2004 Reviews
Review of Leech-Wilkinson, Daniel. 2002. The Modern Invention of Medieval Music: Scholarship, Ideology, Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Anyone who has heard medieval music in live performance or on record in
the last fifty years knows the sound that medieval music used to make: the
joyful yowling of a mixed crew of instrumentalists, bowing, tooting, honking,
and plucking, and-in the best performances-above it all, a single, ecstatic
voice. Anyone who has listened to such music in the last twenty knows
the sound it tends to make now: a blended and-again, in the best renditions-
no-Iess-ecstatic combination of purely intoned a cappella voices. The
former is now widely regarded to be "unhistorical"; it is a model that has
been "superseded;' thanks to "progress" in historical research. The Modern
Invention of Medieval Music tells the story of how a music changed its sound
because scholars re-thought its history and how a music changed its history
because musicians re-thought its sound.
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- Title
- Current Musicology
More About This Work
- Academic Units
- Music
- Publisher
- Columbia University
- Published Here
- November 5, 2014