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.
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