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.
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