The Modern Invention of Medieval Music
Scholarship, Ideology, Performance

A challenging book which questions how much is really known about the way medieval music sounded.

Daniel Leech-Wilkinson (Author)

9780521037044, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 21 June 2007

348 pages, 1 b/w illus. 5 music examples
22.9 x 15.4 x 2 cm, 0.528 kg

"The Modern Invention of Medieval Music is n important book. It raises fundamental questions about the relation among music, performance, and historical writing. It belongs on the reading lists of every graduate course in musicological methods, and by extension in the hands of any musicologist interested in how and (more importantly) why we write about music. I cannot praise this book enough for its imagination, daring and élan. It is a book that hits us where we live." Current Musicology, Thomas Irvine

Medieval music has been made and remade over the past two hundred years. For the nineteenth century it was vocal, without instrumental accompaniment, but with barbarous harmony that no one could have wished to hear. For most of the twentieth century it was instrumentally accompanied, increasingly colourful and increasingly enjoyed. At the height of its popularity it sustained an industry of players and instrument makers, all engaged in recreating an apparently medieval performance practice. During the 1980s it became vocal once more, exchanging colour and contrast for cleanliness and beauty. But what happens to produce such radical changes of perspective? And what can we learn from them about the way we interact with the past? How much is really known about the way medieval music sounded? Or have modern beliefs been formed and sustained less by evidence than the personalities of scholars and performers, their ideologies and their musical tastes?

Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. The invention of the voices-and-instruments hypothesis
2. The re-invention of the a cappella hypothesis
3. Hearing medieval harmonies
4. Evidence, interpretation, power and persuasion
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Medieval & Renaissance music [c 1000 to c 1600 AVGC2]