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Lisa Colton, Mapping medieval music, Early Music, Volume 40, Issue 2, May 2012, Pages 308–310, https://doi.org/10.1093/em/cas041
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This wide-ranging collection of essays is a welcome addition to the Cambridge Companion series. Resisting the urge to map out an entirely chronological survey of music before c.1400, the individual contributions nevertheless provide complementary discussions of most major types of (primarily vocal) repertory from the Middle Ages. Editor Mark Everist has collected an international team of scholars who have provided 19 chapters between them. There is an ample allowance for endnotes, bibliography and index, and the book’s diversity of style, methodology and argument is one of its key strengths.
The text is arranged into three parts. The first covers ‘Repertory, styles and techniques’, and, following Susan Boynton and Michael McGrade’s sections on plainsong and additions made to the liturgy in the form of tropes, sequences and so forth, then proceeds chronologically in sections dedicated to polyphony before 1200, the 13th century and the 14th century. Part II, ‘Topography’, is essentially an exploration of music from different countries and regions (England, Italy, the Iberian peninsula, music east of the Rhine). Finally, in Part III, ‘Themes, topics and trajectories’, authors explore the main themes of musical life that were not constrained by national or chronological boundaries: music and liturgy; vernacular poetry and music; Latin poetry and music; compositional trajectories; ecclesiastical foundations and secular institutions; theory and notation; music manuscripts; the geography of medieval music; reception. As one might imagine, there is a significant risk of duplication between some of these different sections, and it may not be immediately obvious to the reader where information on composers such as Machaut or Perotin might be found. This is deliberate, with the editor explaining from the outset that the focus of the volume is ‘on repertories and their contexts rather than on groups of works defined by composer’, in part because the ‘composer’ is a ‘highly contested term’ for the period. In practice, individual musicians do pop up in the text with regularity, and sometimes with a tendency to fall into comfortable pictures of ‘great composers’. For example, Marco Gozzi’s chapter on ‘The trecento’ opens with a Who’s who? of the composers working in Padua, Verona, Milan, Florence, Rome and Naples, calling Francesco Landini ‘the most important Italian composer of the fourteenth century’ (p.141), before moving to an explanation of the genres available to these men. There is very little in terms of overlapping content between chapters, thanks no doubt to the editor’s careful planning. On the other hand, the arrangement of chapters is sometimes puzzling. Having worked through the majority of the book, the penultimate chapter, ‘The geography of medieval music’, comes as a wonderful debunker of the modern historian’s anachronistic borderlines, preferring instead circuits of communication and politics. In typical storyteller mode, Christopher Page relishes unsettling the reader with the fact that ‘the history of the Gradual opens in Africa’, or that, given that the history of music is skewed to focus on its notation, Ireland and Iceland, no doubt once with their own distinctive cultural heritage, ‘fail to register’ on his own map (p.322). This exceptional discussion could have stood more prominently in the collection, warning the reader that the cosy categories that help us to make sense of the medieval world are often misleading.
