., ed. 2018. Studies in Medievalism: Authenticity, Medievalism, Music XXVI. Cambridge, UK: D.S. Brewer.

Ganim, J.M. 2005. Medievalism and Orientalism: Three Essays on Literature, Architecture and Cultural Identity . New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Gorbman, C. 1987. Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

Heylin, C. 2001. Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades Revisited . New York: Harper Collins.

Holsinger, B. 2007. Neomedievalism, Neoconservatism, and the War on Terror . Chicago, IL: Prickly Paradigm.

Matthews, D. 2018. In Search of Lost Feeling: The Emotional History of Medievalism. Exemplaria 30(3): 207–22.

Article   Google Scholar  

Meyer, S.C. and K. Yri, eds. forthcoming 2019. Oxford Handbook on Music and Medievalism. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

Pugh, T. and A. J. Weisl. 2013. Medievalisms: Making the Past in the Present. New York: Routledge.

Sharp, C. 1907. English Folk-song: Some Conclusions . London: Simpkin & Co.; Novello & Co.

Sharp, C. and S. Baring-Gould. ca. 1906. English Folk-Songs for Schools . London: Curwen.

Silvia, P.J. 2009. Looking Past Pleasure: Anger, Confusion, Disgust, Pride, Surprise, and Other Unusual Aesthetic Emotions. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts 3(1): 48–51.

Takeda, S.S. and K.D. Spilker. 2010. Fashioning Fashion: European Dress in Detail, 1700 to 1915 . Munich, Germany: Delmonico Books.

Whitman, W. 2015. Song of Myself. In Leaves of Grass . San Diego, CA: Word Cloud Classics.

Young, H., ed. 2015. The Middle Ages in Popular Culture: Medievalism and Genre. Amherst, NY: Cambria Press.

Download references

Author information

Authors and affiliations.

School of Culture and Communication, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Helen Dell .

Additional information

Publisher's note.

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Dell, H. Music and the emotions of medievalism: The quest for identity. Postmedieval 10 , 411–422 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-019-00147-7

Download citation

Published : 16 January 2020

Issue Date : December 2019

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-019-00147-7

Share this article

Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:

Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article.

Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative

• Find a journal
• Publish with us
• Track your research

• Locations and Hours
• UCLA Library
• Research Guides

Medieval and Renaissance Music

Books and e-books.

• Primary Sources

Matthew Vest

Selected titles published since 2000 providing an overview of Medieval and Renaissance music. For more books search the UCLA Library Catalog with a Subject such as: Music 500-1400 History and Criticism, Music 15th Century History and Criticism.

• Next: Articles >>
• Last Updated: Apr 30, 2024 10:21 AM
• URL: https://guides.library.ucla.edu/medrenmusic