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

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...