leo treitler. with voice and pen coming to know medieval song and how it was made

[...]... of style history within a medieval genre in accordance with an ideological map of the world’s music in the Middle Ages—as egregious an instance of historiographic conditioning of historical discovery as can be found in the literature of this field This question about Coming to Know is as much the subject of this book as are the particular song traditions that are studied in its chapters and the central... welcome opportunity to revise them where that seemed necessary and to take account of other work in the field that has appeared since the initial publications There are references here and there in the literature to an ongoing ‘debate’ about topics discussed in this book that have to do mainly with aspects of the history of Latin chant, particularly its composition and transmission—oral tradition, improvisation,... them They can be sublimated with attention to some of the epistemological matters mentioned just above, and with a bit of linguistic archaeology Both are attempted in this book (see Chs 1 and 2 with respect to ‘improvisation’ and Ch 6, especially the introduction, with respect to ‘memory’) There is, however, one object of contention that has at least the appearance that it might be settled through... Iliad and the Odyssey to fighting ‘at close quarters’ (autoschedios; Blum elucidates ‘i.e with minimal opportunity to plan one’s moves before making them’) This concords with dictionary definitions of schediasma as whim or caprice and of schediazo as acting off-hand, giving free play, or pejoratively acting with insufficient care Translating these concepts with the word ‘improvisation’ presupposes its prior... our performance decisions Yet we shall never be able to know precisely what constituted long and short durations or fast and slow movement for St Gallen cantors and scribes, how these values related to one another, and how flexible they were in their symbiosis with ¹ The CD accompanying this book contains recordings of several medieval chants and songs, interpreted by various performers This note is... further by the history that the language and concepts of the historian’s present bear, history that is often not in the historian’s consciousness, and which may be alien to the historian’s, as well as to the historical object’s, present The history of language can in such stealthy reversal capture and imprison thought Must we resign ourselves to the distorting effects of that, yielding, with Nietzsche,... contact without which I could not have produced work of any merit in this field They are Helmut Hucke, the late Fritz Reckow, Hartmut Möller, and Andreas Haug in Germany; László Dobszay in Hungary; Wulf Arlt and Max Haas in Switzerland; Ritva Jacobsson, Gunilla Björkvall, and Gunilla Iversen in Sweden; Susan Rankin in England; the late Nino Pirrotta in the United States and Italy; Edward Nowacki and Charles... issued with The Union of Words and Music in Medieval Poetry, edited by Rebecca A Baltzer, Thomas Cable, and James I Wimsatt (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991), used with the permission of the University of Texas Press All four items are used with the permission of their original publishers The remaining tracks are original to this Compact Disc Benjamin Bagby supervised the recording of the new items... parallels with certain kinds of medieval performance models that are discussed in Chapter 6 have long been evident to me I thought I should share that impression But then, too, I decided to make explicit the exception I take to an attitude that runs just below the surface of some of the literature in the field, that emphasis on oral tradition and, even more, improvisation, is an offence to the dignity and. .. interpretations and, more directly, as conveyer of its meanings Both can seem so self-evident as to be redundant, but they need stating explicitly First, medieval song was a singer’s art, an art of belting out through mastery of melody and vocal skills the thoughts, sentiments, and images of scriptural prose and sacred and secular poetry Second, the composing and broadcasting of medieval song took place . class="bi x0 y0 w0 h1" alt="" With Voice and Pen This page intentionally left blank With Voice and Pen coming to know medieval song and how it was made } Leo Treitler 1 3 Great Clarendon Street,. acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Treitler, Leo, 1931– With voice and pen: coming to know medieval song and how it. of which it was composed? How was it transmitted and known to the people who sang it? How firmly did the notators mean just exactly what they wrote down? Did the notations serve them and the singers