Book review. Daniel Leech-Wilkinson, 'The modern invention of medieval music: scholarship, ideology and performance'
Book review. Daniel Leech-Wilkinson, 'The modern invention of medieval music: scholarship, ideology and performance'
Anyone who has heard medieval music in live performance or on record in the last fifty years knows the sound that medieval music used to make: the joyful yowling of a mixed crew of instrumentalists, bowing, tooting, honking, and plucking, and-in the best performances-above it all, a single, ecstatic voice. Anyone who has listened to such music in the last twenty knows the sound it tends to make now: a blended and-again, in the best renditions- no-Iess-ecstatic combination of purely intoned a cappella voices. The former is now widely regarded to be “unhistorical”; it is a model that has been “superseded;’ thanks to “progress” in historical research. The Modern Invention of Medieval Music tells the story of how a music changed its sound because scholars re-thought its history and how a music changed its history because musicians re-thought its sound.
147-157
Irvine, Thomas
aab08974-17f8-4614-86be-e94e7b9cfe76
6 April 2004
Irvine, Thomas
aab08974-17f8-4614-86be-e94e7b9cfe76
Irvine, Thomas
(2004)
Book review. Daniel Leech-Wilkinson, 'The modern invention of medieval music: scholarship, ideology and performance'.
Current Musicology, 77, .
(doi:10.7916/cm.v0i77.5040).
Abstract
Anyone who has heard medieval music in live performance or on record in the last fifty years knows the sound that medieval music used to make: the joyful yowling of a mixed crew of instrumentalists, bowing, tooting, honking, and plucking, and-in the best performances-above it all, a single, ecstatic voice. Anyone who has listened to such music in the last twenty knows the sound it tends to make now: a blended and-again, in the best renditions- no-Iess-ecstatic combination of purely intoned a cappella voices. The former is now widely regarded to be “unhistorical”; it is a model that has been “superseded;’ thanks to “progress” in historical research. The Modern Invention of Medieval Music tells the story of how a music changed its sound because scholars re-thought its history and how a music changed its history because musicians re-thought its sound.
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Published date: 6 April 2004
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Irvine, T. (2004). Review of Daniel Leech-Wilkinson. 2002. The Modern Invention of Medieval Music: Scholarship, Ideology, Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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Local EPrints ID: 67350
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/67350
ISSN: 0011-3735
PURE UUID: 39c4956a-4d8f-40af-8f28-57512128b162
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Date deposited: 26 Aug 2009
Last modified: 13 Mar 2024 18:49
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