Reviews of Books

REVIEWS OF BOOKS

Music, Body, and Desire in Medieval Culture: Hildegard in der Neuzeit (Cologne and Weimar, 2003). Both of Bingen to Chaucer. By Bruce W. Holsinger. attempt to show medieval music—whether in pp. xviii + 472. Figurae: Reading Medieval sound or as a concept—as the result of complex Culture. (Stanford University Press, Stanford, strategies of interpretation and evaluation. 2001, $47.50/$17.95. ISBN 0847-3201-9/ Leech-Wilkinson’s book, through the analysis of -4058-5.) changing conceptions of medieval music as music, shows hermetic scholarship at work. Mine traces History is no less problematic and complex than back to the eighteenth century the sources and other objects of study such as nature, culture, or shapes of ideas that modernity has evolved society. In general, we never say or write pre- around and about medieval music, and excavates cisely what we would wish to. From data and concepts with extremely long duration, ranging facts—derived from Latin verbs revealing that from definitions of ‘the Gothic’ in architecture they are ‘given’ and ‘made’—discourse leads to and music, across artificial Minnesang in song frames of thought, to categories, with which we and on stage in the nineteenth century, to the aim to define them. The coherence we hope to founding fathers of musicology around 1900 in see realized in any flowing discourse is constantly Germany and France and their strategies of irritated, owing on the one hand to the sketchi- separation or adaptation of their subject, reaching ness and deficiency of the data, on the other into twentieth-century composition and reception, hand to the disparity of language and meaning. the whole process resulting in a music more No wonder that Clio, the muse of history, is invented than discovered. All three books are a poet. symptomatic of the scope and status of medieval Bruce W. Holsinger has, since the 1990s, lent studies in the new century. Nevertheless they an especially attentive ear to history, focusing on have different aims. Two of them are much the interpretation and re-examination of medieval closer in that they deconstruct prevalent concepts thought, especially with regard to medieval art and undermine authenticity as the phantom of and music. His study ‘The Flesh of the Voice: historic imagination, showing medieval studies to Embodiment and the Homoerotics of Devotion be a special form of medievalism; but Holsinger’s in the Music of Hildegard of Bingen (1098– book moves back in time methodologically and 1179)’ (Signs, 19 (1993), 92–125) was followed by tells the story as it really was—or, to borrow from his dissertation ‘Music, Body and Desire in the slogan of the Society for Creative Anachronism, Medieval Culture, 1150–1400: Hildegard of as it should have been. Bingen to Chaucer’ (Columbia University, In its focus on the flesh, carnality, and the 1996). In the same year appeared ‘Sodomy and body, Holsinger’s monograph mirrors the desires Resurrection: The Homoerotic Subject of the and interests of a postmodern age in medieval Divine Comedy’ (in Louise Fradenburg and souls. Even before diving into the book in more Carla Freccero (eds.), Premodern Sexualities (New detail it is clear that the topic is really reception York, 1996), 243–74). Three years after that aesthetics. It is perhaps appropriate to recall the ‘Langland’s Musical Reader: Liturgy, Law, and famous medievalist Robert Guiette who in his the Constraints of Performance’ was published in Questions de littérature, published between 1960 and the important Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 21 1972, criticized orthodox medieval studies and (1999), 99–141. And now we have Music, Body, fought for the alterity of medieval literature. and Desire in substantially revised book form. Alterity meant for Guiette historic distance (not Two lengthy studies appeared shortly after the Romantic distance of Novalis) and otherness Holsinger’s book, prepared over the same decade: in this ‘politically, socially and culturally Daniel Leech-Wilkinson’s The Modern Invention of strangely and exemplary closed epoch’. It is no Medieval Music: Scholarship, Ideology, Performance coincidence that Guiette, an extraordinary (Cambridge, 2002) and my study in the history scholar and philologist, could combine aesthetic of concepts of medieval music Ein Traum vom theory and poetic practice in his texts as well as Mittelalter: Die Wiederentdeckung mittelalterlicher Musik literary criticism, text editing, and theories on the

100 history of reading. For medieval studies, his of Notre Dame resonate with emotional devo- concepts are invaluable especially in regard to tion to his subject and use analogies to describe the poetry of trouvères and troubadours, but it is two-voice chant and alleluias through metaphors also evident that his concepts were made possible charged with symbolism. The art historians Otto by two intertwined facts: the basic experience of von Simson and Erwin Panofsky with their famous anti-Romantic poetry since Verlaine and Mallarmé studies not only helped to guide thought towards as well as Guiette’s own interest in writing a hieratic, symbolic, and miraculously strange poetry—he had himself belonged in the 1920s to Middle Ages, their monumental work helped at the literary avant-garde in Paris, along with the same time a disillusioned post-war period in Blaise Cendrars, Fernand Léger, and André Europe to build up the shimmering model of a Lhote. The aesthetic stimulus of the formal meaningful, sacred past which had sunk into poetry of the Middle Ages, along with the longing oblivion. So what one should be interested in first to experience it directly, through ‘the brushwood of all in Holsinger’s book is what kind of image of of philology’, emerges as the fruit of a special medieval culture he paints, what the basis of this convergence in reception history. image is, and what the scope of his writing—his Reading Holsinger’s lengthy and imaginative audience—might be. study we need to keep in mind that we belong in The book is arranged in four main parts (plus an age where body toning, sexual desires, and introduction) which themselves are subdivided surface are issues that many societies worldwide— again into two chapters, an arrangement that especially those in the West—focus upon, and incidentally copies the construction of one of the also that within the field of recent musicology most important books of theoretical writing attempts have been made to deconstruct models from the twentieth century, Michel Foucault’s and structure of history writing to pave the way The Order of Things, published in 1966 and a best- for a fresh outlook. These simultaneities seem to seller ever since. Foucault’s was a courageous mark a special convergence in the historiography but also a wise and modest book, which predicts of medieval culture. We find ourselves, at the that man, a subject formed by discourse as a res- beginning of the twenty-first century, about a ult of the arrangement of knowledge, will be hundred years away from the founding of medieval erased ‘like a face drawn in sand at the edge of studies in music—a reasonable distance from the sea’. which to evaluate the ‘work of the fathers’ (unfor- After an introduction Holsinger moves into tunately no mothers at that time). Are we going the subject of musical embodiments in Christian to follow their legacy of constructing new models Late Antiquity, to be followed by the chapter of thought or are we going to spend some time that will be most interesting and provocative for evaluating the set of dispositions forming the musicologists, ‘Liturgies of Desire’. In Part III he paradigm ‘medieval music’? The connection bet- analyses ‘Sounds of Suffering’ and speaks about ween constructivist and deconstructive, along the musical body in pain, as well as musical with the emergence of queer studies and new violence and the ideology of song, focusing on musicology in the last decades of the twentieth intersections of musicality and pain—as well as on century—all fresh and welcome approaches to the ambiguity of musical pleasure—and of pleasure subjects on which time has snowed not only and musical pain. This chapter concludes with white hairs but hardened methodologies, concepts, remarks on Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly and biases as well—is interesting, to say the least. Delights and its depiction of torture, giving insights But then who would wish the fathers to return but also displaying a fascination with the medieval after a hundred years of medieval studies, only morbid—as the cover of the book stresses. In Part with different coats and hats? IV, ‘Resoundings’, Holsinger analyses the Orphic In focusing now on Holsinger’s book and in myth and explores its musical embodiment attempting to read it properly one cannot help through time, delving into its reception history but be reminded of crucial moments in medieval from antiquity to the present. He closes his study studies within the twentieth century. While many with an epilogue, arguing for a musicology of struggled at the beginning with medieval literary empathy—a quality that one should ask for in all and musical sources, others used them to paint kinds of scholarship. an image of medieval culture in considerable Holsinger offers his monograph as an attempt detail. Johan Huizinga’s The Waning of the Middle to irritate generally accepted notions of medieval Ages was published in 1919 (in German in 1924) musical aesthetics as locating ‘the beauty of to shape scholars’ images of medieval culture, music and musical experience in number’; in describing the medieval world as a time full of other words, the interplay of numeric ratios imagery, a world of flesh and bone—yet sad and abstracted from sensual considerations (p. 5)— dying. Rudolf von Ficker’s studies of the school thereby, I suppose, helping scholarship to take

101 on emphatic character. In Holsinger’s view the amorous same-sex coupling of the two soloists many musicologists took the Platonist disdain for (p. 173). In a peculiar loop in his hermeneutic the ‘flesh’ so prominent in medieval thought and approach, Holsinger moves from his masterly inter- projected a theoretical divorce between music pretations of Leoninus’ homoerotically charged and the material, embodied world. It is in the last poetry to consider Notre Dame polyphony, for in chapter that Holsinger’s main scopus is revealed order to back up his interpretations of polyphony most clearly. He hopes to get ‘the dirt’, the stain of he refers to his own interpretation of the sources, human corporeality, which had been lamented which are to be interrogated and interpreted on by the Schola enchiriadis as an impediment to true different levels, as if the modern mind and the musical understanding and enlightenment, back medieval writer shared the same concepts in into musical practice, back into the discourse of thought. medieval music. The residue of intervening Judging by Holsinger’s publication history, it history, of historiography as well as music history, was with Hildegard of Bingen that he began, and layers of enmity to body culture, to its strange so special attention should be paid to his writing moves and acts, are peeled back to reveal music about her. The chapter ‘Sine Tactu Viri: The as a kind of cultural acting and to ‘forge new Musical Somatics of Hildegard of Bingen’ identifications with those whose musical remains focuses on her. Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179) we enliven and study, to invent new ways of was not just an important abbess and the founder merging and blending the musical cultures of of a convent, a mystic and visionary, the writer of our time with the musical cultures of the dead’ letters, theological tracts, and exegetical discourses, (p. 348—an echo of Christopher Page’s brilliant the author of numerous writings on medical and Discarding Images (Oxford, 1993)). scientific questions, a diplomat and counsellor of This is a valuable effort indeed, an attempt to high-ranking personages of her time, dubbed combine the legacy of Foucault with positivism in ‘the Sybil of the Rhine’ by her contemporaries the historic disciplines, working at understanding and calling herself ‘a note from the trombone of the narrative structure of historiography and God’; she was also one of the few medieval using the power of premisses and concepts women who composed music—songs, hymns, developed in the wake of Foucault and Hayden antiphons, etc., and her sacred morality play in White. But it is only an attempt, and in lacking dramatic verse Ordo virtutum. While indeed some empathy the author, who tries to hide behind the put her texts on the same level as the book of words throughout the book, appears to be sequences by Notker, the poems and treatises of present between the lines. To locate him, I pick Walter of Châtillon, the hymns of Peter Abelard, out the sections on music history in the twelfth and the sequences of Adam de St-Victor, her and thirteenth centuries and focus on two stock of monophonic settings known under the aspects: Hildegard of Bingen and the Notre title Symphonia harmonie celestium revelationum is Dame school. regarded as the most comprehensive work that In the second part of his study, in a chapter can be attributed to any person known by name entitled ‘Polyphones and Sodomites’, Holsinger in the twelfth century. writes about Leoninus and the Notre Dame In recent years Hildegard has been pushed to school. It may well have appeared too late for the front of public attention, mainly as a witness him, but it is a pity that he could not take account to contemporary ecological, esoteric, alternative of and comment upon Rudolf Flotzinger’s hotly trends, being also regarded as the originator of debated study Perotinus Musicus: Wegbereiter abend- an especially individual corpus of music—‘the ländischen Komponierens (Mainz and London, 2000), visionary, who is also an artist’. In countless which discusses possible biographies of Leoninus books her music is described as the product of a and Perotinus. Holsinger focuses mainly on the highly original thinker, turning her into ‘our’ intersection between diatribes against sodomy woman in the twelfth century and presenting among the clergy and those against polyphonic the missing link to a politically correct view of practice (or more specifically the singers of the Western music history. But legends more than polyphonic practice) and reveals in the medieval facts have painted this image as our source for a discourse an interesting vocabulary of inversion, twelfth-century compositional mentality—and effeminacy, excess, and ‘penetrability’, which he Holsinger does not clear up any of the legends suggests may be evidence of a metaphorical (another kind of ‘dirt’?), but rather adds new connection between the two in the interpretative ones. The historic legends range from her fame community of the thirteenth century. Piling up as a composer during her lifetime, over commis- one interpretative layer upon the other he arrives sions from cloisters in her neighbourhood, to a at the conclusion that the design of the vox special liturgy that she and her religious sisters organalis in the Magnus liber organi in fact represents performed on occasion. Allowing that there is

102 some truth here, it remains mysterious why her stresses the connection between ‘musical pleasure’, music did not enter the musical mainstream of ‘musical violence’, and ‘sacred history’ (p. 101). her time and is found in so few sources. Also His focus is Hildegard’s musical, literary, and the question of why the literary and musical scientific productivity—and he knows what he reception of her life and work faded relatively wants to find in the sources before he sees them. quickly awaits an answer. There is an imperial attitude of knowledge A babble of voices began to grow through the looking downwards on the subject of research, in 1980s and reached a peak at the time of the first this case an American man looking down on a large international and interdisciplinary confer- German woman, before attempting to sustain ence on the occasion of the 900th anniversary the otherness of the medieval Hildegard. In this of Hildegard’s birth in 1998 at Bingen, which regard Holsinger’s research has a well-defined turned most of the research on her on its head aim, though he describes ‘any attempt to interpret (see my report in Early Music, 27 (1999), 156–7). the contours of medieval monody (especially Many questions, especially regarding the specific sacred monody) as expressive’ (p. 108). This culture of her music, questions of authorship and statement is followed by a description of Hilde- style, of liturgical context and manuscripts, of gard’s sexual desire and of the female body in her melodic formulation and aesthetic evaluation, important treatise Causae et curae, relating it to the arose—questions asked, answers formulated, melodic design of her hymn Ave generosa, based on material presented and published, articles written, his own listening experience of it as having and all absent from Holsinger’s book. ‘sensuous, erotic, and fertile qualities’ (p. 115). It is a considerable weakness in what is otherwise Holsinger suggests an expression of erotic desire such an imaginative study that Holsinger does towards the Virgin Mary and Ecclesia, and since not take account of the mass of literature on he does not explicitly stress the subjectivity of his Hildegard of Bingen in languages other than interpretation he reveals himself as one of the English and seems to like only what he knows most traditionally minded positivists in town. already. It’s as if source readings could threaten a The female body’s openness and looks are fresh interpretation, as if a discourse with hard related to intervallic leaps and range in the science posing soft problems would result in soft above-mentioned hymn in order to find a femi- science with a hard problem. A new book by the nine presence (p. 107)—albeit stepping back from American-German musicologist Marianne his original 1993 interpretation, in which he Richert Pfau and the German musicologist found in this hymn ‘an active and restless desire Stefan Morent, entitled Hildegard von Bingen: Der for [its] subject, the Virgin Mary’. Implied here is Klang des Himmels, and inaugurating the first large an understanding of medieval interpretative series of women composer biographies (Cologne communities—the interplay of mysticism, and Weimar, 2005), offers an especially good Benedictine religious and spiritual life, the specific opportunity to open the discourse and to start design of Hildegard’s cloisters Disibodenberg debating what Rolf Meyer once called ‘the other and Rupertsberg. revelation’, a specific type of female mystic that is Holsinger relates anew the interpretation of so fascinating to many of us, Holsinger included. the virga that Wolfgang Scherer published in Holsinger relies in this chapter on Barbara his monograph Hildegard von Bingen: Musik und Newman’s studies in the ‘homoerotics of devo- Minnemystik (Freiburg im Breisgau, 1987). The tion’ (‘O feminea forma: God and Woman in the wordplay between ‘virgo’ (virgin) and ‘virga’ Works of St. Hildegard (1098–1179)’ (Ph.D. diss., (branch, rod) is at the centre of his interest, for it Yale University, 1981); ‘Hildegard von Bingen: connects the modes of desire expressed towards Visions and Validations’, Church History, 54 ‘virgo’ in Hildegard’s text to an eroticized virgo (1985), 163–75; Sister of Wisdom: St. Hildegard’s (p. 124). As Holsinger does not move on to interpret Theology of the Feminine (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and the virga—also the name for a neume prevalent London, 1987), and on Claudia Eliass, Die Frau in Hildegard’s monophony—he naturally con- ist die Quelle der Weisheit: Weibliches Selbstverständnis tinues to present the homoerotic connotations of in der Frauenmystik des 12. und 13. Jahrhunderts virga nonetheless, a word used as a euphemism (Pfaffenweiler, 1995), and in essence the argu- for the phallus since Cassiodorus. It is arguable ment in his interpretation of Hildegard is the that the Virgin Mary is not only venerated but same as in his reading of the Magnus liber organi: longed for in a sensual way—given the specific ‘sexual dissidence’ and homoeroticism. As the cult of the Virgin Mary in Europe since the chapter is for the most part repeated from his Middle Ages up to Lourdes, Pope John Paul II, 1993 study, which of course pre-dates the Bingen and Latin American spirituality—but Holsinger conference, he refers to female mystics of the leaves no room for the possibility of any form High Middle Ages in the same way as before and of desire other than the homoerotic, or the

103 possibility of something beyond, the possibility of missing the point’, Vita had said, as if to a child. ‘If a specific form of spirituality not shaped by you agree with my analysis, then you understand.’ twenty-first-century same-sex desires. It might ‘What if I understand but I don’t agree?’ ‘That’s have been fun to discuss with those interested in not possible.’ Is that what empathy is all about? research into early thirteenth-century music and After Foucault’s The Order of Things, and after a poetry the alleluia O virga mediatrix, which is to be decade of deconstructivist approaches to histori- found in the manuscript Österreichische cism in medieval studies, we should be able to Nationalbibliothek 1016 (fo. 118v) as well as the say that we understand but do not agree. That Rupertsberger Riesencodex. It appears also in a Music, Body, and Desire in Medieval Culture is an sequentiary from the early sixteenth century inspiring read—welcome in that it provides anyone (St. Gallen, Stiftsbibliothek 546, ed. Joachim Cuontz interested in the historiography of medieval von St. Gallen, dated 1507–14; German Hufnagel culture with much food for thought—is true as notation on five staves. See Frank Labhardt, Das well. It is also an example of a particular kind of Sequentiar Cod. 546 der Stiftsbibliothek von St. Gallen und hermeneutics and will be a subject of historio- seine Quellen (Publikationen der Schweizerischen graphical study as the twenty-first century moves musikforschenden Gesellschaft), 2 vols. (Berne, on, reflecting the specific coincidence of queer 1959–63). Hildegard’s alleluia is printed in studies, medieval studies, and the turning away Monumenta monodica medii aevi, vii–viii. 382.) In this from deconstructivism. Medieval studies would sixteenth-century version some melodic and be less colourful, less ‘pop’ without Bruce textual variants occur that appear like a kind of Holsinger—but more ‘medieval’, more ‘studied’, redaction, and the beginning of the text is given perhaps. The closedness of the interpretative as ‘O virgo mediatrix’—virgin instead of rod. So circle has not been opened. Thus very little new what does that mean for Holsinger’s argument? ground opens up, and we continue to construct Strengthening and weakening it at the same images for ourselves. In the words of Philip time? The discourse is open. The sources are Hensher (the epigraph to another recent book on well edited and accessible, and they do not bite. medievalism), ‘Whereof we cannot speak, thereof And there are studies that strike a balance we will go on guessing, I suppose’. between shaking off the dust of the past, being ANNETTE KREUTZIGER-HERR aware that scholarship is more about asking doi:10.1093/ml/gci005 questions than pushing for answers, and looking with curiosity into the Middle Ages and its legacy: one outstanding recent example is Giselle de Nie’s Word, Image and Experience: Dynamics of Pierre de la Rue and Musical Life at the Habsburg-Burgundian Miracle and Self-Perception in Sixth-Century Gaul Court. By Honey Meconi. pp. xxiii + 385. (Aldershot, 2003), which offers interesting method- (Oxford University Press, Oxford and New ological approaches to medieval culture. York, 2003, £75. ISBN 0-19-816554-4.) In a kind of morose interest in interpretation and in finding a meaningful approach to an epoch A little more than a decade ago, John Milsom that has disappeared, the image of a strangely reviewed a pair of then recently published vol- familiar Middle Ages appears. The tremendous umes of the masses by the prolific but often appeal of the Middle Ages in our time, of which neglected Renaissance composer Pierre de la the fascination with medieval music is only a Rue (see his review of Pierre de la Rue: Opera omnia, small, though prominent, part, reflects a yearning vols. 2–3, in Early Music, 21 (1993), 479–82). for meaning, for purpose, for guidance and Reflecting on the music he found there, rich in worth, for ‘the real stuff’, and this is Holsinger’s polyphonic interest and distinctive in its contra- topic: familiarization. He is a twenty-first-century puntal design, he wondered about La Rue and host inviting us into frames of thinking and living his art. By what aesthetic standards ought we to which are much more familiar to many than judge these works and the place they should hold bourgeois lifestyles today. This book is indeed of in the tapestry of Renaissance styles of the years the Zeitgeist, and one cannot help but be around 1500? In what ways is his music like (or reminded of James Hynes’s satire The Lecturer’s unlike) that of the equally prolific Josquin? What Tale, which relates the story of a seminar lunch of a connections can we trace between La Rue’s com- department of English literature in order to discuss positional choices and those of older composers a paper entitled ‘The Lesbian Phallus of Dorian such as Ockeghem? And what can we learn Gray’. The heated debate culminates in the about La Rue’s music from his enduring rela- exchange between Vita Deonne and her colleague tionship with the Habsburg-Burgundian court Nelson, who exclaims: ‘So I can only understand and its important musical scriptorium, headed by your argument if I don’t understand it?’ ‘You are Petrus Alamire, where so many of La Rue’s

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