Medieval Song from Aristotle to Opera by Sarah Kay (review)

IF 0.3 3区 历史学 0 MEDIEVAL & RENAISSANCE STUDIES
Johannes Junge Ruhland
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Positioning herself in the transdisciplinary field of sound studies, Kay places voice at the center of her discussion, at once relating song to the production of human speech and characterizing it as a phenomenon occurring in the wider cosmos (9). Medieval Song provides at least three answers to her ontological question. In its broadest sense, medieval song is the result of touch, light, breath, inspiration, and imagination. In the context of song largely mediated by manuscripts and opera, it is eminently multisensory, and lends itself to what Kay dubs “operatic reading,” a form of attention that grants song the status of sound, performance, and vision. And because no performance exhausts what can be heard in a song, song is essentially anachronic, lingering beyond its time of production and performance. The book’s corpus ranges from Aristotle to opera (including an opera created in 2019) and puts late antique, early medieval, scholastic, and contemporary theoretical writings in conversation with troubadour and trouvère poems, narrative dits, bestiaries, manuscripts, and operas. Kay offers an encyclopedic yet concise sum that complements existing scholarship on medieval song in musicology and literary studies (examples include Ardis Butterfield, Marisa Galvez, Elizabeth Leach, and Judith Peraino). The convergence of operatic reading with work by other scholars (Emma Dillon’s The Sense of Sound [2012] and Bissera Pent-cheva’s AudioVision in the Middle Ages [2023]), suggests how promising operatic reading is for medieval studies writ large. Essential to the book’s documentation and argumentation is a companion website curated by Christopher Preston Thompson (https://cornellpress.manifoldapp.org/projects/medieval-song), to which Kay regularly refers. It features (sometimes multiple) recordings of medieval songs by Thompson and the ensemble Concordian Dawn, texts, scores, and translations, as well as performance reflections by Thompson and Kay. For accessibility, videos are fully captioned. The book’s introduction provides three key parameters for the study to [End Page 240] follow. First, it justifies its definition of song as interconnected with the “wider universe” (9) by shifting attention from words to sound. Second, it develops the notion of operatic reading. Noting that many composers and librettists have engaged with medieval and especially troubadour song, Kay observes that “operatic works can … propose themselves as ways of reading texts” (15). Operatic reading, then, consists in “extending the notion of ‘performance’ to manuscript transmission” (7) by drawing on visual, melodic, and textual cues culled from manuscript openings to produce real or imagined renditions of song. Third, the introduction justifies the book’s pairing of sources such as The Marriage of Philology and Mercury with Occitan albas by characterizing song as essentially anachronic (“resistant to so-called chronological order” [6]) because it is inherently belated in the listener’s ear (7). The first chapter, “Between Touch and Thought,” centers on the trope of a touched body eliciting song. Bookended by discussions of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy and Guillaume de Machaut’s Remede de Fortune, it also surveys occurrences of the trope in late antique and early medieval prosimetra and in troubadour songs. Observing that in these texts, touch is experienced as epiphanic, Kay explores the paradox that touch causes song while mostly being the touch of an abstraction (e.g., Philosophy, Love) and therefore bridging the sensory with the intelligible. The second chapter makes two claims about the trope of light. 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引用次数: 0

Abstract

Reviewed by: Medieval Song from Aristotle to Opera by Sarah Kay Johannes Junge Ruhland Sarah Kay, Medieval Song from Aristotle to Opera (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2022), xix + 270 pp., 38 ills., with companion website by Christopher Preston Thompson. Prompted by “colleagues in musicology who protested at the absence of any discussion of music in [Sarah Kay’s] earlier work on sung texts” (xi), Medieval Song from Aristotle to Opera revolves around an ontological question: what is song in the European Middle Ages? Sidestepping the common assumption that song is “the conjunction of words and music” (3), Kay instead focuses on “the act of singing, and the quality of being singable” (2). Positioning herself in the transdisciplinary field of sound studies, Kay places voice at the center of her discussion, at once relating song to the production of human speech and characterizing it as a phenomenon occurring in the wider cosmos (9). Medieval Song provides at least three answers to her ontological question. In its broadest sense, medieval song is the result of touch, light, breath, inspiration, and imagination. In the context of song largely mediated by manuscripts and opera, it is eminently multisensory, and lends itself to what Kay dubs “operatic reading,” a form of attention that grants song the status of sound, performance, and vision. And because no performance exhausts what can be heard in a song, song is essentially anachronic, lingering beyond its time of production and performance. The book’s corpus ranges from Aristotle to opera (including an opera created in 2019) and puts late antique, early medieval, scholastic, and contemporary theoretical writings in conversation with troubadour and trouvère poems, narrative dits, bestiaries, manuscripts, and operas. Kay offers an encyclopedic yet concise sum that complements existing scholarship on medieval song in musicology and literary studies (examples include Ardis Butterfield, Marisa Galvez, Elizabeth Leach, and Judith Peraino). The convergence of operatic reading with work by other scholars (Emma Dillon’s The Sense of Sound [2012] and Bissera Pent-cheva’s AudioVision in the Middle Ages [2023]), suggests how promising operatic reading is for medieval studies writ large. Essential to the book’s documentation and argumentation is a companion website curated by Christopher Preston Thompson (https://cornellpress.manifoldapp.org/projects/medieval-song), to which Kay regularly refers. It features (sometimes multiple) recordings of medieval songs by Thompson and the ensemble Concordian Dawn, texts, scores, and translations, as well as performance reflections by Thompson and Kay. For accessibility, videos are fully captioned. The book’s introduction provides three key parameters for the study to [End Page 240] follow. First, it justifies its definition of song as interconnected with the “wider universe” (9) by shifting attention from words to sound. Second, it develops the notion of operatic reading. Noting that many composers and librettists have engaged with medieval and especially troubadour song, Kay observes that “operatic works can … propose themselves as ways of reading texts” (15). Operatic reading, then, consists in “extending the notion of ‘performance’ to manuscript transmission” (7) by drawing on visual, melodic, and textual cues culled from manuscript openings to produce real or imagined renditions of song. Third, the introduction justifies the book’s pairing of sources such as The Marriage of Philology and Mercury with Occitan albas by characterizing song as essentially anachronic (“resistant to so-called chronological order” [6]) because it is inherently belated in the listener’s ear (7). The first chapter, “Between Touch and Thought,” centers on the trope of a touched body eliciting song. Bookended by discussions of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy and Guillaume de Machaut’s Remede de Fortune, it also surveys occurrences of the trope in late antique and early medieval prosimetra and in troubadour songs. Observing that in these texts, touch is experienced as epiphanic, Kay explores the paradox that touch causes song while mostly being the touch of an abstraction (e.g., Philosophy, Love) and therefore bridging the sensory with the intelligible. The second chapter makes two claims about the trope of light. Because light relates to celestial bodies, songs that thematize it depict a cosmology that links the cosmic with the individual, a theme to which Kay returns in chapters 3 and 4. Moreover...
《从亚里士多德到歌剧的中世纪之歌》莎拉·凯(Sarah Kay)
约翰内斯·琼格·鲁兰·萨拉·凯,《从亚里士多德到歌剧的中世纪之歌》(伊萨卡,纽约:康奈尔大学出版社,2022),19 + 270页,38卷。,其配套网站由克里斯托弗·普雷斯顿·汤普森(Christopher Preston Thompson)提供。“音乐学的同事们抗议在[Sarah Kay]早期关于歌唱文本的工作中没有任何关于音乐的讨论”(xi),《从亚里士多德到歌剧的中世纪之歌》围绕着一个本体论问题展开:在欧洲中世纪,什么是歌曲?回避这种常见的假设,即歌曲是“文字和音乐的结合”(3),凯而不是关注“唱歌的行为,质量可唱的”(2)。把自己定位在声音的跨学科的领域研究中,凯地方声音她讨论的中心,同时相关歌曲生产人类语言和描述这一现象发生在更广阔的宇宙(9)。中世纪的歌曲提供至少三个她的本体论问题的答案。从最广泛的意义上说,中世纪的歌曲是触摸、光线、呼吸、灵感和想象的结果。在以手稿和歌剧为媒介的歌曲背景下,它是显著的多感官,并适合于Kay所称的“歌剧阅读”,一种给予歌曲声音,表演和视觉地位的注意力形式。因为没有任何表演会耗尽歌曲中所能听到的内容,所以歌曲本质上是错时的,它超越了创作和表演的时间。这本书的语料库从亚里士多德到歌剧(包括2019年创作的一部歌剧),并将古代晚期、中世纪早期、学术和当代理论著作与游吟诗人和游吟诗人的诗歌、叙事诗、动物寓言、手稿和歌剧进行了对话。凯提供了一个百科全书式而简洁的总结,补充了音乐学和文学研究中中世纪歌曲的现有奖学金(例子包括阿迪斯·巴特菲尔德,玛丽莎·加尔维斯,伊丽莎白·里奇和朱迪思·佩莱诺)。歌剧阅读与其他学者的作品(艾玛·狄龙的《声音的感觉》[2012]和比塞拉·彭特切娃的《中世纪的视听》[2023])的融合表明,歌剧阅读对中世纪研究来说是多么有前途。这本书的文档和论证的关键是由克里斯托弗·普雷斯顿·汤普森策划的一个配套网站(https://cornellpress.manifoldapp.org/projects/medieval-song),凯经常提到这个网站。它的特色是(有时是多个)汤普森和协和黎明合奏团的中世纪歌曲录音,文本,乐谱和翻译,以及汤普森和凯的表演反思。为了方便使用,视频都配有完整的字幕。这本书的引言为接下来的研究提供了三个关键参数。首先,它通过将注意力从文字转移到声音,证明了它对歌曲的定义是与“更广阔的宇宙”相互联系的。其次,它发展了歌剧阅读的概念。注意到许多作曲家和词作者都参与了中世纪,特别是游吟诗人的歌曲,凯观察到“歌剧作品可以…提出自己作为阅读文本的方式”(15)。因此,歌剧阅读包括“将‘表演’的概念扩展到手稿传播”(7),通过从手稿开头提取视觉、旋律和文本线索,产生真实或想象的歌曲版本。第三,引言部分将《文献学与墨丘利的联姻》等文献与奥西塔阿尔巴斯相结合,通过将歌曲描述为本质上的时间错误(“抵制所谓的时间顺序”[6])来证明本书的合理性,因为它在听者的耳朵里本质上是迟来的(7)。第一章“在触摸与思想之间”以被触摸的身体引发歌曲的比喻为中心。书的结尾讨论了波伊提乌的《哲学的慰藉》和纪尧姆·德·马肖的《命运的救赎》,书中还调查了这一比喻在古代晚期和中世纪早期的prosimetra和游吟诗人歌曲中的出现。观察到在这些文本中,触摸是一种顿悟的体验,凯探索了触摸引起歌曲的悖论,而触摸主要是一种抽象的触摸(例如,哲学,爱),因此将感官与可理解的联系起来。第二章对光的比喻作了两点论述。因为光与天体有关,所以以它为主题的歌曲描绘了一种将宇宙与个人联系起来的宇宙学,凯在第三章和第四章中又回到了这个主题。此外……
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来源期刊
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期刊介绍: Comitatus: A Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies publishes articles by graduate students and recent PhDs in any field of medieval and Renaissance studies. The journal maintains a tradition of gathering work from across disciplines, with a special interest in articles that have an interdisciplinary or cross-cultural scope.
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