The Horse, the Clerk and the Lyric:
The Musicography of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries
Mark Everist
It is not hard to find reports of a crisis in medieval musicology. As recently as 2001, readers of what is perhaps the most widely read scholarly journal in the anglophone musicological world were invited by Judith A. Peraino to re-read Joseph Kerman's comfortable elision of 'positivism' and 'medievalism' in the light of the writings of others quick to entertain adverse criticism of the discipline. Hardly surprisingly, the identification of crisis was largely triggered by a desire to foreground alternative methodological views of the subject, in Peraino's case 'combining historical research in medieval music and postmodern critical theories associated with "new musicology"_'.1 But it is tempting to counter such gloom by echoing the title of the 1975 Supertramp album Crisis: What Crisis?, and certainly the appearance of no fewer than four studies of a small segment of medieval music – from around 1225 to around 1375 – suggests that there is some fairly spirited defence of the subject to be read both from authors who are senior in their field and from those who are reworking doctoral dissertations. They also suggest that Peraino's call for a fusion of the postmodern with the medieval may have been premature or even unnecessary. Published in 2002 and 2003, and therefore more or less complete before the [End Page 136] publication of Peraino's article, these books not only inscribe medieval studies within the domain of the postmodern and Peraino's 'new musicology' but also flamboyantly reinscribe it within the traditional, ever-developing discourse of humanistic study that Peraino's predecessors were so quick to caricature.
Such a creative conjunction of old and new elicits a dissonance of musicological voice, a plurality of scholarly discourse that demonstrates just how far the musicography of the Middle Ages has travelled in less than two decades. 20 years ago, to draw a neat distinction between evidence-based observation and speculation was one of the skills one hoped to acquire in the early stages of a career, and work was judged on the basis of how well such distinctions were sustained; there was an abrupt cliff-edge where evidence-based observation ended and speculation began, and – it was inferred – the location of the warning signs was known to all. Such overly optimistic distinctions have now given way to a relationship between evidence and interpretation which is nothing like so clear. Such complexities are bound to have resonances with the language that embodies the control of evidence and interpretation, and the emergence of multiple scholarly voices is an unavoidable, perhaps pleasurable consequence. The range of subjects encompassed by the four volumes under review is large, but dissolves into three constituent parts: 'Guillaume de Machaut and the motet'; 'Music and romance: manuscripts and texts'; and 'Machaut's Mass: contexts and analysis'.
Guillaume de Machaut and the motet
Of the 18 essays in Machaut's Music, no fewer than 12 are about the vernacular works, and largely the polyphonic specimens. Three essays are on the Mass, leaving only the same number of essays on the entire repertory of 23 motets. Of these, the essays by Jacques Boogaart and Alice V. Clark focus exclusively on motet 3, He! Mors / Fine amour / Quare non sum mortuus, and Thomas Brown's essay, while building on Karl Kügle's work on the significance for Machaut of the anonymous motet in the Ivrea Codex Flos ortus inter lilia / Celsa cedrus ysopus effecta / Quam magna pontifex, returns to He! Mors at length.2 There is a sense in which this balance in Machaut's Music well reflects a broader understanding of the significance of Machaut's oeuvre: until as recently as the 1950s, he was largely regarded as the originator of polyphonic song and of the cyclic Mass. Furthermore, in those studies of the fourteenth-century motet that went beyond attributed works, Machaut's motets came off rather badly as being less innovative than those of others. While such simplistic views have now lost their currency, at a metacritical level – what is studied and why – the prejudice may still remain.
Two recent undertakings go a long way towards improving the position held by Machaut's motets in the pantheon of medieval music. The Hilliard Ensemble's recent recording of 18 of Machaut's 23 motets represents a quantum leap in our ability [End Page 137] to judge almost the entire corpus supported by at least some sort of sonic embodiment.3 There are those who, quite rightly, will point to the contingent nature of such a recording, and question its historically transcendent credentials. For those who are confident that their inner ear can recreate with confidence, say, the textures of one of the three late motets from the scores alone (manuscripts or modern editions), this recording might be redundant, but the Hilliard Ensemble has done the rest of the musical world a great service.
The second – and almost contemporary – undertaking within the domain of the Machaut motet repertory is Anne Walters Robertson's Guillaume de Machaut and Reims. Almost two thirds of the book is taken up with an account of the canon of Machaut's motets. She divides up the repertory into the first 17 motets, the later works (nos. 21–3), two closely connected with Reims itself (nos. 18 and 19), and motet 20 – Trop plus / Biauté paree / Je ne sui mie certains (following the orthodoxy established by Lawrence Earp that it was designed as a valedictory work for Bonne of Luxembourg and to close Machaut's C manuscript, Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France (hereafter F–Pn), fr. 1586).4 For Robertson, motets 1–17 are closely related in a way that demands serious attention, and the discussion of these as a group constitutes the central part of her argument.
Looking at the single point of comparison between the discussion of the motet in Machaut's Music and in Guillaume de Machaut and Reims throws Robertson's project into relief in a particularly productive way. Boogaart's re-reading of He! Mors / Fine amour / Quare non sum mortuus, supported and amplified by Clark's contribution, takes as axiomatic the methodology developed by such literary scholars as Sylvia Huot and Kevin Brownlee, which seeks to stress the 'polyphony' in the texts of medieval motets: resonances and contradictions, symmetries and asymmetries between the text of the tenor (plus its ritual implications) and those of the upper parts.5 In this context Boogaart claims that this work exhibits a 'bewildering amount of literary and musical ideas and patterns' that 'is held together through strict formal principles', and goes on to claim – and this is the main argument of his chapter – that 'Machaut even questions the rigidity of those formal restrictions' (p. 14). Readers will have to decide whether or not they are convinced by this position: it is difficult to judge because we are left to guess at the nature of the 'strict formal principles' that hold together He! Mors / Fine amour / Quare non sum mortuus. One is left with the suspicion that there might be a residue of the idea of the 'isorhythmic motet' as a generic category (perhaps as dangerous a term as the concept of 'sonata form' or 'rescue opera') underpinning this claim. At the end of the chapter, this seems to be more clearly spelt out: 'it appears that in the hands of Machaut the – allegedly rigid – isorhythmic motet is a most flexible form in which [End Page 138] to unfold and express intricate and subtle images' (p. 28). Few would want to argue with the overall suggestion, but this is a far cry from the background of a rigid isorhythmic structure against which Machaut proposes a more flexible foreground; isorhythm may simply not be the generic determinant Boogaart seems to allow at the beginning of his chapter.
Although cited in the notes to Boogaart's chapter, Huot's article that links He! Mors / Fine amour / Quare non sum mortuus with its predecessor, Tous corps / De souspirant / Suspiro, figures hardly at all.6 But the idea that there may exist some sort of intertextual relationship between one Machaut motet and another lies at the heart of Robertson's account of Machaut's third motet. Her discussion is significantly less ample but more wide-ranging than those of Boogaart and Clark – even than that of Huot; but that is because her mission is to place He! Mors / Fine amour / Quare non sum mortuus in a much broader context. She spends all of Chapter 3 of Guillaume de Machaut and Reims demonstrating that 'the tenors of Machaut's Motets 1–17 mark the mileposts of a spiritual journey through their ordering according to steps traditionally found in mystical works' and then goes on to suggest that
Motets 1–17 operate in a mode that allows for fruitful comparison of vernacular lyric poetry with Latin theology_._._., one that successfully balances Machaut's passionate yet intellectual conception of courtly love with the mystics' ardent yet highly structured portrayals of endless longing for Christ.
In fact, He! Mors / Fine amour / Quare non sum mortuus threatens to derail the project of tracking continuities in the upper voices of Machaut's motets 1–17 for the simple reason that only a couple of steps into what Robertson calls 'the beginning of love's journey' the beloved dies. Working hard with the similarities between the tenors of this motet and its predecessor (both from the responsory Inclinans faciem, for the liturgy for Job), Robertson is able to argue that the death of the beloved is a prompt for remembrance, and reminds us that Machaut includes in the work the proverb 'He who loves well does not forget'; and memory of course ties in with the next motet in the series.
Judging whether or not Robertson's claim that Machaut's motets 1–17 constitute a musical embodiment of love's journey is futile; there is no question of the claim being 'wrong' or 'right', merely more or less plausible. But it is possible to judge the degree of purchase that the hypothesis has on its evidence, and in those terms it is probably fair to say that while Robertson's account of the ordering of Machaut's tenors, where 'the gist of the story of Motets 1–17 is first revealed' (p. 84), has a strong evidential base in the mystic theological texts that she adduces, this base is much less clear and more subject to ad hoc interpretative strategies in her accounts of the 'story' as told in the upper voices of the 17 motets. In this, the central part of Guillaume de Machaut and Reims, Robertson skilfully modulates her discourse in a way that characterizes most of the books currently under review. One example will demonstrate this point. Robertson compares the treatment of the upper voices of He! Mors / Fine amour / Quare non sum mortuus (pp. 116–18) with Machaut's careful placement of the tenors of motets 1–17 in two contexts: (a) commentaries on the Song of Songs and (b) wisdom literature in the mystical tradition (pp. 81–2 and passim). She is able to tabulate a comparison of [End Page 139] Baldwin of Ford's sermon on lovesickness with Machaut's tenors (p. 92), and she maps Machaut's upper voices against the steps of the spiritual journey and against the documentary sources she brings forth in support of her argument: Henry Suso's Horologium sapientiae, Guigio de Ponte's De contemplatione and Richard of St-Victor's The Twelve Patriarchs (pp. 98–9). To have sufficient confidence in the strength of an argument to tabulate it betrays a very different scholarly voice from the careful, exploratory and perhaps conditional prose of the account of other upper-voice texts and their relationship to the steps of Machaut's spiritual journey; this mixture of discursive voices in Robertson's account of Machaut's motets 1–17 is one of the reasons for the persuasiveness of her claims.
Music and romance: manuscripts and texts
The relationship between music and romance lies at the heart of Emma Dillon's Medieval Music-Making and the 'Roman de Fauvel' and of Ardis Butterfield's Poetry and Music in Medieval France. Both titles are somewhat misleading: Dillon's book focuses almost exclusively on one of the manuscripts of the Roman de Fauvel in a 'reading' of the 'song space' in an attempt 'to open up new interpretative possibilities in a manuscript that offers just one glimpse of a fabulously inventive and imaginative musical culture' (p. 10). The reference to 'music-making' also undercuts expectations, for Dillon's concept of music-making is far removed from the idea that such an activity brings forth sound from silent notes on the page; her sense of music-making is a more obviously physical activity: the subtle balance between poetry, music, scribal practice, codicology and what might be called the sociology of the book. Butterfield's title betrays a publisher more anxious about markets than accurate description of the volume; Music and Poetry in Medieval France in fact examines the role of music in romance from around 1200 to around 1360, focusing largely on the use of the refrain. Readers who were hoping to read about the grands chants of the Chatelain de Couci and other trouvères will be disappointed; but at least the subtitle, From Jean Renart to Guillaume de Machaut, gives some clue that the book is just about vernacular traditions, and this is not the place to look for a discussion of cauda or rithmus. Dillon, then, has an object of inquiry that is anchored chronologically to a romance whose two books were written in 1310 and 1314 respectively, and preserved in a manuscript copied probably in 1317. Butterfield's, by contrast, is characterized by a chronologically wide range of texts, copied in an even wider range of manuscript sources, for many of which dating is severely problematic. Issues of chronology are central to those who, like Butterfield, explore the treacherous terrain of song repertories in the half century either side of 1300.
Butterfield's desire to speak authoritatively across the period in question is strong, and the best parts of the book are those where chronological precision is least important, and where this authoritative voice may be given free reign. Chapters 7–9 are grouped under the heading 'The Location of Culture', and encompass the antithesis (if that is really what it is) between 'courtly' and 'popular', the urban culture of Arras and its institutions and the cultural contexts of Le jeu de Robin et de Marion by Adam de la Halle. There is much to admire here, but in terms of laying out the ground in a sound chronological way for her reader, Butterfield can make some remarkable comments. She writes that [End Page 140]
fr. 146 [the notated manuscript source for the Roman de Fauvel] . . . is the only extant source of French polyphonic music (apart from a few short collections) to survive between the late thirteenth century motet collections and the ars nova manuscripts of the 1360s and 1370s.
Leaving aside the fact that Machaut's C manuscript (F–Pn fr. 1586) dates from the early 1350s rather than the 1360s and 1370s (its date has been accepted for over 20 years), the idea that the sources of the 'thirteenth-century' motet all neatly predate Fauvel is unlikely to be true in the abstract and certainly false in fact.7 No one could reasonably call such French collections of motets as the eighth fascicle of the Montpellier codex or the Turin motet book 'short collections'.8 Yet both these sources may be contemporary with the compilation of fr. 146, and while their contents might be thought to represent styles of an earlier generation, such has yet to be proved, and the possibility should at least be entertained (one might well put this more strongly) that the activity in F–Pn fr. 146 is part of a much wider range of contemporary practices – as Butterfield herself seems to acknowledge: 'Generic change . . . takes place in an atmosphere in which authors increasingly saw composition as a mutual, collaborative exercise, in which the boundaries of cross-reference were constantly explored and stretched' (p. 285). Butterfield's caveat ('apart from a few short collections') apparently absolves her from including the two songs in F–Pn Collection de Picardie 67 or the single song in the so-called Chansonnier Cangé (F–Pn fr. 846); but while it could be argued that these are indeed 'short collections' she does however focus at great length on the single polyphonic song by Lescurel in F–Pn fr. 146 (pp. 285–6; see below).
Poetry and Music is characterized by a curious reluctance to exploit what is known of the chronology and provenance of the manuscripts on whose evidence much of the book depends. As we are talked through the layout of the chansonniers, they are introduced to us by their shelfmark, their name (Chansonnier Clairambault, Chansonnier St Germain, etc.) and a parenthetical date: 'late thirteenth-century' for the former and 'c. 1250' for the latter (p. 30). No sources are cited for these dates, so the reader is left wondering whether they are the results of recent research or guesses from nineteenth-century catalogues. Butterfield seems unaware of recent research on the so-called Chansonnier du Roi (which she unhelpfully locates merely in the 'thirteenth century'; p. 31) that would offer significantly greater precision.9 This reluctance to engage with the chronology of medieval monophony in the last quarter of the thirteenth century, when she is [End Page 141] developing theories of historical continuity and change, matters greatly. Take the status of the formes fixes in Nicole de Margival's Le dit de la panthère d'amours: here Butterfield attempts an analogy between the presence of the earliest recorded rondets in Jean Renart's Le roman de la rose and the 'earliest recorded rondeaux, virelais and ballades . . . in the epilogue to Nicole de Margival's Le dit de la panthère d'amours' (p. 221). Leaving aside the question of whether Renart's Rose does indeed record the earliest rondets, Butterfield's reader has to turn to p. 330 (where her note 10 is buried) to learn that 'the date of the Panthère is uncertain. . . . Todd [its editor] dates it between 1290 and 1328.' The reader is therefore left to him/herself to work out that the earliest date for the Panthère places it before the compilation of Adam de la Halle's manuscript collected works (F–Pn fr. 25566), a fact that throws into doubt much of the content of the paragraphs which the note documents: F–Pn fr. 25566 was probably copied between 1291 and 1297, Adam de la Halle may not have died until after 1306, and Le dit de la panthère d'amours may date from around the same time as the copying of Adam's complete works.10 Again, in another repertory on which Butterfield leans heavily in her discussion of contrafacta – the songs of Gautier de Coinci – she slavishly follows Jacques Chailley's chronology, proposed nearly 50 years ago, which is surely ripe for review – especially given what is now known of the dating of the Soissons manuscript (F–Pn 24541).11 In a world where two of the key texts in the book, Gautier's songs and Renart's Roman de la rose, are dated 1218–36 and c.1210 respectively, there is good reason for some chronological caution, especially where matters of compositional priority are paramount (as they are in questions of contrafactum).
At the centre of Poetry and Music lies discussion of the repertory of refrains. Literary tags of two or more lines which may or may not be accompanied by music, they circulate in the romance, the chanson à and avec des refrains, the rondet/rondeau repertory and elsewhere in the literate culture of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.12 They are of interest for two reasons. They betray a great deal about the compositional practices of those who wrote and compiled the manuscripts preserving romances, of the poets and composers responsible for the chanson and of the poet-musicians who created the motet. Refrains may also be seen to have a defining and changing effect on poetic and lyric genres. What is interesting in Butterfield's book is how much emphasis is given to the latter and how little to the former. This is doubly problematic because the idea of the refrain as the agent of generic change is predicated on a view of genre that is little more than a taxonomy: rondet, chanson (in multiplicity of forms), the neologistic roman à chansons (p. 17), the motet and the various types of formes fixes. There is no doubt that the refrain is an important characteristic of all these types, and that it plays a key role in – say – the relationship between motet and romance. There is furthermore a great opportunity here to take a close look at the ways in which rondeaux were written, or how motets were put together; this opportunity is not taken. In a sense, this is understandable, since questions surrounding compositional process have to be so much more finely [End Page 142] textured than the simple identification of concordances in different genres. But it would allow one to ask some hard questions; for example, do some refrains originate in chansons or motets, and then circulate elsewhere? We get little help with this question in Poetry and Music, and one is left with the distinct impression that the question has been sidestepped in favour of a taxonomic concern with genre that seems – to put it generously – dated.
In much of Poetry and Music, analysis of musical structures lies at the centre of the argument, and it is instructive to compare these analytical concerns with those in Machaut's Music, a book that at least one of its contributors at some stage thought was called Analysing Machaut.13 The essays in the book that are dedicated to the secular works are largely analytical in nature, and well demonstrate current scholarly preoccupations in this repertory. They make a striking contrast to the handling of musical materials in Poetry and Music.
While Jehoash Hirschberg's and Jennifer Bain's contributions to Machaut's Music allude to the context of Machaut's songs in his dits (the Jugement du Roy de Navarre and the Voir dit respectively), and while Hirschberg, Jane Flynn and Peter Lefferts are concerned about the transmission of Machaut's songs in intabulation, most of the essays on Machaut's secular songs deal with internal analytical issues.14 Fundamental questions of the relationship between music and poetry are handled in three very different ways by Daniel Leech-Wilkinson, Yolanda Plumley and Karl Kügle: the importance of the phonemic qualities of the text in the context of the analysis of recording, reciprocity in text and music, and the power of the text to bind together otherwise disparate works.15 And Kügle's is not the only essay to occupy itself with the question of the relationships between certain works. The editor of the volume, Elizabeth Eva Leach, points to the relationship between ballades 11 and 12,16 while Bain associates ballades 32 and 33. As has been seen in the essays on motets in Machaut's Music and in Guillaume de Machaut and Reims, this is a current interest in research not only on Machaut but on fourteenth-century polyphonic song in general. Similarly, a wider interest in authorial and compositional self-image is betrayed in William Mahrt's article on two of Machaut's monophonic virelais (in itself welcome), and in Leach's and Anne Stone's studies of ballade 12.17
The more traditional analysis of melody, modality and tonal space occupies large parts of these essays. It comes centre-stage in Christian Berger's analysis of ballade 32,18 and in the exchange between Hirschberg and Lefferts on ballade 25. Sections of this analysis are intimidating to read, and in certain circles this would be considered a defect. It is more realistic, however, to view its complexity as a result of the sophisticated thinking that points to the maturity of the subject (remarkable given [End Page 143] the position only 20 years ago). There is much on which to reflect in the essays in Machaut's Music in terms of the light the analysis throws on the individual works, and of the methodological practices in play.
The analysis that we read in Poetry and Music is very different. Where the contributors to Machaut's Music are particularly careful about their sources and their treatment when they are dealing with musical materials (indeed, comparison of variant readings as part of the analytical discourse is one of the things that makes the scholarly dialogue so complex), in Poetry and Music all the examples are taken either from critical editions or from music examples in the secondary literature. This means in the first case that editorial method is inconsistent across the book, and in the second that the carefully mediated nature of the examples' original context is lost.19 Various points arise, only one of which can be addressed in the space available here.
Richard de Fournival's song Onques n'amai is taken from an edition by Gennrich that is 50 years old (Example 13, p. 251). This might not matter quite so much if it did not have consequences for the commentary that accompanies the example. For Butterfield attempts to distinguish between the style of the refrain in Richard's song and that of one she cites earlier in the book (Example 1, p. 80). She writes that
the melody, a haunting, controlled phrase from an elevated musical register (see Ex. 13), stands out from other refrain melodies, which often have a more abrupt, light and dance-like character (see Ex. 1). The music would thus support the words in giving this opening refrain-citation in the [Roman de la] Poire a more emphatic authorial presence than many of the subsequent refrains.
It may be that this example is being called on here to support a larger interpretative load than it can really bear. The problem is that Gennrich's edition takes the unmeasured notation of the original melody and – as was common in the mid-1950s – imposes a metrical rhythm on it, here largely dictated by the first rhythmic mode. (We are not told anywhere what the original sources are: the song is found in F–Pn fr. 844; Rome, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana (hereafter I–Rvat) Reg. Lat. 1490; F–Pn fr. 20050; F–Pn fr. 12615; Louvain, Bibliothèque Universitaire without shelfmark (destroyed; photographs in Göttingen, Universitätsbibliothek, Ludwig Nachlass, IX,14).)20 How the melody of the refrain in Richard's song could be a [End Page 144] 'haunting, controlled phrase from an elevated musical register' is frankly anybody's guess, but the comparison between this example and the one the reader is invited to make (170 pages earlier) is rendered more complex by the fact that Example 1 (taken from Maria Fowler's 1979 dissertation) is carefully edited to reflect the original unmeasured notation of the Noailles chansonnier (F–Pn fr. 12615), two of the Gautier de Coinci manuscripts (F–Pn fr. 25532) and Leningrad (sic), Bibl. Publ. Fr. F. v.XIV.9 (the library is now the Rossiyskaya Natsional'naya Biblioteka in St Petersburg), and the measured notation of the Montpellier, La Clayette and Munich motet manuscripts.21 When these differences are taken into consideration, it is extremely difficult to see the registral difference in the music, and the conclusion that this difference has significance for the opening citation of a refrain (if that is what it really is) in the Roman de la poire is difficult to sustain in the extreme. The difference between the two examples resides as much in the choice of existing editions as in any qualities inherent in the music.
Central to any book on lyric insertion in romance that might be subtitled From Jean Renart to Guillaume de Machaut are the musical interpolations in the Roman de Fauvel. These bring into focus the very different aspirations of Poetry and Music and Dillon's Medieval Music-Making. They stand in the same relationship to each other as do the accounts of Machaut's motet 3 in the essays in Machaut's Music and that in Robertson's Guillaume de Machaut and Reims: Butterfield's commentary on Fauvel is part of a cyclopaedic view of the subject while Dillon dedicates over 300 pages to the notated manuscript of Fauvel alone. While Butterfield pursues her analysis of generic change triggered by the use and function of the refrain in Fauvel (and it is self-evident that this manuscript is an important source for her project), Dillon's reading attempts to keep contemporary musicology and what some in the early 1990s called the 'new philology' in some sort of equilibrium, to maintain a constant awareness of the scholarly persona as she mediates between what she sees as the 'medievalist working in the discipline' and 'musicology's new commitments to preserve historical difference' (p. 6).22 The invocation of 'musicology's new commitments' serves as a helpful pointer to the metacritical preoccupations of Medieval Music-Making, and in places Dillon's authorial voice fits well with the orthodoxies of 'musicology's new commitments'. Here is the close of a discussion on the identification of F–Pn fr. 146's scribe C/E as Chaillou de Pesstain:
And yet I have no desire here to pursue the scribe beyond the exterior of the book, to graft in extra, biographical detail, to bring to life the individual who made these texts. For it is only within the metaphor of crucifixion that Chaillou becomes present: his identity is, according to that metaphor, defined by the inky marks on parchment, his body a material corpus of books he created. . . . Within the elaborate Christological frame, readers themselves are called on to participate in the writing of the text. The metaphor of crucifixion demands that we, too, play a role: our communion with the makers of fr. 146 is to open the book, to make the mid-point visible, the script evident, the text apparent; within the Christological metaphor at play there, we need to engage in the final act of bodily violation – to inflict the fifth and final wound to the 'heart' of Chaillou's textual body.
Some of the activities described here are commonplaces of medieval scholarship: the pursuit of 'the scribe beyond the exterior of the book' asks if Chaillou de Pesstain was the scribe of any other early fourteenth-century book, and the metaphor of pursuit here neatly mimics the metaphor of crucifixion that forms the subject of the quoted extract (and it is difficult to imagine that this is not part of the concluding drama of this chapter). Similarly, the extract develops a well-worn idea that the activity of reading completes (or concretizes, to borrow a term from Ingarden) a text, and that a reader is to a degree complicit in its authorship. Again, the communion metaphor raises the linguistic stakes in this extract to a degree that elevates more routine musicological writing to the status of prose-poetry, and it is difficult to argue that Dillon does not do it very well.
But as in Guillaume de Machaut and Reims there is more than one voice audible in Medieval Music-Making, and this could well be attributed to Dillon's 'medievalist working in the discipline'. Compare the following extract with the previous one; scribe C/E is still the subject:
However, there were several occasions, particularly in the musical items, where scribe A appears to miss errors, and it is here that another scribe, one I believe can be proven to be scribe C/E, intervenes. Such an instance occurs on folio 1r where the text of Favellandi vicium (Pmus 1) is disrupted by a minute ink change (barely visible in the facsimile), and some rough marks which are evidence of a scrape mark, signalling two instances of correction (see figure 4.2). The two interventions show characteristics of scribe C/E's hand. In figure 4.3, the flamboyant stroke on the end of the 'e' is a feature not of scribe 'A' but of scribe C/E. Similarly, the change at the beginning of 'dominum' (figure 4.4), with the fine looped bowl [sic] on the 'd', is again characteristic of scribe C/E, a distinction all the more evident by its proximity to scribe A's standard rendition of that letter.
This is a very different literary and scholarly world from that describing the bodily violation of Chaillou de Pesstain. We are here at the heart of a musicological discourse that would not only have seemed familiar 40 years ago, but that would then have had the status of cutting-edge research. The careful analysis of scribal identity, the suggestion that the author 'believe[s that another scribe] can be proven to be scribe C/E', the appeal to figures in the text, the implicit presence of the scholar in front of the manuscript itself rather than a modern facsimile, and the identification of folio and composition numbers all betray a radically different authorial voice from the one identified in the preceding quotation. The language is functional in the extreme: the only qualitative adjective that the author allows herself here is the word 'flamboyant', and that is to describe a stroke of a pen; the discourse is unconditional and authoritative to the point almost of laying down a challenge ('one I believe can be proven') to any opponent.
Judging the value of Dillon's book is extremely difficult: those who are interested, say, in the current state of scholarship on the question of how the work of scribes C/E and A interrelate in F–Pn fr. 146 will find much to absorb here. But so too will those who are interested in a new kind of materiality in music, in the meditative elements of Dillon's reading of the manuscript and the culture that engendered it. The real question is whether one group will profit from those sections praised and prized by the other. Will the cultural critic enjoy the detail of Chaillou de Pesstain's corrections, and will the codicologist enjoy his crucifixion?
In contrast, Butterfield's style is neither that of the codicologist nor that of the cultural critic, but more that of the traditional literary historian who demands our trust in the authority of her words. This is particularly clear as she sets out the likely [End Page 146] knowledge-base of her readers: in outlining the principal groups of sources that form the basis of her study, she writes
The (manuscript) sources for vernacular song in medieval France are numerous. The most familiar (at least to music scholars) are the great song books (chansonniers) of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The less familiar (at least to music scholars) include a wide range of writings that might loosely be called 'narrative'.
Musicologists, it is certain, are not so thin-skinned as to take offence at being singled out for their blinkered, single-minded interest in notes on the page, although they might argue about the physiognomy of the elaborate straw man being erected here. But this quotation does raise some questions about the nature of the multi- or interdisciplinary project, and about the sensitivity of musicology to the work of other disciplines and vice versa, that could be answered in very different ways from those implied by Butterfield's parentheses. Just to take one example, the so-called 'new philology' in literary studies seeks to re-embed medieval literary texts (among others) in their manuscript context, and Butterfield implicitly sites her work in these contexts; medieval musicologists of even the most traditional stripe who read the literature on the 'new philology' will have found little to excite them. The idea of reading the Roman de la rose with a sense of its manuscript transmission and presentation will have struck them as something that has represented business as usual in their field for decades. In this regard it is significant that, in Poetry and Music, literary texts are always considered without any reference to their manuscript context, and simply cited by title, whereas for chansonniers and other music books the manuscript source is regularly cited, as is the norm in almost all musicological writing. Whether this paradox is a residual characteristic of literary studies before the 'new philology' is a moot point; but, to pose a question more directly, one would have liked some discussion of the manuscript of Jean Renart's Roman de rose (I–Rvat Reg. Lat. 1725), at least for the purposes of identifying its date and provenance (the date of the work's composition is acknowledged as problematic; see above); the single description 'late thirteenth-century' (p. 20) simply raises more concerns than it allays, and the single facsimile of the manuscript (p. 52) is presented for a very different purpose. Here we are told about the marginal identification of the authors of songs in Renart's text with the astonishing parenthesis '(sixteenth-century?)'. The last example is particularly egregious since there are good contemporary examples of rubricated auctoritates (incipits rather than authors in this case) in the margins of the motet collections in Wolfenbüttel, Herzog-August-Bibliothek, MS 1099 (1206), a manuscript which receives little mention in Poetry and Music despite the large numbers of works with refrains it includes, and this would have served the author well as an exemplum of this practice.
The last section (of six) of Poetry and Music is dedicated to a single subject: 'The Formes fixes: From Adam de la Halle to Guillaume de Machaut'. Put in very blunt terms, one of the fundamental subjects that the musicology of the late Middle Ages has yet to answer is: what is the compositional, poetic, aesthetic and cultural background to the emergence of polyphonic song as we know it from Machaut and his contemporaries? Hardly surprisingly, Butterfield's approach to this question lies in the use of the refrain. She writes: 'the construction of rondeaux, ballades and later, virelais in the fourteenth century takes place within the context of a fundamentally continuous, and broad-based practice of refrain-citation' (p. 278). Butterfield's [End Page 147] idiosyncratic view of the survival of sources of polyphonic music between what she considers sources of late thirteenth-century motets and those for the music of Machaut is restated in this chapter from a different perspective. Beyond F–Pn fr. 146, she argues, 'material evidence of transition is notoriously difficult to locate. Apart from fr. 146_._._., we have only a group of non-musical manuscripts' (p. 276). No one would argue that the romance sources that she cites (Nicole de Margival's Le dit de la panthère d'amours – but note the caveat about its date above; Jean Acart de Hesdin's La prise amoureuse; and Jehan de la Mote's Li regret Guillaume Comte de Hainault) fall into the chronological period between c.1300 and c.1340, but her inclusion of the songs in GB–Ob Douce 308 (which she dates 'c.1300' without citing evidence) is nothing like so clear.
The romance sources have already been treated in great detail by Lawrence Earp,23 but Butterfield claims that 'in the light of more detailed work on thirteenth- and fourteenth-century refrain citation in earlier chapters of this book, a more nuanced outline of some of the generic shifts . . . may be attempted' (p. 278). What Butterfield's account leaves out is the wide range of other existing views on this question, and a significant amount of relevant source material. Doing anything more than listing the sometimes brilliant arguments that have been advanced to account for the reversal of balance between aristocratisant and popularisant poetry, and between monophony and polyphony (to borrow the very neat encapsulation of Earp's position offered by Butterfield; pp. 277–8), is impossible here, but it would have been interesting to see Butterfield's response to the views of Sarah Jane Williams (that the origins of polyphonic song were a consequence of nothing more than Machaut's genius; 1952), Lawrence Gushee (that it was the result of a synthesis of monophonic song with the ensemble practices of urban minstrelsy; 1974), or Christopher Page (that it arose out of the performance of high-style chansons by viellatores; 1987).24 Perhaps the most striking absence is any mention of Anne Ibos-Augé's 2000 dissertation 'La fonction des insertions lyriques dans des œuvres narratives et didactiques aux xiiième et xivème siècles', in which many of the repertories examined in Poetry and Music are covered from a similar perspective, and which presents a complete edition of refrains with their music (vol. 2), together with wider-ranging repertories (vol. 3).25 Ibos-Augé also includes a vast amount of material relating to the prosodic context of refrains (vol. 4) which is of great value to the reader of Butterfield's study. It is clearly unfortunate that Butterfield was unaware of Ibos-Augé's work as she assembled Poetry and Music, but perhaps the fact that five of Butterfield's sections are reworked from pre-existing publications (cited at pp. xvi–xvii) would have made it difficult to take [End Page 148] account of the work in any case. Nevertheless, Poetry and Music gains immeasurably from being read in the context of the arguments advanced and data assembled in Ibos-Augé's dissertation.
Likewise it would have been instructive to have considered some of the sources that Butterfield dismisses. She tucks away the reference to the important collection of polyphonic rondeaux in F–Pn fr. 12786 into a footnote (p. 335, n. 2), despite the number of concordances with the works of Adam de la Halle, and the two polyphonic songs in F–Pn Collection de Picardie 67 figure not at all.26 Given that her main point of distinction between Adam de la Halle and Machaut is text setting ('We are largely registering the difference between a syllabic and melismatic relation between the words and the music'; p. 273), these two songs are of crucial significance in that they take some aspects of the poetic and musical style of Adam de la Halle but marry these to some that are more characteristic of early Machaut, especially in their melismatic text setting.27 And can it really be true that the rondeau-motets in F–Pn fr. 12615 and related sources had absolutely no consequence for later composers – as Butterfield seems to imply by taking no account of this tradition? Whatever date one might want to propose for the manuscript sources for the rondeau-motet (and it is probably going to be no later than the last third of the thirteenth century), there is evidence that the idea of matching a dance-song in an upper voice to a carefully manipulated newly composed or borrowed tenor was still being developed around 1300 and perhaps later. The single polyphonic song already alluded to in F–Pn fr. 846, copied quite possibly within a few years of the version of Fauvel in F–Pn fr. 146, is an example of just this tradition. The dating of F–Pn fr. 846 has been known at least since 1993, when its pairing with the datable Chrétien de Troyes manuscript F–Pn fr. 1376 was recognized by Alison Stones.28 The exact dating ranges from 1307 (Stones) to that of Kathleen Ruffo, who has argued for 1297;29 whichever of the two dates one accepts, there is no doubt that the single polyphonic song in [End Page 149] F–Pn fr. 846 falls right into the middle of the period under discussion.30 Another repertory that one would like to have seen considered is those motets – the reverse of the rondeau-motet – where the upper parts follow the song form in their tenor. A consideration of such works as those in F–Pn Collection de Picardie 67 and F–Pn fr. 846 would have perhaps tempered the extravagant claim that 'this lone piece by Lescurel [A vous douce debonnaire] is the potent combination of melisma and polyphony which appears to create single-handedly the soundworld of the fourteenth century' (p. 285).
There is no doubt about the importance of the system of citation of refrains in the period covered by van den Boogaard's inventory (up to and including the Roman de Fauvel). There is also rapidly emerging evidence that poet-composers of Machaut's generation quoted extensively from a wide range of sources: the Bible, Boethius, Brunetto Latini and the Roman de la rose. And in this context it is not surprising that Perrin d'Angecourt and Thibaut de Navarre should appear as auctoritates alongside these other figures.31 But this is a very different system of allusion to literary and doctrinal authority from that of the network of citation that van den Boogaard documents, and trying to smooth over the distinction between these two types of practice may not be helpful. This is not to say that there are no continuities in the use of refrains in this period, especially in the romance, but the evidence does not support Butterfield's claim that 'it is worth noting how far the surviving lyric repertory between Adam and Machaut is drawn together by these connecting threads' (p. 284). The sole example that she adduces that links Machaut's twelfth ballade to other sources (including a motet in the seventh fascicle of F–MOf H 196) does not make clear whether or not this is an example of musical or textual cross-reference, but the literature in the past has made this claim on musical grounds, and this in turn has been shown to be impossible to sustain.32
Machaut's Mass: contexts and analysis
Acknowledged since at least the eighteenth century as the composer's greatest contribution to music history, Machaut's four-part setting of the Mass Ordinary continues to be the subject of scholarly attention. Many of the voices audible in the books under review in this article acknowledge two important contributions from the previous decade: Anne Walters Robertson's chapter in Plainsong and the Age of Polyphony (1992) and Daniel Leech-Wilkinson's Machaut's Mass: An Introduction (1990).33 Margaret Bent's article in Machaut's Music, entitled 'The "Harmony" of the Machaut Mass' (pp. 75–94), makes this debt very clear: 'These two publications stand [End Page 150] for different ways, neither opposed nor separable, of approaching a musical work of the past. One [Robertson] anchors the historical, liturgical and institutional context of the Mass's creation and early use, and the other [Leech-Wilkinson] scrutinizes the musical text itself for evidence of Machaut's compositional process and intentions' (p. 75). Bent's article is important for two reasons. First, her analysis of the non-isorhythmic sections of the Gloria of the Mass is an object lesson in 'bringing fourteenth-century music and fourteenth-century theory into dialogue' (p. 81), and in the context of a particularly troublesome movement, characterized by a contrapuntal idiom in which forbidden intervals (fourths, sevenths and ninths) proliferate. She – perhaps strikingly – takes as her immediate point of departure an article by Gilbert Reaney published exactly 50 years previously (surely no accident) that addressed similar sorts of questions.34 Such a choice immediately throws her into direct opposition with the view of the same article taken in 1984 by Leech-Wilkinson, who described Reaney's position as 'widely held but hopelessly illogical'.35 The second reason for the importance of Bent's chapter is her systematic defence of dyadic, successive composition, and of the value of fourteenth-century (indeed earlier and later) theory in coming to an understanding of compositional practice. Bent's method is quotation and commentary (p. 82, for example, consists of three-quarters quotation from Leech-Wilkinson, and one quarter authorial text), and this is helpful in throwing into relief not only many of the issues that split the two authors, but also the ideological divide that separates different voices heard in contemporary musicology.
It is difficult not to share some sympathy with Bent as she tries to come to terms with the views expressed by Leech-Wilkinson in the 1984 Rose, lis article, the 1990 book and the article published here in Machaut's Music: 'Rose, lis Revisited'. The part that Bent brings to our attention from the latter reads as follows (and brava to the editrix who engineered the sharing of text in advance of publication):
whatever kind of moral obligation you might feel we should have to the past, the fact remains that Machaut is dead and has been for over 600 years; we cannot owe him anything anymore. The only issue of any interest is what the music means to us. One can confine that meaning within a rigorous attempt at a historically constrained view if one so chooses, but one can choose not to, and there is no way to show that one choice is right and the other wrong.
There is a sense in which the implications of Leech-Wilkinson's declaration completely undercut the debate. As Bent writes, she 'had assumed that [wanting to understand what this musical work had to say to us] was [Leech-Wilkinson's] goal too, even if [they] agreed to differ about just what that language was and how it might be defined' (pp. 80–1). Reading Leech-Wilkinson's statement that 'the only issue of any interest is what the music means to us', it is difficult to imagine any common ground on which Bent and Leech-Wilkinson could examine such general questions as compositional process (which clearly seems excluded by the quotation), let alone such specific issues as dyadic or triadic, successive or simultaneous, [End Page 151] composition. It is clear from Leech-Wilkinson's 'Rose, lis Revisited' that he means what he says, and his article is largely concerned with the contemporary (by which he means twentieth-century) sound of Rose, lis. His access to this sound is via recordings, with methodologies based on the analysis of the phonemic qualities of the vowels (in particular), on the performances of the text and on spectrographic analysis of the recorded performances (by Gothic Voices (1988) and the Waverly Consort (1973)). This undertaking well illustrates Leech-Wilkinson's claim that 'of course, pitches and meanings matter vitally, but they are not the whole story of the way we perceive Machaut's songs, or indeed anyone else's. The sound, as well, is an essential part of their sense' (p. 262). The technological slant to Leech-Wilkinson's analysis perhaps gives a clue to rationalizing 'Machaut's Rose, lis' and 'Rose, lis Revisited', and that is to view both as the product of an essentially modernist aesthetic: a move from analysis as a tool that would scientifically decode the past to technology that may decode the present. But however one wants to remember the story, Leech-Wilkinson's article represents a complete retreat from the field occupied by the armies of successive and simultaneous composition. And this flight leaves us with Bent's careful explanation of how subtle 'successive composition' in fact is (p. 76).
Robertson's contribution to the scholarship on Machaut's Mass from the 1990s also generated a degree of disagreement, and this is represented in the revision of her article now published in Guillaume de Machaut and Reims (pp. 257–75). But here the disagreements centre on the reading of a single document, the inscription on the floor of Reims Cathedral that marked the burial place of Guillaume de Machaut and Jean (his brother; p. 259 and n. 15). Unlike Bent and Leech-Wilkinson, whose voices (at least as expressed in 2003) are so discordant as to render dialogue impossible, Robertson and her interlocutor, Roger Bowers, even within the context of a publication such as this, mutually refine arguments and rationalize misunderstanding. They speak, if not with the same voice, at least in the same language.
Context and analysis are the subject of the two other essays on the Mass in Machaut's Music. Both are fused in Owen Rees's article, 'Machaut's Mass and Sounding Number' (pp. 95–110), where the author picks up on a couple of exploratory comments in Leech-Wilkinson's Machaut's Mass concerning numerical choice in his disposition of chants in isorhythmic sections of the chant. Rees carefully tracks the fortunes of the numbers 7 and 12 in the Kyrie and Agnus dei of the work, and shuttles back and forth between issues of numerical disposition and what Robert Surles has helpfully called 'allegoresis', a process by which number is used to support a basic idea inherent in the work.36 In contrast, Kevin Moll takes a cyclopaedic look at four-part Mass settings in an attempt to come to terms with the implications of dyadic frameworks for four-part writing and the 'contrapuntal dispensability' of single voice-parts. He reaches the conclusion that in no Mass setting of the fourteenth century is a fourth voice 'fully assimilated into the polyphonic fabric', since each of the possible combinations compromises either the contrapuntal, textural or registral integrity of at least one part of the texture.37 [End Page 152]
It will have become clear in the course of this article that the homogeneity of voice that characterized the musicography of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries a quarter of a century ago has been transformed into a highly varied chorus. There is a clear divorce, furthermore, between speaker and voice, with scholars (as suggested in the case of Robertson and Dillon) mutating between different discursive registers according to the type of material and the treatment being proposed. The adjective to describe this claim that comes almost too easily to mind is 'dissenting', and within a journalistic domain one could imagine such a term being dropped in without a second thought. But there is little dissent in matters of detail and, even in the exchange between Bent and Leech-Wilkinson, the very context of the latter's claims has the effect of entirely neutralizing any disagreement. Indeed, in the readings of the 'music-making' in F–Pn fr. 146 or of the first group of Machaut motets, there is little with which to argue: propositions are simply acceptable or unacceptable. Paradoxically, it is in the descriptions of the nineteenth century's engagement with the Middle Ages with which Dillon is so concerned that some real dissent might be possible (where her commentary in many respects depends on attempts to reconstruct the (nineteenth-century) past), but that engagement is not contemplated here.38 One might ask if the vocal multivalence that is exhibited in these volumes is a feature of medieval studies in general, a question that may be answered by reference to Butterfield's Poetry and Music, whose apparently authoritative tone represents a voice – perhaps welcome to many – of an earlier, less troubled age, but a voice which admits dissent and discussion.
Sensitivities to historical contingency play an important part in the characterization of voice. For some (Leech-Wilkinson, for example), it seems that any sort of historical contingency beyond our own lifetimes is of little concern. For others, it seems little more than an inconvenient hurdle. But for most of the scholarship in these books, especially Robertson's Guillaume de Machaut and Reims and the essays in Machaut's Music, scholarly voice is predicated on a sympathy with the contingencies of history that shares the best of the past with the most promising of the future.
Footnotes
1. Judith A. Peraino, 'Re-Placing Medieval Music', Journal of the American Musicological Society, 54 (2001), 209–64 (p. 264). Almost identical words are used, but without the exact formulation 'new musicology', ibid., 209. Peraino's principal sources are either extremely local ('Report on the State of the Humanities at Cornell University', Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Office of the Dean of Arts and Sciences, 1998; cited at p. 211, n. 3) or so unreliable as to be almost meaningless (the 'graduate student interest in medieval topics' culled from an investigation of DDM Online makes no sense as there is no comparison with previous periods or with other parts of the discipline; cited at p. 212, n. 6).
2. Jacques Boogaart, 'Speculum mortis: Form and Signification in Machaut's Motet Hé! Mors / Fine Amour / Quare non sum mortuus (M3)' (pp. 13–30); Alice V. Clark, 'Observations on Machaut's Motet He! Mors, com tu es haie / Fine Amour, qui me vint navrer / Quare non sum mortuus (M3)' (pp. 31–5); Thomas Brown, 'Flos / Celsa and Machaut's Motets: Emulation – and Error?' (pp. 37–52). See also Karl Kügle, The Manuscript Ivrea, Biblioteca Capitolare 115: Studies in the Transmission of Ars Nova Polyphony, Musicological Studies, 69 (Ottawa, 1997).
3. Guillaume de Machaut, Motets, The Hilliard Ensemble (ECM 1823, 2004). The recording consists of all the motets with the exception of nos. 1, 6, 12, 15 and 17; so, while presenting the more heterogeneous tail of the collection in its entirety, it does not offer the complete sequence of works proposed in Robertson's Guillaume de Machaut and Reims (see below).
4. Lawrence Earp, Guillaume de Machaut: A Guide to Research, Garland Composer Resource Manuals, 36; Garland Research Library of the Humanities, 996 (New York and London, 1995), 25–6, 276 and 382.
5. The bibliography on this subject is by now extensive. For two representative studies see Sylvia Huot, Allegorical Play in the Old French Motet: The Sacred and the Profane in Thirteenth-Century Polyphony, Figurae: Reading Medieval Culture (Stanford, CA, 1997), and Kevin Brownlee, 'La polyphonie textuelle dans le Motet 7 de Machaut: Narcisse, la Rose, et la voix féminine', Guillaume de Machaut, 1300–2000: Actes du colloque de la Sorbonne, 28–29 septembre 2000, ed. Jacqueline Cerquiglini-Toulet and Nigel Wilkins, Musiques / écritures: études (Paris, 2001), 137–46.
6. Sylvia Huot, 'Patience in Adversity: The Courtly Lover and Job in Machaut's Motets 2 and 3', Medium aevum, 63 (1994), 222–38.
7. See, for the evidence for dating F–Pn fr. 1586, François Avril, 'Les manuscrits enluminés de Guillaume de Machaut: Essai de chronologie', Guillaume de Machaut: Colloque–Table ronde, Reims (19–22 Avril 1978) (Paris, 1982), 117–33.
8. Montpellier, Bibliothèque de l'Université, Faculté de Médecine (hereafter F–MOf) H 196; Turin, Biblioteca Reale, vari 42. For the dating of the former see Mark Everist, Polyphonic Music in Thirteenth-Century France: Aspects of Sources and Distribution (New York and London, 1989), 118–34. Even the view of the manuscript that attempts to argue that all its parts were assembled simultaneously agrees with an early fourteenth-century date for its eighth fascicle (Mary Wolinksi, 'The Compilation of the Montpellier Codex', Early Music History, 11 (1992), 263–301).
9. John Haines, 'The Musicography of the Manuscrit du Roi' (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Toronto, 1998). The claim (Peraino, 'Re-Placing Medieval Music', 233, n. 70) that Haines's view represents one of 'two very different hypotheses' for the origin of the manuscript is false. The suggestions that the manuscript was commissioned by Guillaume de Villehardouin and that it was produced in Artois are not mutually exclusive (Haines, pp. 81–7; Everist, Polyphonic Music, 171–88). I am grateful to Prof. Haines for his comments on these observations and on Peraino's use of them (personal communication to the author, 8 July 2002).
10. The confusion is exacerbated by the fact that Todd's dating of the work goes back to 1883.
11. Jacques Chailley, Les chansons à la Vierge de Gautier de Coinci (1177[78]–1236): édition musicale critique avec introduction et commentaires, Publications de la Société Française de Musicologie, 1/15 (Paris, 1959).
12. Their texts are inventoried and edited in Nico H. J. van den Boogaard, Rondeaux et refrains du xiie siècle au début du xive: Collationnement, introduction, et notes, Bibliothèque française et romane, D:3 (Paris, 1969). For a musical edition, see below, note 25.
13. Jacques Boogaart, 'Encompassing Past and Present: Quotations and their Functions in Machaut's Motets', Early Music History, 20 (2001), 1–86 (p. 19, n. 48).
14. Hirschberg, 'A Portrayal of a Lady who Guards her Honour (B25)' (pp. 139–60); Bain, 'Balades 32 and 33 and the "Res dalemangne"_' (pp. 205–19); Flynn, 'The Intabulation of De toutes flours (B31) in the Codex Faenza as Analytical Model' (pp. 175–91); Lefferts, 'Machaut's B-flat Balade Honte, paour (B25)' (pp. 161–74).
15. Leech-Wilkinson, 'Rose, lis Revisited' (pp. 249–62); Plumley, 'The Marriage of Words and Music: Musique naturele and Musique artificiele in Machaut's Sans cuer, dolens (R4)' (pp. 231–48); Kügle, 'Some Observations Regarding Musico-Textual Interrelationships in Late Rondeaux by Machaut' (pp. 263–76).
16. Leach, 'Singing More about Singing Less: Machaut's Pour ce que tous (B12)' (pp. 111–24).
17. Mahrt, 'Male and Female Voice in Two Virelais of Guillaume de Machaut' (pp. 221–30); Stone, 'Music Writing and Poetic Voice in Machaut: Some Remarks on B12 and R14' (pp. 125–38).
18. Berger, 'Machaut's Balade Ploures dames (B32) in the Light of Real Modality' (pp. 193–204).
19. This is particularly pressing in the case of Example 11, a possible reconstruction of laisse 9 from Aucassin et Nicolette borrowed from John Stevens, Words and Music in the Middle Ages: Song, Narrative, Dance and Drama, 1050–1350, Cambridge Studies in Music (Cambridge, 1986), 226. It is presented in Poetry and Music (p. 193) with no commentary beyond the caption that alludes to its nature as a possible reconstruction (the bibliographical citation is found only in the 'List of Musical Examples', p. xiii), and Stevens's very careful explanation is suppressed. This matters because Stevens describes three possible interpretations of the relationship between word and note in Aucassin et Nicolette (Poetry and Music, 225–7), and proposes his example – which Butterfield reproduces – not as a reconstruction but as 'one [of at least three] possible arrangements of melodies' (ibid., 226).
20. For full details of the bibliography of this song, including other modern editions, see Robert White Linker, A Bibliography of Old French Lyrics, Romance Monographs, 31 (University, Mississippi, 1979), 226. Gennrich's Altfranzösische Lieder, 2 vols. (Halle, 1953; Tübingen, 1955), ii, 40, from which Butterfield takes her example, represents 'the final form' of his 'highly sophisticated system of rhythmic "progressions" to reflect the inner metre of the poem from line to line . . which involved three levels of rhythm – "Distinktion – (D-Rhythmik)", "Einheiten – (E-Rhythmik)" and "Tongruppen (G-Rhythmik)" ' (Ian D. Bent, 'Gennrich, Friedrich', Grove Music Online, ed. Laura Macy, <http://www.grovemusic.com>, accessed 6 October 2004). The effect of this edition is to foreground Gennrich's life work in the development of theories of rhythm for medieval monody rather than to offer a usable edition for posterity.
21. Maria V. Fowler, 'Musical Interpolations in Thirteenth- and Fourteenth-Century French Narratives', 2 vols. (Ph.D. dissertation, Yale University, 1979), ii, 344.
22. See the themed issue of Speculum, 65 (1990), entitled The New Philology, for an excellent view of the spectrum of literary subdisciplines encompassed by the term.
23. Lawrence Earp, 'Lyrics for Reading and Lyrics for Singing in Late Medieval France: The Development of the Dance Lyric from Adam de la Halle to Guillaume de Machaut', The Union of Words and Music in Medieval Poetry, ed. Rebecca A. Baltzer, Thomas Cable and James I. Wimsatt (Austin, TX, 1991), 101–31.
24. Sarah Jane Williams, 'The Music of Machaut' (Ph.D. dissertation, Yale University, 1952); Lawrence Gushee, 'Two Central Places: Paris and the French Court in the Early Fourteenth Century', Gesellschaft für Musikforschung: Bericht über den Internationalen Musikwissenschaftlichen Kongress Berlin 1974, ed. Hellmut Kühn and Peter Nitsche (Kassel, etc., 1980), 135–57; Christopher Page, Voices and Instruments of the Middle Ages: Instrumental Practice and Songs in France 1100–1300 (London and Melbourne, 1987), 126–33.
25. Anne Ibos-Augé, 'La fonction des insertions lyriques dans des œuvres narratives et didactiques aux xiiième et xivème siècles', 4 vols. (Ph.D. dissertation, Université Michel de Montaigne-Bordeaux III, 2000).
26. The cryptic comment (Poetry and Music, p. 335, n. 2) to the effect that 'comparative research is needed on the relation between the song forms in these manuscripts and the Montpellier Codex' is difficult to understand. With the exception of the very few opening texts, the majority of the 'song forms' are analogous to those in the de la Halle canon, and it is not hard to agree that a systematic comparison would be useful (for a beginning, see Mark Everist, 'The Polyphonic Rondeau c.1300: Repertory and Context', Early Music History, 15 (1996), 59–96), but it is not clear to which song forms in the Montpellier Codex she alludes. If she is talking about the French tenors in the seventh and eighth fascicles of the manuscript, then that comparison has already been undertaken (Thomas Walker, 'Sui tenor francesi nei motetti del '200', Schede medievali: Rassegna dell' officina di studi medievali, 3 (1982), 309–36 (not cited in the bibliography)).
27. The two songs are edited in Rondeaux, Virelais und Balladen aus dem Ende des XII., dem XIII., und dem ersten Drittel des XIV. Jahrhunderts mit den überlieferten Melodien, ed. Friedrich Gennrich, 3 vols., Gesellschaft für romanische Literatur, 43 (Dresden, 1921), i, 262–4 (the editions, given that the notation is fully mensural, are antiquated but trustworthy). Both songs are found on f. 68 of the manuscript, and neither has anything to do with the previous six compositions; see Gilbert Reaney, Manuscripts of Polyphonic Music (c. 1320–1400), Répertoire international des sources musicales, BIV/2 (Munich and Duisburg, 1969), 197–9.
28. Alison Stones, 'The Illustrated Chrétien Manuscripts and their Artistic Context', Les manuscrits de Chrétien de Troyes / The Manuscripts of Chrétien de Troyes, ed. Keith Busby, Terry Nixon, Alison Stones and Lori Walters, 2 vols. (Amsterdam, 1993), i, 227–322 (pp. 256–7).
29. Kathleen W. Ruffo, 'The Illustration of Noted Compendia of Courtly Poetry in Late Thirteenth-Century Northern France' (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Toronto, 2000), 61–4 and 125–82. I am grateful to Alison Stones for her thoughts on this complex of manuscripts, and for granting me access before publication to the entries on the manuscripts in her forthcoming monograph on French manuscripts, 1250–1320 (personal communication to the author, 12 October 2003).
30. F–Pn fr. 846, ff. 21r–v. See the facsimile in Reproduction phototypique du chansonnier Cangé: Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, ms. français no 846, ed. Jean Beck, 2 vols., Corpus cantilenarum medii aevi, 1 / Les chansonniers des troubadours et des trouvères, 1 (Paris and Philadelphia, 1927), and the – again old but serviceable – edition ibid., ii, 49.
31. See Boogaart, 'Encompassing Past and Present', passim, and the sources cited there.
32. Ursula Günther, 'Zitate in französischen Liedsätzen der Ars nova und Ars subtilior', Musica disciplina, 26 (1972), 53–68 (pp. 54–5). For a critique of this argument, see Mark Everist, 'The Origins of Polyphonic Song, I: Citation, Motet, Rondeau', paper read at the colloque 'La musique à Avignon au XIVe siècle', Abbaye de Royaumont, 8–12 July 1988.
33. Anne Walters Robertson, 'The Mass of Guillaume de Machaut in the Cathedral of Reims', Plainsong in the Age of Polyphony, ed. Thomas Forrest Kelly (Cambridge, 1992), 100–39; Daniel Leech-Wilkinson, Machaut's Mass: An Introduction (Oxford, 1990).
34. Gilbert Reaney, 'Fourteenth-Century Harmony and the Ballades, Rondeaux and Virelais of Guillaume de Machaut', Musica disciplina, 7 (1953), 129–46.
35. Daniel Leech-Wilkinson, 'Machaut's Rose, lis and the Problem of Early Music Analysis', Music Analysis, 3 (1984), 9–28 (p. 9, n. 2).
36. Robert Surles, 'Introduction', Medieval Numerology: A Book of Essays, ed. Robert Surles, Garland Medieval Casebooks, 7 / Garland Reference Library of the Humanities, 1640 (New York, 1993), i–xii (p. viii).
37. Kevin Moll, 'Texture and Counterpoint in the Four-Voice Mass Settings of Machaut and his Contemporaries', pp. 53–73 (p. 73).
38. An obvious point of comparison would be John Haines, Eight Centuries of Troubadours and Trouvères: The Changing Identity of Medieval Song (Cambridge, 2004).
