The Modern Invention of Medieval Music: Scholarship, Ideology, Performance(Musical Performance and Reception)

Medieval music has been made and remade over the past two hundred years. For the nineteenth century it was vocal, without instrumental accompaniment, but with barbarous harmony that no one could have wished to hear. For most of the twentieth century it was instrumentally accompanied, increasingly colourful and increasingly enjoyed. At the height of its popularity it sustained an industry of players and instrument makers, all engaged in recreating an apparently medieval performance practice. During the 1980s it became vocal once more, exchanging colour and contrast for cleanliness and beauty. But what happens to produce such radical changes of perspective? And what can we learn from them about the way we interact with the past? How much is really known about the way medieval music sounded? Or have modern beliefs been formed and sustained less by evidence than the personalities of scholars and performers, their ideologies and their musical tastes?

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgements; Introduction; 1. The invention of the voices-and-instruments hypothesis; 2. The re-invention of the a cappella hypothesis; 3. Hearing medieval harmonies; 4. Evidence, interpretation, power and persuasion; Conclusion; Notes; Bibliography; Index.

About the Author :
Daniel Leech-Wilkinson is a writer and broadcaster on medieval music. He is Reader in Historical Musicology at King's College, London and his previous books include studies and editions of the fourteenth-century poet and composer Guillaume de Machaut.

Review :
"This book is a good read for anyone who is interested in medieval music or has an interest in how history, particularly music history, is written and developed." Music Educators Journal "Part histoiography and part reception history, this meticulously researched volume reminds readers that no attempt to re-create the music of the past is likely to avoid doing sos through perspectives that are decidedly embedded in the present. Highly recommended." Choice "The Modern Invention of Medieval Music is n important book. It raises fundamental questions about the relation among music, performance, and historical writing. It belongs on the reading lists of every graduate course in musicological methods, and by extension in the hands of any musicologist interested in how and (more importantly) why we write about music. I cannot praise this book enough for its imagination, daring and elan. It is a book that hits us where we live." Current Musicology, Thomas Irvine