Translating Medieval Music

Daniel Leech-Wilkinson

This essay argues that the findings of musicologists are determined by personality, culture and, in the field of performance practice, by the market, to a greater extent than by the evidence itself.⁽¹⁾ To accept this is to change the way we read and respond to one another's work. The historiography of medieval performance practice provides a rich example, since it shows musicologists working not only as historians but also in relation to performers and consumers. Here we see the past not simply translated into stories we can understand today but also into sounds we can appreciate. And since taste in matters of musical performance is so strongly period bound, even today, the performance of medieval music is a domain in which historical fact is especially weakly placed in relation to the imperatives of our own time. The translation (changing from their language into ours) involved in trans-lating medieval music (moving it from the past to the present) goes far beyond exchanging equivalent terms, deep into the realm of (re)invention.

Strategies for interpretation

How much do we really know about medieval music? What are the indisputable facts? These questions already raise problems, for it is a truism of our time that there are no facts unmediated by interpretation. But, self-evident as that may be, we still expect straight answers to simple historical questions. For example, when did Guillaume de Machaut die? The evidence is (by medieval standards) pretty clear. In the register of canons of Reims cathedral, on the page devoted to the stall Machaut occupied, his name was crossed through and under it was entered the name of Johannes Gibourti, received as a canon on 9 November 1377.⁽²⁾ That is all we know about the date of Machaut's death, but in the absence of any further evidence it would be perverse not to conclude that he died some (but not many) months earlier, long enough before November for his successor to have been confirmed. For students of medieval music, this is a typical fact. All we really know is that the register of canons has this entry, but common sense allows a deduction from that evidence that any scholar familiar with these sorts of materials could accept.

A sceptic, whether a post-structuralist or just a cynic, could rightly point out that 'any scholar familiar with these sorts of materials' is by definition untrustworthy. Precisely because s/he is so familiar with the subject s/he is likely to arrive at the same conclusions from a given piece of evidence as any other expert. Their interpretations are agreed in line with the discipline they accept (which is why the word 'discipline' is so revealing when it describes an academic subject), and it is their skill at finding new material or new interpretations while remaining within the boundaries of the discipline that marks them out as experts. A view of the material that does not conform, that lies outside those boundaries, would be professionally suicidal. To argue, for example, that the register of canons is an authoritarian document whose evidence should be rejected on grounds of political principle would seem to any medievalist ridiculous, and any scholar seriously maintaining that would soon cease to be taken seriously by his (or her) colleagues.

But to conclude that the discipline works as a cartel, fixing the limits of permissible interpretation, and that its conclusions are ideologically grounded and therefore of doubtful worth, would seem to most people unnecessarily harsh. It does work as a cartel, and ideology does play a large part in fixing the limits of interpretation, but one can hardly blame historians for wishing to speculate beyond the surviving evidence; and to avoid committing oneself to any interpretation for fear of being wrong or of being wrong-footed by another, is intellectually dull and -- because it offers nothing that anyone else can use -- arguably somewhat selfish. We may be able to know nothing for sure, but it is feeble-minded in the extreme to do nothing as a result. The attitude that rejects interpretation as inevitably flawed is paralysed by terror of making a mistake; and nothing could show more clearly how wholly it is bound by positivistic thinking. It is rooted in the belief that things happened, but that we cannot now know exactly how, and that it is better to say nothing than to be wrong about them. It is hard to feel much sympathy for such an approach.

That said, the range of interpretation that we find in work on medieval music is worryingly narrow. Rejecting the extreme sceptic viewpoint, and accepting that facts can be known well enough to make working with them worthwhile, we have for medieval music a fair quantity of straight facts (such as the entry for Johannes Gibourti in the register of canons). But they are isolated facts, there are gaps between them that we have to fill with supposition in order to construct any kind of narrative. And inevitably, therefore, most of what we pretend to know - that is, what we agree to know - is supposition (and the death date of Machaut certainly comes into that category).

In view of this, it is perhaps surprising that there is so much agreement among scholars of medieval music. Hard facts are sufficiently sparse that they should be capable of supporting, at just about any point in an argument, several competing hypotheses, each offering the basis for contrasting histories. So why don't they? The community of musical medievalists is a small one, the background of its members is quite narrow, it has developed very recently (since about 1900), it is largely self-contained, its students are trained only in its traditions, it is self-referential and self-refereeing; and for all these reasons it has not been good at nurturing varied approaches to its material.⁽³⁾

How concerned one is about this of course depends upon one's orientation within the discipline, one's success, the extent to which one has enjoyed its techniques and constraints. Yet however well one may fit into the musicological community, one may still feel that a diversity of interpretations is in itself a good thing and that we have been too unwilling to allow it. Euan MacKie, in Science and Society in Prehistoric Britain, explains that he wrote that book in part because of his 'own belief that all fields of science and scholarship are never in a really healthy state unless argument and debate are constantly going on over the evidence being amassed. Indeed I would go so far as to say that the existence of at least two alternative explanations for a given set of data is essential if the true scientific spirit of enquiry is to flourish...'⁽⁴⁾

When there are as few real facts available as we have, the writing of different histories around them should be particularly easy. But we need to be absolutely clear about how these stories are made. We have a sprinkling of facts, and the gaps between them have to be filled. But with what? There is only one honest answer and, particularly for those trained in more positivistic times to believe in the possibility of facts it is not a comfortable one: we fill the gaps. That is, our beliefs, our assumptions, our tastes, our prejudices, our personalities, the whole of us. The kind of work we do reflects - is indissolubly tied to - the kinds of people we are. A beautiful illustration of this may be found in the proceedings of the 1992 conference, held in Cyprus, on the early 15^th-century manuscript Turin J.II.9.⁽⁵⁾ Twenty scholars were invited to write on a source for which, because it has no concordances and because it has only been studied in depth once, there was a limited body of existing data from which each conference participant had to start. As one might expect, those who usually work on chant worked on chant, those who work on motets worked on motets, those who work on songs worked on songs. But more to the point, each worked not just on their usual area but worked in the way they usually worked on it. Thus, those who are happiest with minute observation observed minutely, those who have documentary evidence at the centre of their view studied documents, those who believe that music springs from text studied texts, those who revel in global views constructed global views, and so on. The manuscript simply provided another arena for the musicology practised by each participant; despite the fact that it is wildly atypical, the findings of these scholars appeared in line with their findings on other topics. Each scholar worked to integrate the manuscript into their view of the subject as a whole, ironing out and explaining away its peculiarities. Consequently they disagreed about J.II.9 only to the extent that they hold differing views of the subject as a whole. It thus remains an open question whether the published proceedings increase our knowledge of the manuscript by anything like the amount that the organisers might have wished: what they do show us very clearly is the way that personal interests colour our work, our choice of viewpoint and our repeated expression of it. We specialise in these things because they reinforce patterns in our psychological makeup. Our view comes from inside, not outside; that is, from deeper inside than is penetrated by anything we know about the middle ages. It seems impossible to observe the diversity of scholarly approaches, and the correspondence between them and the character of their advocates, and yet to deny that musicology is driven and shaped by personality: it is in essence a creative activity.

That said, there is a limited range of strategies that scholars employ when joining together fragments of evidence into arguments. For medieval music two are particularly noticeable, and both spring from the huge distance that separates us from the middle ages and the consequent paucity of evidence that survives. For anyone who traces for themselves a European ethnic origin, and for Europeans especially, studying the middle ages is inevitably in part a study of one's own heritage, while at the same time a study of a society so remote as to seem strongly 'other'. The tension between these opposing points of view pulls us now in one direction, now in another, as we each try to find a comfortable position along the line between them. Do we recognise features of the medieval world in our own, or was it fundamentally different? Do we set out for our readers its likeness or its otherness? The first is dangerous, because it lays us open to the charge that we misrepresent medieval beliefs and attitudes by drawing them closer to our own; the second has an equally dangerous attraction to the extent that it involves forcing readers into a world not their own, into views they do not share, to the extent - in other words - that it tends towards the totalitarian. In the first case, then, the scholar is a host, bringing reader and subject together; in the second case a priest, setting out an unfamiliar belief-system that the reader is urged to adopt.

In the following sections I illustrate both approaches by showing how musicology as a discipline swung between them during the twentieth century.

Making medieval music familiar

Before the last decade of the nineteenth century only a small amount of medieval polyphony had ever been published. The largest collections, by a long way, were Coussemaker's: L'Art Harmonique aux XII^e et XIII^e Siècles⁽⁶⁾ with its 51 examples in diplomatic facsimile and modern transcription, and Histoire de l'Harmonie au Moyen Age with facsimiles and transcriptions of 20 polyphonic pieces from the 12^th to the 14^th centuries. Apart from that, anyone who wanted to see medieval polyphony had to make do with the few examples published in general histories of music. Of the earlier histories, Kiesewetter's was the most effectively illustrated,⁽⁷⁾ and his examples tended to appear again and again in later works. In the latter part of the century Ambros provided the most extended treatment of medieval and renaissance music before modern times,⁽⁸⁾ but even he provided only a handful of examples taken from primary sources, the rest coming mainly from Coussemaker and Kiesewetter.

Yet, as the Ambros suggests, the century following the pioneering music histories of Forkel, Burney and Hawkins⁽⁹⁾ saw the publication of painstaking and ever more detailed surveys of medieval music. As well as heavy borrowing from their predecessors, the authors of these studies found their main source material in the monumental collections of theoretical writings from the middle ages published by Gerbert in 1784 and Coussemaker in 1864-76. These provided numerous small music examples, which were well plundered by the authors of histories, but few complete pieces and no photographic facsimiles to show what the original notation might have been like. Thus in 1878 Hugo Riemann was able to write an entire book on medieval notation without any examples from beyond the treatises and without, so far as one can tell, having ever seen a medieval music manuscript himself. There was thus a substantial and well-rehearsed history of medieval music in existence, well-formed in scholars' minds, before any useable body of music - which was ostensibly the subject of all this writing - had been seen.

This lack of contact with manuscripts resulted in a view of medieval music that had striking gaps. To all intents and purposes, the music of the 12^th and 14^th centuries was unknown before the first decade of the twentieth century. Thus in 1900, the history of medieval polyphony, as summarized in the fifth edition of Riemann's Musik-Lexikon looked as follows.⁽¹⁰⁾

The only composers whose music was in any way known by this date were Adam de la Halle, Dufay, Okenheim [sic.] and Josquin, together with the anonymous composers of Coussemaker's Montpellier motets and the few examples available in the histories. These were just isolated fragments from which few conclusions could be drawn.

Nevertheless it is worthwhile trying to ferret out the assumptions that historians made in the absence of firmer evidence. One conclusion that seems strikingly clear, and in view of later events rather surprising, is that written polyphony, secular as well as sacred, was generally assumed to be entirely vocal. Ambros considers the possibility of vocalising lower voices,⁽¹¹⁾ Riemann in 1893 offers songs by Binchois, Dunstable and Dufay (ascribed to Binchois) fully texted,⁽¹²⁾ Wooldridge in 1905 speaks of Machaut songs having their lower voices sung 'upon some vowel, in the old manner.'⁽¹³⁾ And in all editions of the Musik-Lexikon before the seventh, of 1909, entries on accompaniment, instrumental music and the history of music make clear that instruments had no part to play in written music from the middle ages, apart from accompanying the troubadours.⁽¹⁴⁾

It is fascinating, therefore, to see how the picture changes once larger bodies of medieval polyphony start to appear in print. The seminal publications are the Stainer family's Dufay and his Contemporaries of 1898 and Guido Adler's first volume of pieces from the Trent Codices of 1900.⁽¹⁵⁾ I have argued elsewhere that it was Riemann's encounter with these publications, and especially the Stainers' volume, that transformed his view of the nature of medieval music and effectively shaped the understanding of it for the next 80 years.⁽¹⁶⁾ What Riemann believed he saw, in the untexted introductions and melismas of early 15^th-century song which to him so clearly indicated instrumental participation, was the birth of accompanied art song as we understand it today from the songs of his contemporaries, Brahms, Strauss and Wolf. The equation (no text = instruments = accompanied art song) was so beautiful that it must be true. For our purposes here the main point is that Riemann was making medieval music familiar, not just by writing up the known facts but by reading it in terms of the music of his own time. By comparing it to the greatest works of his contemporaries, Riemann was conferring status on medieval music, and helping readers to assimilate it by treating it as far as possible as proto-modern. This of course chimed well with his contention that the history of music was a gradual discovery of the laws of modern tonality.⁽¹⁷⁾

We should not underestimate Riemann's achievement, or its influence on ourselves. Until his work of familiarisation, medieval music was regarded, even by those who wrote about it in detail,⁽¹⁸⁾ as barbarous and by modern standards impossibly crude. Riemann placed it in relation to modern music, made it comprehensible in modern terms and showed how modern music was grounded in it. And despite some curious details (as we now think) his view remains the basis for ours. We still see a process of development in music; we still tell music history, like general history, as a narrative; and even if we no longer hear medieval music as groping towards a more perfect tonal language we still hear it as analogously organised.⁽¹⁹⁾ Riemann's hearing and telling of medieval music was so convincing that much of it still seems unchallengeable.

So it is no wonder that his views on the performance of this music were influential. While most of the few people who thought about it before 1905 may have assumed that the pieces they knew (so few) were vocal, Riemann, thanks to his early assimilation of Stainer and the transcriptions of Wolf (which he must have seen well before they were published),⁽²⁰⁾ burst on the scene with so much more material so thoroughly assimilated, and put it into a context so attractively modern, that the force of his arguments must have seemed irresistible. Once one read Riemann it was self-evident that this wealth of secular music now appearing must be intended for voice with instrumental accompaniment. That the instruments, in new editions and recreated performances, had perforce to be modern simply increased the extent to which the music could be assimilated by a wider audience. Every aspect of it that could be was made familiar.

The rediscovery - and let us now say, the reinvention - of medieval music thus began with a process of familiarisation. People got used to the idea that it might become part of our culture once again, that it might be appropriate to put on performances, and that it might be at least partly comprehensible. This took some time, of course, and this may be why there were few attempts at first to recreate medieval instruments. There was ample evidence that medieval instruments were different from modern ones all around in the form of carvings in churches and reproductions of miniatures in art books. So musicians of Riemann's generation must have known perfectly well that the instruments originally used to accompany these songs were not like their own. But it is understandable that there should have been little appetite to explore them while the process of making medieval music familiar was still a chief concern. But once that process of familiarisation had gone far enough for old music to have become accepted as an available cultural resource, it was inevitable that enthusiasts would wish to remodel it in order to keep it before the public eye. Perhaps this sounds crude, but we have so many examples of the process constantly before us that we can hardly pretend it does not happen. We have only to look at the impact of period instruments on the market for later music to see how effective they could be in freshening up a tired, over-worked repertoire. While enthusiasts had been experimenting with old instruments in the latter part of the nineteenth century, with the modern harpsichord already a commercial proposition in the 1880s, this freshening-up process only came to public consciousness with recovery of the recorder and viol, especially by Dolmetsch in the 1920s, and only became the primary characteristic of 'early music' when it spread back to middle ages and renaissance in the 1950s and 60s.⁽²¹⁾ Only when audiences came to regard rackets and crumhorns as normal did baroque instruments begin to capture the market, with consequences that are still being worked out in reconstructed 20th-century performance practices today. This whole process amounts to a recurring cycle in which deliberate de-familiarisation produces sounds that gradually become the norm, followed by (in the next cycle) the defamiliarisation of a chronologically adjacent repertory, and so on.

So medieval music, once assimilated into the general musical cultural background, was defamiliarised by the recreation of early instruments. Their exploration gradually, through the 1960s and 70s, made them familiar and normal - the ultimate point of triumph for Riemann's vision of the musical middle ages, realised throughout the musical world by groups such as the Early Music Consort of London, Studio der Frühen Musik, The Clemencic Consort. This, everyone agreed, was medieval music, as perfectly as it could be recovered in modern times. That it was only Riemann's hypothesis, based on his reading of nothing more than the placing of text in the manuscripts, was quite forgotten. The view was so fully established that its origins were no longer sought nor remembered.

How, then, did Christopher Page's counter-proposal, set out in articles published from 1977 and 1982 and illustrated in recordings by Gothic Voices from then on,⁽²²⁾ make such a profound impact so quickly? How could so many accept so easily and with such enthusiasm that instruments had no place in the accompaniment of medieval polyphony, that the music (as generally believed before Riemann) was conceived for voices alone? How could performances in that manner seem at once so plausible? Obviously this was another cycle beginning, with all the excitement that in itself brings, regardless of the strength of the scholarly argument: there was the delight in change for change's sake, in finding a new vision for a new generation of scholars and performers and audiences. But more than that, this defamiliarisation was also a new familiarisation. Not only were we getting away from the old ways, we were returning to something we all knew. Vocal ensemble music (as Page has himself argued)⁽²³⁾ was a part of our heritage (especially for English scholars, and it was in England that the greatest early steps in this direction were taken). The English choral tradition was exactly that, something we imagined stretching back unbroken to the middle ages in the same buildings in which it was created. So we were not just reinventing the middle ages but recovering them too.

The cyclic process I've described therefore alternates cycles of different strength and quality. The de-familiarisation that goes simply from the known to the unknown (as from modern instruments to old instruments) is less powerful that its successor, the defamiliarisation that mixes reaction with return. Those, then, who move the performance of medieval music away form its current state (where all-vocal performances seem to carry the greatest authority) are going to have a harder time of it than did Page and his followers. One wishes them luck, nevertheless.

Making medieval music strange

Let us examine in a little more detail some of the ways in which medieval music was made strange. Riemann's junior colleague at Leipzig, Arnold Schering, was a key figure in the process. Though he had to work with Riemann, and indeed collaborated with him on an early anthology,⁽²⁴⁾ Schering had a far more radical imagination, both for musical sounds and for historical hypotheses. Already in 1911, he proposed that the surviving medieval notations were intended not for singers but for organists, providing not the whole substance of the music but simply a contrapuntal core to be read as the basis for a performance encrusted with improvised ornamentation.⁽²⁵⁾ His explanation of the presence of a texted upper line in the sources was so fantastic as to seem unbelievable today - he proposed that it served only as a means of orientation, something like modern rehearsal letters - and for most was probably unbelievable at the time,⁽²⁶⁾ for it never became accepted. Nevertheless, Schering's vivid imagination continued to produce colourful readings of the evidence, as is clear in his 1931 book on the performance of early music.⁽²⁷⁾ This certainly was widely influential; it encapsulates what had surely been his teaching for many years at Leipzig University (and his practice with the university Collegium), it was reprinted in a popular series in 1969, and has evidently influenced generations of early music groups in Germany and beyond. Holding on to his view that the music was essentially instrumental in conception, Schering went on to show how the parts that are notated in the sources might be allocated to instruments and might be simplified or decorated in ways appropriate to the nature of the (medieval) instrument being used.⁽²⁸⁾ His examples make clear that he advocated a heavily orchestrated performance that would have involved a lot of editorial preparation; and that is exactly what we hear in many recorded performances from the 1930s onwards. Rudolf von Ficker's well-known 1930 arrangement of Perotin's Sederunt for symphony orchestra⁽²⁹⁾ (recorded by the Bavarian Radio Chorus conducted by Eugen Jochum in 1950) is just a more traditional example of the same assumptions. But Schering was radical enough to be willing to entertain medieval instruments, and given his position it is easier to understand how so many early music groups of the 1950s, 60s and 70s should have devoted so much energy to working out his beliefs in practice. The result was attractive; it gave the music that frisson of strangeness that comes from momentary contact with the Other, and that in itself seemed, for some, to guarantee that here was a genuine medieval experience. Hence, the performances / arrangements, of the Studio der Frühen Musik, with their instrumental introductions, interludes and postludes,⁽³⁰⁾ their deliberately unsynchronised parts, their ornamentations, their intermingling of passages sung and played within a single written part, owed their beliefs to the imaginations of Riemann and Schering yet realised those imaginings with such skill and conviction that a generation was entranced, entranced by a strangeness which nevertheless made musical sense because it created a consistent musical world that had enough points of contact (through habits of musical gesture, phrasing, speed and dynamic manipulation) with other contemporary music-making for listeners to recognise it as essentially 'musical', as then understood. This is how 'making medieval music strange' worked.

Another strand in this process borrowed sounds and ornamentations from the Middle East and North Africa. The historical justification was flimsy, but not totally implausible, and consisted mainly in the observations that the Moors occupying southern Spain had enough contact with other European court culture for the sounds of their musicians to influence the rest, and that the crusades brought western musicians into contact with indigenous middle eastern cultures. This was a view influentially promoted by Geiringer in his seminal work on musical instruments.⁽³¹⁾ Though published only in 1943 it was written in the later 1930s and surely set down his teaching from well before. It thus forms part of the same world as Schering.

The attraction of the oriental hypothesis is again that it mixes the familiar and unfamiliar, by taking sounds familiar in one context and inserting them into another in order to acceptably defamiliarise it. Our imperialist tendency to look at the Middle East as a medieval society makes it that much easier for us to listen to Western medieval music filtered through Eastern sounds - strange, appealingly exotic, yet familiar. Musica Reservata's turning to the Balkans, or Ensemble Organum's appropriation of Corsican singing,⁽³²⁾ are just other examples of the same process. The historical justification may be flimsy, but there is musical sense there, and above all it makes medieval music new again. It is psychologically rewarding and therefore commercially sound. But it all aims to keep medieval music fresh, by keeping it different. The Other never ceases to delight us, so long as it is always a different other.

Given these precedents and examples of what is possible, we cannot be surprised to find that the main criticism of the performances of Page and his followers has been that they do not sound sufficiently different to be plausibly medieval. The criticism must be justified. The evidence of early recordings teaches us how much greater is the range of possible performance styles than any one period can imagine. Medieval music must, in vocal quality if nothing else, have sounded quite unlike anything we can imagine today. But to what extent does manufacturing difference produce an analogous effect? Do Jantina Norman (Musica Reservata) and Marcel Pérès (Ensemble Organum) bring us any nearer to a medieval experience simply by making unfamiliar sounds? What reviewers yearn for is difference, and the argument that it is medieval in any sense is specious and self-deluding.

It should hardly surprise us that the sorts of processes I've been tracing in performance practices have analogies in scholarship. What we've been seeing is an in-built psychological desire for controlled variety, realised through different imaginations applying themselves to interpreting a limited body of data (the surviving music and the agreed 'facts'). Scholars have the same attitude to material of all sorts, not just questions of voices and instruments.

A striking example was provided a few years ago by the published disagreement between Christopher Page and Margaret Bent concerned, at root, with our access to an understanding of medieval music.⁽³³⁾ Here were two scholars with quite different reactions to the same material. While both were interested in how medieval people thought about music, for one the medieval mind sought order, expressed in schemes of great sophistication yet always bound within a rational framework;⁽³⁴⁾ for the other the middle ages was a complex and inconsistent place, peopled with men and women whose humanity was appreciably continuous with ours,⁽³⁵⁾ who strove after beauty of effect and expressed it in imperfect elaborations of an ideal. Where one sees puzzles with solutions, the other sees images in need of interpretation. If one may generalise ad personam, one tends to make the middle ages seem familiar, the other to make them strikingly different. Looking over their work as a whole one may say that a similar approach informs much of what they do. In a sense, then, when we read their work we read them.

There are several reasons why this is so powerful an example that I feel compelled to override normal scholarly courtesies, and risk the wrath of two friends, by holding up their work for comparison. One is that it encapsulates so clearly the two opposing tendencies I've been identifying in approaches to medieval music, each exemplified by scholarship of the highest quality. Another is that it provides a rare exception to the tendency of scholars to smooth over their differences of opinion in print. The price of disagreement between scholars is high: if our work comes from ourselves, a criticism of it, by someone who sees things differently, feels like a criticism of our Selves. It takes courage to argue one-to-one before a public, and this may be part of the reason why scholars prefer to hold to a generally agreed line.

But if we can admit that, broadly speaking, we make much of it up, our situation looks very different. In the first place our respect for each other increases: others' views are bound to differ from our own, that is a product of our humanity and not a threat to our identities. Secondly, diverse and competing views can be encouraged as a beneficial product of the nature of what we do. Thirdly, there is no secure history of medieval music and never will be, there will never be enough hard facts to shape our invention of stories around them into a single mould. Fourthly, musicology is period-bound: we see only those possibilities that the taste of our time permits. Fifthly, the business of the musicologist is to write histories that are plausible and engaging to readers of her/his time. The future will leave us behind, and there is nothing to be gained from minding. Our writings have no more chance of immortality than we do.

So, our job is to interest ourselves, each other, and anyone whom we may have good reason to think would find our view rewarding. And that is essentially all. Some of us will be lucky enough to discover new facts (not as many as we claim to have discovered, of course). But, once rediscovered, they will live without us. The real facts are not ours. Our achievements are our stories, so we may as well enjoy them, and one another's, while we can. In sum, there is no possibility of translating the middle ages. They are gone. All we have is the surviving evidence and ourselves. We reinvent the middle ages, and we do it in our own image.

NOTES

1. The research on early musicology, drawn on here, was supported by a grant from the British-German Academic Research Collaboration Programme of the British Council and the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst, to whom I wish to express my thanks.
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2. Reims, Archives départmentales de la Marne, annexe de Reims, 2.G.1650, f. 54r.
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3. There is a valuable discussion of these issues in Lee Patterson, 'On the Margin: Postmodernism, Ironic History, and Medieval Studies', Speculum 65 (1990) especially p. 102.
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4. Euan MacKie, Science and Society in Prehistoric Britain (London, 1977) p. 5.
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5. Ed. Ursula Günther and Ludwig Finscher, The Cypriot-French Repertory of the Manuscript Torino J.II.9 (Neuhausen-Stuttgart, 1995).
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6. Paris, 1865 and 1852 respectively.
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7. R.G. Kiesewetter, Geschichte der Europäisch-abendlandische Musik (Leipzig, 1834). English translation by Robert Müller, issued as History of the Modern Music of Western Europe (London, 1848).
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8. August Wilhelm Ambros, Geschichte der Musik, vol. 2, (Leipzig, 1864).
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9. Sir John Hawkins, A General History of the Science and Practice of Music (London, 1776); Johann Nicolaus Forkel, Allgemeine Geschichte der Musik (Leipzig, 1788-1801); Charles Burney, A General History of Music (London, 1789).
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10. Hugo Riemann, Musik-Lexikon (5^th ed., Leipzig, 1900).
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11. Ambros op. cit., (2^nd ed., 1880) p. 339; (3^rd ed., 1891) p. 372.
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12. Hugo Riemann, Illustrationen zur Musikgeschichte. I : Weltlicher mehrstimmiger Gesang im 13.-16. Jahrhundert (Wiesbaden, 1893).
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13. H.E. Wooldridge, The Polyphonic Period, Part II: Method of Musical Art, 1300-1600, The Oxford History of Music, vol. II (Oxford, 1905) p. 25.
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14. See especially the articles 'Begleitstimmen', 'Instrumentalmusik', 'Geschichte der Musik', in Hugo Riemann, Musik-Lexikon, 5/1900, 6/1905, 7/1909.
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15. Ed. J.F.R. Stainer and C. Stainer, Dufay and his Contemporaries: Fifty Compositions ... transcribed from MS. Canonici misc. 213 (London, 1898). Ed. Guido Adler, Sechs Trienter Codices, Denkmäler der Tonkunst Österreich, vols. 14-15 (Vienna, 1900).
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16. Daniel Leech-Wilkinson, 'The invention of medieval music c. 1900' (forthcoming).
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17. See also Dieter Christensen, 'Hugo Riemann and the shaping of musicology: an ethnomusicological perspective', in ed. Christoph-Hellmut Mahling and Ruth Sieberts, Festschrift Walter Wiora zum 90. Geburtstag (Tutzing, 1997) 34-43.
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18. See e.g. Ambros, op. cit., 2^nd ed. p. 373-4 (also quoting Kiesewetter on Machaut's harmony); Robert Hope, Medieval Music: An historical sketch (London, 2/1899) p. 122.
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19. See, for example, Sarah Fuller, 'On sonority in fourteenth-century polyphony', Journal of Music Theory 30 (1986) 35-70, and 'Tendencies and resolutions: the directed progression in ars nova music', Journal of Music Theory 36 (1992) 229-58.
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20. Although Wolf's seminal work on notation, with its 78 complete pieces in diplomatic facsimile and modern transcription, was published in 1904, Wolf had been Riemann's doctoral student during the years in which he was collecting his material. It is inconceivable that he did not show Riemann his copies of the sources he visited. (Johannes Wolf, Geschichte der Mensural-Notation von 1250-1460 (Leipzig, 1904).)
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21. Harry Haskell, The Early Music Revival (London, 1988).
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22. Christopher Page, 'Machaut's 'Pupil' Deschamps on the performance of music', Early Music 5 (1977) 484-91; 'The performance of songs in late medieval France: a new source', Early Music 10 (1982) 441-50. The first Gothic Voices recording to adopt this approach was 'The Mirror of Narcissus: Songs of Guillaume de Machaut (1300-1377)' (Hyperion, A66087, 1983).
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23. Christopher Page, 'The English a cappella renaissance', Early Music 21 (1993) 452-71.
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24. Hugo Riemann, Musikgeschichte in Beispielen... mit Erläuterungen von Dr Arnold Schering (Leipzig, 1912), following a 1911 edition by Riemann with the examples alone.
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25. Arnold Schering, 'Das kolorierte Orgelmadrigal des Trecento', Sammelbände der Internationalen Musik-Gesellschaft 13 (1911-12) 172-204.
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26. For powerful confirmation of this see Hermann Springer, 'Der Anteil der Instrumentalmusik an der Literatur des 14.-16. Jahrhunderts', Zeitschrift der Internationalen Musik-Gesellschaft xiii (1911-12) 265-269, reporting a meeting of the Berlin local chapter of the IMG at which Johannes Wolf demolished arguments from Schering and Kinkeldy. The annotated copy belonging to Friedrich Ludwig, now in the library of the Musikwissenschaftliches Seminar in Göttingen, makes clear that Ludwig unequivocally supported Wolf.
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27. Arnold Schering, Aufführungspraxis alter Musik (Leipzig, 1931; reprinted Wiesbaden, 1969).
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28. Ibid., p. 110.
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29. Ed. Rudolf von Ficker, Perotinus: Organum Quadruplum Sederunt Principes (Vienna, 1930).
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30. Deriving (ultimately) from Riemann, Handbuch der Musikgeschichte (Leipzig, 1905) p. 307.
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31. Karl Geiringer, Musical Instruments (London, 1943) p. 87.
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32. For example, 'French Court Music of the 13^th Century', Musica Reservata (Decca, L'Oiseau Lyre, SOL-R332, 1968); 'Guillaume de Machaut: Messe de Nostre Dame', Ensemble Organum (Harmonia Mundi, HMC90 1590, 1996).
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33. Bent's review of Page's Discarding Images, Early Music 21 (1993) 625-33; Page's reply, Early Music 22 (1994) 127-32; see also Reinhard Strohm's 'How to make medieval music our own: a response to Christopher Page and Margaret Bent', Early Music 22 (1994) 715-9.
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34. Margaret Bent's exceptional skill at recognizing coherent patterns in diverse and fragmentary evidence is powerfully illustrated in, among other studies, 'Diatonic ficta', Early Music History 4 (1984) 1-48; 'Deception, exegesis and sounding number in Machaut's motet 15, Early Music History 10 (1991) 15-27; 'The grammar of early music' ed. Cristle Collins Judd, Tonal Structures in Early Music (New York, 1998) 15-59.
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35. Christopher Page, Discarding Images (Oxford, 1993) p. 190. Cf Bent's review cited in note 33 above, especially p. 627. For an excellent survey of Page's views see Bernard D. Sherman, Inside Early Music (New York, 1997) 71-95.
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© Daniel Leech-Wilkinson 1999

last updated 30 November 1999