Medieval Music and the Art of Memory

by Anna Maria Busse Berger

This bold challenge to conventional notions about medieval music disputes the assumption of pure literacy and replaces it with a more complex picture of a world in which literacy and orality interacted. Asking such fundamental questions as how singers managed to memorize such an enormous amount of music and how music composed in the mind rather than in writing affected musical style, Anna Maria Busse Berger explores the impact of the art of memory on the composition and transmission of medieval music. Her fresh, innovative study shows that although writing allowed composers to work out pieces in the mind, it did not make memorization redundant but allowed for new ways to commit material to memory.

Since some of the polyphonic music from the twelfth century and later was written down, scholars have long assumed that it was all composed and transmitted in written form. Our understanding of medieval music has been profoundly shaped by German philologists from the beginning of the last century who approached medieval music as if it were no different from music of the nineteenth century. But Medieval Music and the Art of Memory deftly demonstrates that the fact that a piece was written down does not necessarily mean that it was conceived and transmitted in writing. Busse Berger's new model, one that emphasizes the interplay of literate and oral composition and transmission, deepens and enriches current understandings of medieval music and opens the field for fresh interpretations.

Genres: Music, Nonfiction

304 pages, Hardcover

First published June 13, 2005

Reviews

[Manuel Lorite Arauzo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Muy interesante estudio acerca de los métodos compositivos de la música medieval. Las anteriores creencias acerca de la barrera entre la escritura y la transmisión oral se destruye para dar paso a una creación conjunta donde no existe un compositor, sino un cantante, un intérprete que crea junto a otros un nuevo repertorio basado en un legado musical. Obviamente muy técnico, aún hay cosas que se me escapan y se que cuando lo relea dentro de un par de años le sacaré mucho más jugo (el capítulo de motetes isorrítmicos, por ejemplo). Lectura muy recomendable.

[Silvio Curtis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Argues that medieval western Europeans used memorization techniques that scholars know about from other contexts to memorize huge numbers of musical formulae to use in singing or composing. It builds on some observations by the anthropologist Jack Goody how literacy changes literary practice in a culture where only a minority can read and write - it doesn't immediately lead to less memorization, but to more word-for-word memorization as opposed to recomposition in performance, along with more grammatical analysis. Berger's idea is that the same applies to medieval music. Some of the evidence comes from medieval textbooks and theoretical works on music, and some from the structure of the surviving music itself. Basically all of it is way over my head in terms of music theory. The first chapter is a partly hostile biography of a founding figure in musicology, which seemed to me should have been shorter.