Medieval Song from Aristotle to Opera

By Sarah Kay

Focusing on songs by the troubadours and trouvères from the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries, Medieval Song from Aristotle to Opera contends that song is not best analyzed as "words plus music" but rather as a distinctive way of sounding words. Rather than situating them in their immediate period, Sarah Kay fruitfully listens for and traces crosscurrents between medieval French and Occitan songs and both earlier poetry and much later opera. Reflecting on a song's songlike quality—as, for example, the sound of light in the dawn sky, as breathed by beasts, as sirenlike in its perils—Kay reimagines the diversity of songs from this period, which include inset lyrics in medieval French narratives and the works of Guillaume de Machaut, as works that are as much desired and imagined as they are actually sung and heard.

Kay understands song in terms of breath, the constellations, the animal soul, and life itself. Her method also draws inspiration from opera, especially those that inventively recreate medieval song, arguing for a perspective on the manuscripts that transmit medieval song as instances of multimedia, quasi-operatic performances.

Medieval Song from Aristotle to Opera features a companion website (cornellpress.manifoldapp.org/projects/medieval-song) hosting twenty-four audio or video recordings, realized by professional musicians specializing in early music, of pieces discussed in the book, together with performance scores, performance reflections, and translations of all recorded texts. These audiovisual materials represent an extension in practice of the research aims of the book—to better understand the sung dimension of medieval song.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Release date: Jul 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9781501763892

Sarah Kay

Sarah Kay experienced her faith in extraordinary and exotic ways in Africa and Europe as the child of missionary parents. Graduating from Wheaton College in 2002 with a degree in Cross-Cultural Communications, she fell in love with narratives and the power of story. Sarah Kay and her husband, Nate, live in Iowa with their dog, Angel.

Book preview

MEDIEVAL SONG FROM ARISTOTLE TO OPERA

SARAH KAY

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS

Ithaca and London

In memoriam SMD

CONTENTS

List of Figures and Tables

Acknowledgments

Note on the Companion Website

Contents of the Companion Website

Note on Abbreviations, Quotations, Translations, and Manuscript References

Introduction: Desiring Song—Sound, Anachrony, and Operatic Reading

1. Between Touch and Thought

2. Voice as Light

3. Breath of Beasts and the Ecologies of Inspiration

4. Animating Air

5. Sweeter than a Siren: Singing and the Balance of Enchantment

6. Imagining Hearing Song

Conclusion: Il trovatore and the Future of Medieval Song

Bibliography

Index

Cover

Title

Dedication

Contents

List of Figures and Tables

Acknowledgments

Note on the Companion Website

Contents of the Companion Website

Note on Abbreviations, Quotations, Translations, and Manuscript References

Introduction: Desiring Song—Sound, Anachrony, and Operatic Reading

1. Between Touch and Thought

2. Voice as Light

3. Breath of Beasts and the Ecologies of Inspiration

4. Animating Air

5. Sweeter than a Siren: Singing and the Balance of Enchantment

6. Imagining Hearing Song

Conclusion: Il trovatore and the Future of Medieval Song

Bibliography

Index

Copyright

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Cover

Title

Dedication

Contents

List of Figures and Tables

Acknowledgments

Note on the Companion Website

Contents of the Companion Website

Note on Abbreviations, Quotations, Translations, and Manuscript References

Start of Content

Conclusion: Il trovatore and the Future of Medieval Song

Bibliography

Index

Copyright

FIGURES AND TABLES

Figures

I.1 Operatic songbook page

I.2 Operatic facing page, Machaut, Remede de Fortune , rondeau

I.3 Operatic facing page, Machaut, Remede de Fortune , rondeau

1.1 Attica, Oropos, Temple of Amphiaraos

1.2 Machaut, Remede de Fortune , Hope’s touch

1.3 Machaut, Remede de Fortune , Hope’s touch

2.1 The alba of Fleury-sur-Loire, with neumes

2.2 Giraut de Bornelh, Reis glorios

3.1 Wind rose

3.2 Richard de Fournival, Bestiaire d’amours en vers , bestiary lion

3.3 Cicero, Aratea , Canis Major

3.4 Aratus Latinus , Sagittarius, Aquila, and Delphinus

3.5 A short treatise on the stars followed by a bestiary

3.6 Germanicus Caesar, Aratea , Leo breathing the wind

3.7 Aratus Latinus , Leo breathing the wind

3.8 Bas-de-page drawing of a lion resuscitating its cub

3.9 Bas-de-page drawing, perhaps of Love as a winged seraph

3.10 Abbo of Fleury, De figuratione signorum , Panthera and Ara

3.11 Nicole de Margival, Dit de la Panthere , initial bestiary image

3.12 Nicole de Margival, Dit de la Panthere , Amor explains the meaning of the Panther

3.13 Guillaume de Machaut, Dit dou Lyon , bestiary image

3.14 Guillaume de Machaut, Dit dou Lyon , the lion sings a chantepleure

4.1 Air

5.1 Bas-de-page sirens in Queen Mary Psalter

5.2 Bas-de-page sirens in Queen Mary Psalter

5.3 Arnaut Daniel, Si.m fos Amors, with bas-de-page siren

5.4 Arnaut Daniel, Si.m fos Amors

5.5 Guillaume le Clerc, Bestiaire , siren

5.6 Melody of Volez vous que je vous chant, together with the text of stanza 6

5.7 Motet De mes amours / L’autrier / Defors Compiegne (opening)

5.8 Text and music of motet De mes amours / L’autrier / Defors Compiegne

5.9 Machaut, Remede de Fortune , the narrator sleeps while Hope sings

6.1 Machaut, La Fonteinne amoureuse , the lady and Venus comfort the prince

6.2 Machaut, Prologue, Amors gives the poet his children

6.3 Machaut, Le Livre du Voir dit , the narrator adores Toute Belle’s portrait

6.4 Machaut, Le Livre du Voir dit , text and melody of the ballade Nés qu’on porroit les estoilles nombrer

6.5 Comparative pitch content of the opening line of Joye, plaisance and that of Nés qu’on porroit les estoilles nombrer

C.1 Deserto sulla terra from Verdi’s Il trovatore

Tables

2.1 The Muses assigned to the cosmic spheres in The Marriage of Philology and Mercury , 1.27–28

2.2 Order and content of the Muses’ hymns in the Scande caeli templa sequence, Marriage of Philology and Mercury , 2.117–126

2.3 Fulgentius’s glosses on the Muses’ names as the progress of an education, Mythologies , 1.15

2.4 Curriculum described by Peire de Corbian in his Thezaur

4.1 Order and meaning of the Muses in the Reims diagram

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The impetus for this project came from colleagues in musicology who protested at the absence of any discussion of music in my earlier work on sung texts, and then encouraged me as I inched toward addressing their concerns. I should like in particular to thank Sam Barrett, Susan Boynton, Mary Channen Caldwell, Larry Earp, Mark Everist, Elizabeth Leach, Evan McCarthy, Judith Peraino, and Anne Stone for their hospitable responses to my efforts. The form this book eventually took owes an equal debt to colleagues in literature and thought, and notably to Gaia Gubbini, Nicholas Hammond, Ruth Harvey, Timothy Mathews, François Noudelmann, and Simone Ventura. More people than I can name engaged generously with what is euphemistically called work in progress, but I would like especially to thank Simon Gaunt, Elizabeth Leach, and Stephen Dembski for their insightful comments on the chapters they were kind enough to read. The deaths of Stephen and Simon at different times as this book was being produced are much mourned. And I cannot overstate how much I owe to the students I have been fortunate enough to work with over the last decade of mulling this project, notably Terrence Cullen, Emily Kate Price, Maria Sanchez-Reyes, and Kate Travers.

The research for this book was enabled by New York University, which I thank for generous research funding, a stimulating fellowship at NYU Berlin, and ever gracious administrative support. NYU’s Center for the Humanities contributed significant funding toward making recordings for the website. I also want to thank the journals in which some of the material and ideas presented here first appeared. Some of chapter 4 was originally published in Circulating Air: Inspiration, Voice and Soul in Poetry and Song, Paragraph 41, no. 1 (2018): 10–25, while parts of chapter 5 appeared in Siren Enchantments, or, Reading Sound in Medieval Books, SubStance #152, 49, no. 2 (2020): 108–32, and Chant et enchantement dans l’œuvre de Guillaume de Machaut. Métamorphoses du risque et du désir, Revue des Langues Romanes 118, no. 2 (2014): 447–68. A number of colleagues generously allowed me to cite unpublished work: my thanks for this courtesy to Rachel Bowlby, Larry Earp, Gérard Gouiran, and Anne Stone. It has been a distinct pleasure to work again with Cornell University Press. Mahinder Kingra is an exemplary editor, and the readers he commissioned to report on my typescript went above and beyond to provide help and guidance. I thank them for engaging so constructively with the constitutive hybridity of this project, combining as it does a book on the sound of song by a nonmusician with a set of recordings by professional ones.

In this connection, my warmest thanks of all must go to Christopher Preston Thompson, who, when I approached him with tentative suggestions for recording performances of the songs I was writing about, generously embraced my proposal in the spirit of research and experimentation in which it was meant, and took it in directions I could not have foreseen. Since then he has become not only the lead performer but also the impresario and director of the companion website. To him I owe the privilege of thanking the musicians of the ensemble Concordian Dawn, of which he is the founder and artistic director; videographer Oliver Weston; visual artist Benjamin Thorpe; and, crucially, sound engineer Richard Price, whose work for us has been outstanding. Christopher also raised money to meet the performance fees of Concordian Dawn musicians from the JQW Fund and from Chamber Music America. Heartfelt thanks, finally, to Anne Stone for the advice and support she has so unstintingly given our collaboration.

NOTE ON THE COMPANION WEBSITE

Readers of this book are repeatedly referred to the companion website https://cornellpress.manifoldapp.org/projects/medieval-song, which hosts recordings of the songs discussed in this book, mainly audio but some video, together with complete texts and translations, performance scores, and chapter-by-chapter performance reflections. Readers are encouraged to consult these resources both as a complement to the book and as a freestanding exploration of its repertoire through the medium of performance.

Unlike the sites some music publishers include with their books, whose purpose is essentially illustrative, this website is intended as an extension in practice of the spirit of experimentation that guides the book; its purpose is to explore how the songs I am concerned with might sound in performance. The recordings were all made following discussions between me and professional musician Christopher Preston Thompson in light of arguments advanced in the book. Those arguments helped shape performance but were also shaped by it; we discuss some of these exchanges in a recorded conversation that serves as an introduction to the website (http://bit.ly/3HBtQ7z). In this same spirit of research and experimentation, we have sometimes included more than one recording of a song (see 1.3.1a for a variant performance of En amer for comparison with the same balladelle included in 1.3.1, and 5.1.1a and 5.1.1b for alternative performances of a motet by Philippe de Vitry).

CONTENTS OF THE COMPANION WEBSITE https://cornellpress.manifoldapp.org/projects/medieval-song

Artistic director of the site: Christopher Preston Thompson

Musicians of Concordian Dawn, Ensemble for Medieval Music:

Christopher Preston Thompson, director tenor and medieval harp

David Dickey countertenor and recorder

Michele Kennedy soprano

Clifton Massey countertenor

Andrew Padgett baritone

Niccolo Seligmann vielle

Karin Weston soprano

Unless otherwise indicated, all recordings are audio only.

0Introducing the website. A conversation between Sarah Kay and Christopher Preston Thompson (video)

1.1 Aimeric de Peguilhan, Qui sofrir s’en pogues (contrafact)

1.1.1 Recording Thompson (voice and medieval harp)

1.1.2 Text and translation Shepard and Chambers / Kay

1.1.3 Performance score Thompson

1.2 Aimeric de Peguilhan, En greu pantais m’a tengut longamen

1.2.1 Recording Thompson (voice), Seligmann

1.2.2 Text and translation Shepard and Chambers / Kay

1.2.3 Performance score Thompson

1.3 Machaut, Remede de Fortune 905–2892: song between touch and thought

1.3.1 Recording (video) Weston, Thompson (voice and medieval harp), Dickey (recorder), Seligmann

1.3.1 a Balladelle En amer Weston, Thompson (voice), Dickey, Seligmann (alternate recording of this song)

1.3.2 Text and translation Wimsatt and Kibler / Kay

1.3.3 Performance score Thompson

1.4 Performance reflections on chapter 1 Thompson

2.1 Boethius, Tunc me discussa, Consolation of Philosophy , 1 m. 3

2.1.1 Recording Thompson (voice)

2.1.2 Text and translation Büchner / Kay

2.1.3 Performance score Thompson, after Barrett and Bagby

2.2 Anon., alba of Fleury-sur-Loire, and

2.3 Giraut de Bornelh, Reis glorios, verays lums e clardatz

2.2.1/2.3.1 Recording (video) Fleury alba : Kennedy, Massey, Dickey (voice), Padgett, Thompson (medieval harp), Seligmann; followed by Reis glorios: Thompson (voice)

2.2.2 Fleury alba, text and translation Kay

2.2.3 Fleury alba, performance score Thompson

2.3.2 Reis glorios, text and translation Di Girolamo / Kay

2.3.3 Reis glorios, performance score Thompson

2.4 Peire de Corbian, Domna, dels angels regina (contrafact)

2.4.1 Recording Thompson (voice and medieval harp)

2.4.2 Text and translation Scheludko / Kay

2.4.3 Performance score Thompson

2.5 Performance reflections on chapter 2 Thompson

3.1 Rigaut de Berbezilh, Atressi com lo leos

3.1.1 Recording Thompson (voice)

3.1.2 Text and translation Várvarro / Kay

3.1.3 Performance score Thompson

3.2 Anon., Ensement com la panthere

3.2.1 Recording Thompson (voice and medieval harp)

3.2.2 Text and translation Gouiran / Kay

3.2.3 Performance score Thompson

3.3 Anon., chantepleure , En esmai et en confort

3.3.1 Recording Thompson (voice)

3.3.2 Text and translation Kay

3.3.3 Performance score Thompson

3.4 Performance reflections on chapter 3

4.1 Bernart Marti, Amar dei (contrafact)

4.1.1 Recording Padgett, Seligmann

4.1.2 Text and translation Kay, after Beggiato and Gaunt

4.1.3 Performance score Thompson

4.2 Bernart de Ventadorn, Can lo boschatges es floritz (contrafact)

4.2.1 Recording Massey, Seligmann, Thompson (medieval harp)

4.2.2 Text and translation Lazar / Kay

4.2.3 Performance score Thompson

4.3 Disputed attribution, Entre.l Taur e.l Doble Signe (contrafact)

4.3.1 Recording Padgett, Seligmann

4.3.2 Text and translation Poe / Kay

4.3.3 Performance score Thompson

4.4. Machaut, Lay de plour (Qui bien aimme)

4.4.1 Recording Weston, Seligmann

4.4.2 Text and translation Hœpffner / Kay

4.4.3 Performance score Thompson

4.5 Performance reflections on chapter 4 Thompson

5.1 Philippe de Vitry, motet In virtute nominum / Decens carmen edere / Clamor meus

5.1.1a Recording Kennedy, Massey, Dickey (voice), Thompson (voice)

5.1.1b Alternate recording Kennedy, Massey, Dickey (voice), Thompson (voice)

5.1.2 Text and translation Rigg, Rihmer, Zayaruznaya

5.1.3 Performance score Thompson, after Zayaruznaya

5.2 Anon., Volez vous que je vous chant?

5.2.1 Recording Kennedy, Massey, Padgett, Thompson (medieval harp), Dickey (recorder), Seligmann

5.2.2 Text and translation Rosenberg and Tischler / Kay

5.2.3 Performance score Thompson

5.3 Anon., motet De mes amours / L’autrier / Defors Compiegne

5.3.1 Recording Massey, Thompson (voice), Padgett

5.3.2 Text and translation Tischler / Kay

5.3.3 Performance score Tischler

5.4 Chant royal Joie, plaisance Weston, Thompson (harp), Dickey, Seligmann (audio extract from 1.3.1)

5.5 Performance reflections on chapter 5 Thompson

6.1 Marcabru, D’aisso laus Dieu (contrafact)

6.1.1 Recording Thompson (voice)

6.1.2 Text and translation Gaunt, Harvey, and Paterson / Kay

6.1.3 Performance score Thompson

6.2 Machaut, complainte Mes doulz amis, Voir dit , 1356–91

6.2.1 Recording Kennedy (intonation)

6.2.2 Text and translation Imbs and Cerquiglini-Toulet / Kay

6.3 Machaut, ballade Nés qu’on porroit les estoilles nombrer, Voir dit , 1626–46

6.3.1 Recording Kennedy, Dickey (voice), Massey

6.3.2 Text and translation Imbs and Cerquiglini-Toulet / Kay

6.3.3 Performance score Thompson

6.4 Performance reflections on chapter 6 Thompson

7Deserto sulla terra, Verdi, Il trovatore , Act 1 sc. 2

7.1 Recording Thompson (voice and medieval harp)

7.2 Text and translation ed. Lawton / Kay

7.3 Performance score Thompson, after Verdi, ed. Lawton

7.4 Performance reflections on conclusion Thompson

NOTE ON ABBREVIATIONS, QUOTATIONS, TRANSLATIONS, AND MANUSCRIPT REFERENCES

This book quotes materials from a wide variety of sources in several languages. Abbreviations are explained at the head of the bibliography. Quotations follow the spelling and punctuation of the edition(s) cited, except that I use capital letters only when required by syntax, have generally modified punctuation in line with modern US usage, and have occasionally revised it where I understand the text to mean something different from the editor(s). Only changes of this last kind are signaled in the notes. Since the majority of the song texts I discuss are provided in full on the companion website, they are quoted only selectively in the book. Translations are my own except where otherwise indicated. When using published translations, I have sometimes silently adjusted their punctuation or wording slightly in order to convey a meaning I think is more accurate; only significant departures from the translator’s choices are identified in the notes.

I sometimes refer to manuscripts by their shelfmarks but more often by their conventional sigla. Rather than detailing both sets of information exhaustively here, I refer readers to these online sites that are well maintained and have the advantage of giving direct access to scans of the entire manuscripts, when available.

For troubadour songbooks: Trobaretz: Occitan Manuscripts Online, created by Courtney Joseph Wells: https://trobaretz.wordpress.com/

For Machaut manuscripts: the website of the International Machaut Society: http://machautsociety.org/static_pages/manuscripts.html

For trouvère manuscripts, this permalink to the songbooks on ARLIMA links to further information on each manuscript, but not to facsimiles: https://arlima.net/no/4954

For other manuscripts than these, information is provided on first mention in the course of the book; for a list of those that feature in discussions or illustrations, see the entry manuscripts in the index.

Introduction

Desiring Song—Sound, Anachrony, and Operatic Reading

Song is performed, but even more, song is imagined, and song is desired. When Bernart de Ventadorn weighs the song he is actually singing against the love that inspires it, he finds it inadequate. The song he desires would be as superlative as his rapture—better, indeed, than any song he can actually imagine wanting:

My singing will never bring me honor in comparison with the great joy I have won, and so my song, although it is good, needs to be better; for just as the love that heals and improves me is supreme, so my verse should be supreme above all other song, desired or sung.

Ja mos chantars no m’er onors

encontra.l gran joi c’ai conques,

c’ades m’agr’ ops, si tot s’es bos,

mos chans fos melher que non es.

Aissi com es l’amors sobrana,

per que mos cors melhur’ e sana,

deuri’ esser sobras lo vers qu’eu fatz

sobre totz chans, e volgutz e chantatz.

(Bernart de Ventadorn, "Ja mos

chantars no m’er onors," 1–8)¹

Medieval song is also an object of imagination and desire for modern scholars, performers, and audiences, if for different reasons than for Bernart. Like all past sound it is wreathed in an aura of absence and thus of desirability; as Daniel Leech-Wilkinson puts it in a knock-out formulation, Almost everything we might wish to know about the sound of medieval music is lost to us.² Tantalizingly placed just out of earshot by treatises or forms of notation that imply performance but do not constitute it, and often altogether unrepresented in the written record, actual medieval singing is certainly elusive.³ Redoubling the efforts of musicology, the relatively new transdisciplinary field of sound studies has joined the quest for this obscure object of desire. Approaches to the study of medieval song have been reinvigorated through such fields as grammar, cosmology, and manuscript studies.⁴

This book has been enabled by this hospitable broadening of discourses around music and sound. Having no pretension to being either a practicing musician or a historical musicologist, I have proceeded in the belief that all song texts, whether or not they have notation, can tell us something about song. I mean by this not only the genre of the song but also what Bern-art de Ventadorn in the stanza quoted above calls li chantars or li chanz: the act of singing, and the quality of being singable that can be traced even in works that were never intended to be sung. In a series of exploratory chapters, I reflect on song, in this broad sense, as what arises between touch and thought, as the voice of the sky at dawn, as an expression of the animal soul, as the lure of a siren, and as a complex imaginary event. The repertoire on which I draw—the songs of the troubadours and trouvères, inset lyrics in romances and dits, and the works of Machaut—has long been recognized as a rich resource for understanding the nature of song in the Middle Ages and the possible sounds of its performance.⁵ My thinking has been greatly assisted by collaborating with a professional singer, Christopher Preston Thompson. Over many hours of conversation and rehearsal, we worked on ideas for performing the songs discussed in these chapters. Sound and video recordings of the resulting performances by him and members of his ensemble Concordian Dawn, along with other documentation, can be found on the companion website, for use as an integral part of this book and as an autonomous trove of material.

The song Bernart desires in his imagination would be an outpouring of sound and affect capable of expressing the extremity of his love. This book shares the troubadour’s quest for medieval song, imagined and desired. Composed in an intellectual rather than a poetic register, it pursues two questions in tandem. How can I, as a literary critic, write about the sound of song from outside the discipline(s) of music? And what might such writing be able to contribute to discussions about rediscovering the lost sounds of the past?

Lógos and Phōné

Writing outside music or musicology but within the broader ambit of sound studies is liberating insofar as it enables us to allow the possibility that song might not best—and certainly not only—be described as the conjunction of words and music. If singing were not written down using forms of notation that we have come to differentiate as verbal and musical, would we think of it as a twofold phenomenon, rather than as a particular (indeed, a singular) way of sounding a text? Phoneticians can describe singing using the same terminology as they use to describe the articulation of utterances that are not sung; singing words is, after all, a particular way of pronouncing them. All language makes sounds; what happens when one sings is that the rhythm and pitch of those sounds undergo certain systematic changes.⁶ Among the songs I shall be considering, three come from manuscripts with neumes rather than notes on stafflines, and this early form of notation, which blurs into other forms of textual markers like those indicating versification, insinuates movements of the voice that have as much in common with rhetoric as with music.⁷ In fact, verbal text and performed song were never more closely identified than in the Middle Ages, when they were regularly taught together under the heading of vox, voice.⁸ When Boethius discusses voice in his treatise on music, he distinguishes three ways in which the voice can sound: the singing voice, which jumps across pitch intervals, the relative monotone of speech, and an intermediate category of chant or declamation.⁹ For this influential theorist, then, song appears as one or more among several ways of sounding the voice. The formula motz e sons, words and sounds, used by several troubadours to describe their songs, implies, too, a focus on diction and how it sounds, and not on words and music, as it is often rendered. In light of these considerations, it seems reasonable to suppose that reading or performing songs (or works that contain songs) could range over many different kinds of vocalization, from the inner voicing of so-called silent reading, through speaking tones, and modes of declamation or intoning, in addition to the melodic lines more central to our category of music.¹⁰ In this spirit, the website accompanying this book includes a declaimed verse complainte (Mes doulz amis) from Machaut’s Livre du Voir dit, which, I argue in chapter 6, forms part of a sonic network with song even though it is not itself melodic.

Given the repertoire I work on, an approach defined by words-plus-music risks being overly restrictive. Songs, like other texts, reference sounds from any number of animate or inanimate sources that would not usually be described as words or as music, but that nevertheless contribute to their overall sonority, imagined or desired; and manuscript decor likewise often evokes sound worlds that are neither musical not textual in any conventional sense.¹¹ Indeed, many songs are transmitted in elaborate codices whose complex intersensorial makeup overflows the attempt to confine it in just the two channels of words and music, since their pages often conspicuously include visual display, while contact with their parchment multiplies awareness of touch as each reader feels—and sees—where other readers’ fingers have felt before. The sonic range of such manuscripts, moreover, often goes beyond what would typically be recognized as either words or music to include, for example, images of sound sources such as animals, bird, fountains, and mechanical contrivances.

As well as falling short, defining song as words-plus-music also risks over-reaching. One of its effects, notably, is to shore up the misconception that words have no sound until music gives them one, a view that should be vigorously resisted.¹² It also risks giving a false sense of security to the status of the word, even when words are sung. My interest in the sounds that texts make has been shaped by the experience of working in animal studies, which have long recognized language as a contested point of human exceptionalism and hence as a theoretical flashpoint. Historically, humans have defined themselves as the rational animal, that is, as the speaking animal. The question of the human appears quite differently when, for speaking, we substitute singing. Wielding the word, in the sense of the lógos, may be what grounds rationality, but we understand something entirely more open-ended by the singing animal. No longer exclusively human, the category now includes, at the least, songbirds. Even dogs, according to Isidore of Seville, are named for their singing, canis from canere.¹³

Not only does singing extend beyond the human, but human singing inevitably modifies, inhibits, or even annihilates the intelligibility of the word as lógos.¹⁴ In this way, it erodes from within, as it were, the definition of humans as the rational animal. In fact, this same process of erosion is triggered as soon as we focus attention on the sound as opposed to the meaning of a text, on voice and nothing more, as Mladen Dolar calls it.¹⁵ Once song is no longer defined as the conjunction of two disciplines, literature plus music, but as a manifestation of phōné, of a way in which voice can sound, it becomes necessary to talk about it in ways that go beyond the traditional confines of either discipline. Although I sometimes speak about the music of songs, it will be in cases where their sound is organized in specific ways that invite commentary, and not in the more abstract way the term would be understood by a musicus, or music theorist.

One of the consequences, then, of challenging the definition of song as words-and-music is the possibility that singing suspends rationality, and with it a narrow conception of humanity, prompting instead the question, How human is song ? The potential nonrationality of the singing animal is a thread that runs through this book, informing, for example, the discussion in chapter 1 of singing as the paradoxical conjunction of touch and thought, and of song’s association with animal breath and soul in chapters 3, 4, and 6, and with sirens in chapter 5.

Anachrony

My view of song as anachronic, that is, as resistant to so-called chronological order, complements the claim that singing exposes the lógos to being supplanted by a phōné that is desired and imagined as much as it is heard.

Anachrony is generally understood as the (intellectually reprehensible) transference back to an earlier time of something that is held to belong to a subsequent one.¹⁶ However, in this sense all hearing is anachronic, since an actual sound is only ever heard after the fact, in the second-order collision with the ear of the air displaced by an earlier blow: what is heard as a sound is the deferred effect of an earlier sounding. Similarly, although singing appears to be intensely of its moment, it is not confined by it but rather always potentially out of time with itself. Performance has its own multilayered temporality that relies on both recollected and anticipated recognition, processes set up and manipulated by all the medieval song forms encountered in this book, since all repeat melodic material either stanza by stanza, or from one recurrence to another of material such as a refrain. Then again, singing tends to be belated, because it posits itself as a reaction to, an imitation of, or a realization of a previous act of composition, recording, or singing. It also anticipates future transmission, realization, or composition, which in turn will seem belated. Imagination or desire are free to construct past or future soundings, which, since they are virtual rather than actual, permit many different temporal layers or indices to be simultaneously present, in such a way as both to activate temporal difference and deny the subordination of sound to any particular moment.

A consequence of this anachrony is that the actual soundtrack of song in performance does not exhaust what may be heard—in imagination or memory—with the inner ear. Extending the notion of performance to manuscript transmission makes it clearer that even without physical realization, songs on the page could be objects of interior, imaginative, or memorial enjoyment. In chapter 6 I propose how an experience of song that relies on imagination might be theorized in medieval faculty psychology. The inner senses, where the impacts of different external senses combine, are acknowledged in a number of works in which the medieval terminology of (mental) impression points to poets’ awareness of how to conceptualize the imaginative dimension of song.

My use of the word anachrony is indebted to Anachronic Renaissance, a study of late medieval and Renaissance painting by Alexander Nagel and Christopher Wood, where what is at stake is the tension between the artwork both as indefinitely substitutable and as the unique creation of a master. The outcome of this contradiction is that a painting is both of its time yet not determined by it; instead, it freely resonates across different times, exhibiting what the authors call its power to compel but not explain a folding of time over onto itself. The authors choose the terms anachrony, anachronic in preference to anachronism, anachronistic in order to distance themselves from the latter’s negative connotations. Anachronism, they say, implies that the chief value of an artwork is to serve as a marker of its times, whereas anachrony frees the work to be considered " as art."¹⁷

Despite the shades of art for art’s sake in this latter formulation, Nagel and Wood’s refusal to subordinate a visual artwork to a single precise historical moment, and their corresponding insistence on its multiform, anachronic realizations, offer interesting models for thinking about song. For just as paintings, as analyzed by these scholars, necessarily convey the belatedness of vision, in the same way when songs are sung, the work is late, first because it succeeds some reality that it re-presents, and then late again when that re-presentation is repeated for successive recipients.¹⁸

Another influential theorist of anachrony, Jacques Rancière, likewise repudiates the pejorative associations of the term anachronism as used by some historians. For Rancière, to condemn something as anachronistic may purport to respect the value of historical time, but in fact does the opposite: it is the symptom of a fallacious and widespread effort among historians to devise forms of history writing that sacrifice the properly historical dimension of time in favor of a historiography of the eternal, and so set out, in his words, to redeem eternity. Rancière distinguishes two principal strategies that, in his view, serve this disavowed aim of discarding temporality in favor of redemption. One is to reduce the flux of time to static periods (the Middle Ages, for example), each of which is understood to be internally