Medieval Song from Aristotle to Opera

Focusing on songs by the troubadours and trouvères from the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries, this book contends that song is not best analyzed as “words plus music” but rather as a distinctive way of sounding words. Rather than situating them in their immediate period, the book's author fruitfully listens for and traces crosscurrents between medieval French and Occitan songs and both earlier poetry and much later opera. Reflecting on a song's songlike quality—as, for example, the sound of light in the dawn sky, as breathed by beasts, as sirenlike in its perils—the book reimagines the diversity of songs from this period, which include inset lyrics in medieval French narratives and the works of Guillaume de Machaut, as works that are as much desired and imagined as they are actually sung and heard. The author understands song in terms of breath, the constellations, the animal soul, and life itself. The author's method used also draws inspiration from opera, especially those that inventively recreate medieval song, arguing for a perspective on the manuscripts that transmit medieval song as instances of multimedia, quasi-operatic performances.