Sung Birds

Is birdsong music? The most frequent answer to this question in the Middle Ages was resoundingly "no." In Sung Birds, Elizabeth Eva Leach traces postmedieval uses of birdsong within Western musical culture. She first explains why such melodious sound was not music for medieval thinkers and then goes on to consider the ontology of music, the significance of comparisons between singers and birds, and the relationship between art and nature as enacted by the musical performance of late-medieval poetry. If birdsong was not music, how should we interpret the musical depiction of birdsong in human music-making? What does it tell us about the singers, their listeners, and the moral status of secular polyphony? Why was it the fourteenth century that saw the beginnings of this practice, continued to this day in the music of Messiaen and others?Leach explores medieval arguments about song, language, and rationality whose basic terms survive undiminished into the present. She considers not only lyrics that have their singers voice the songs or speech of birds but also those that represent other natural, nonmusical, sounds such as human cries or the barks of dogs. The dangerous sweetness of birdsong was invoked in discussions of musical ethics, which, because of the potential slippage between irrational beast and less rational woman in comparisons with rational human masculinity, depict women's singing as less than fully human. Leach's argument comes full circle with the advent of sound recording. This technological revolution-like its medieval equivalent, the invention of the music book-once again made the relationship between music and nature an acute preoccupation of Western culture.

"An interesting and encouraging intersection between the 'two cultures' of science and humanities is the emergence of books and conferences on whether or not the delightful songs of birds can be considered a form of music, situated as it is in a time of fascination with questions of animal consciousness with the realization that under sexual selection, animals make choices based on signals; and birdsongs are surely signals that appeal to other birds, but even to humans but wholly aesthetic reasons. There is a surge in interest among ethologists as well as musicians as to whether we can judge the often melodic and even haunting songs of some birds as musical. Thus, Elizabeth Eva Leach's book, Sung Birds: Music, Poetry, and Nature in the Later Middle Ages is a timely contribution, in addition to its welcome fresh look at an aural relationship that has existed between the natural world and humans that stretches back to the origins of the latter. It is clear that musical scholars, even in the later Middle Ages, have been taking the measure of birdsong in cognitive, anthropocentric terms. Music was composed and appreciated in terms of a mathematically precise order: intervals separating tones were defined within a ratio system that had its origins with the Pythagoreans (3:2 for fifths, etc.). This book will be attractive to an audience beyond its target of musicologists and historians. Anyone interested in the ways the natural world affects the artist, and those naturalists interested in birds, including birdwatchers (and listeners) as well as environmentalists who enjoy music, will be rewarded by reading this book.", "Despite the ubiquity of recorded music in contemporary society, according to Leach, music now possesses a rather watered-down existence as mere 'organized sound.' The medieval conception of music was much richer.... This is a fine book and is all the more useful for bringing the technical skills of the medieval musicologist to bear on issues important to any historian of medieval court life and the complex interplay between orality and literacy.", "Elizabeth Eva Leach's Sung Birds is a refreshing examination of the late medieval fascination with the intersection of human song, bird song, animal sounds, and the words of poetry. One of the most imaginative and accomplished scholars of music and literature writing today, Leach examines the question, 'what kind of thing is music?' Her analysis is interdisciplinary in the original sense, the work of a scholar who uses her secure base of musical knowledge to illuminate a range of other subjects from mythology (the song of Sirens) to technology (the lasting changes wrought by musical notation) to the poetry of Machaut and Chaucer. Sung Birds deserves an honored place among the best work of a talented group of younger scholars in medieval studies.", "Sung Birds is highly original and genuinely opens up a new way of reading (or hearing) much late-medieval vernacular lyric. It is representative of relatively new, potentially very exciting, directions in medieval musicology that involve reaching out to other disciplines and placing the study of music in a much broad theoretical and cultural context. Elizabeth Eva Leach covers a lot of ground and makes some complex arguments, pulling together a wide range of material in a way that is easy to follow.", "With this intriguing book, Elizabeth Eva Leach invites us into the world of musical theory and practice of the European Middle Ages, with a particular emphasis on fourteenth-century music. Her rigorous, wide-ranging study combines examination of key theoretical texts, analysis of music and songs, and discussion of the significance of all of this for musicology today. It is a beguiling read for anyone, and although readers with musical expertise will appreciate the central chapters of musical analysis most, anyone can keep up, as Leach is careful to explain terms.... This is a dense and rich book. A particular pleasure are the very attentive readings of both individual theoretical texts and musical pieces, uncovering layers of meaning, and always embedded in the wider cultural context, and to which I have not even attempted to do justice here. Mention should also be made of the many interesting illustrations, and the useful appendices that help us trace some of Leach's close readings. Clearly aimed at musicologists too, this book is in fact a fascinating and important read for anyone with an interest in the history of ideas."

Elizabeth Eva Leach is University Lecturer in Music at the Faculty of Music, University of Oxford and a Fellow of St Hugh's College.