The Oxford Handbook of Music and Medievalism 9780190658441, 0190658444

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T h e Ox f o r d H a n d b o o k o f

M USIC A N D M E DI E VA L ISM

The Oxford Handbook of

MUSIC AND MEDIEVALISM Edited by

STEPHEN C. MEYER and

KIRSTEN YRI

1

1 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America. © Oxford University Press 2020 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. Library of Congress Control Number: 2019955815 ISBN 978–0–19–065844–1 1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2 Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America

Acknowledgments

This handbook began as an idea for a small collection of essays on medievalism in music. That it grew to include thirty-three essays is a testament not only to a growing field, but also to the confidence Oxford placed in us as editors. We wish to thank Oxford University Press, in particular, Editor in Chief Suzanne Ryan, and Assistant Editor Lauralee Yeary, for their stewardship, their continuous support and enthusiasm for the project. For the Handbook’s production, we are indebted to Lakshmanan Sethuraman and his team. Thanks also go to two Laurier students, Anthea Conway-White and Bridget Ramzy for their diligence with musical examples and citations. Finally, our deepest gratitude extends to the authors for their contributions, for their commitment to the project, and for their patience and cooperation during the editorial process. In developing this project and bringing it to completion, the editors have benefitted from the advice and insights of numerous friends, colleagues, and students. In addition to the contributors (many of whom provided valuable ideas about the shape of the handbook as a whole), we would like to thank Rebekah Ahrendt, Jenny Doctor, Sarah Fuller, Andreas Giger, Ashley Greathouse, Thomas Grey, Brian Hart, and Annette Kreutziger-Herr. We would also like to acknowledge the invaluable support that our families have given to us. We would especially like to thank our partners, Eileen Strempel and Andreas Kitzmann, for their loving encouragement.

Contents

Notes on Contributorsxi

Introduction1 Kirsten Yri and Stephen C. Meyer

SE C T ION 1   ROM A N T IC I Z I N G T H E M E DI E VA L : T H E L ON G I N G F OR T H E M I DDL E AG E S I N T H E N I N E T E E N T H C E N T U RY 1. Medievalisms in Early Nineteenth-Century German Musical Thought17 Laura K. T. Stokes 2. From Knight Errant to Family Man: Romantic Medievalism in Brahms’s Romanzen aus L. Tiecks Magelone, op. 33 (1865–1869) Marie Sumner Lott

38

3. Liszt’s Medievalist Modernism Balázs Mikusi

63

4. Soldiers and Censors: Verdi’s Medieval Imagination Liana Püschel

81

5. The Distant Past as Mirror and Metaphor: Portraying the Medieval in Historical French Grand Operas Diana R. Hallman

109

6. Medievalism and Regionalist Identity in Lalo’s Le Roi d’Ys135 Elinor Olin 7. Romantic Medievalist Nationalism in Schumann’s Genoveva, Then and Now Michael S. Richardson 8. Richard Wagner’s Medieval Visions Barbara Eichner

155 174

viii   contents

SE C T ION 2   P E R F OR M I N G T H E M I DDL E AG E S 9. “What England Has Done for a Thousand Years”: Medievalism in Christmas Lessons and Carols Services Jacob Sagrans 10. Medieval Folk in the Revivals of David Munrow Edward Breen

205 224

11. Re-sounding Carl Theodor Dreyer’s La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc247 Donald Greig

SE C T ION 3   M E DI E VA L I SM A N D C OM P O SI T IONA L P R AC T IC E I N T H E   T W E N T I E T H C E N T U RY 12. Medievalism and Antiromanticism in Carl Orff ’s Carmina Burana269 Kirsten Yri 13. Past Tense: Creative Medievalism in the Music of Margaret Lucy Wilkins Lisa Colton

301

14. Hucbald’s Fifths and Vaughan Williams’s Mass: The New Medieval in Britain between the Wars Deborah Heckert

327

15. The Return of Ars subtilior?: Rhythmic Complexity in the Chantilly Codex and in Selected Twentieth-Century Works Aleksandra Vojčić

340

16. Miserere: Arvo Pärt and the Medieval Present Laura Dolp

367

17. The Postmodern Troubadour Anne Stone

397

contents   ix

SE C T ION 4   R E I M AG I N I N G T H E M E DI E VA L   WOM A N 18. Tolling Bells and Otherworldly Voices: Joan of Arc’s Sonic World in the Early Twentieth Century Elizabeth Dister

423

19. Medievalism and Rued Langgaard’s Romantic Image of Queen Dagmar Nils Holger Petersen

449

20. Nature, Reason, and Light in Vision—Aus dem Leben der Hildegard von Bingen468 Jennifer Bain 21. Disciplining Guinevere: Courtly Love and the Arthurian Tradition from Henry Purcell to Donovan Leitch Gillian L. Gower

484

SE C T ION 5   E C HOE S OF T H E M I DDL E AG E S   I N   F OL K , RO C K , A N D M E TA L 22. Early Music and Popular Music: Medievalism, Nostalgia, and the Beatles Elizabeth Randell Upton

509

23. “Ramble On”: Medievalism as a Nostalgic Practice in Led Zeppelin’s Use of J. R. R. Tolkien  Caitlin Vaughn Carlos

530

24. A Gothic Romance: Neomedieval Echoes of Fin’amor in Gothic and Doom Metal Ross Hagen

547

25. Viking Metal Simon Trafford

564

26. Medievalism and Identity Construction in Pagan Folk Music Scott R. Troyer

586

x   contents

SE C T ION 6   M E DI E VA L I SM OF T H E S C R E E N 27. From the Music of the Ainur to the Music of the Voice-over: Music and Medievalism in The Lord of the Rings611 Stephen C. Meyer 28. Faith, Fear, Silence, and Music in Ingmar Bergman’s Medieval Vision of The Seventh Seal and The Virgin Spring636 Alexis Luko 29. Hope against Fate or Fata Morgana? Music and Mythopoiesis in Boorman’s Excalibur662 David Clem 30. The Many Musical Medievalisms of Disney John Haines 31. Evil Medieval: Chant and the New Dark Spirituality of Vietnam-Era Film in America James Deaville

690

709

32. Fantasy Medievalism and Screen Media James Cook

729

33. Gaming the Medievalist World in Harry Potter Karen M. Cook

750

Selected Bibliography Index

767 785

Notes on Contributors

Jennifer Bain is a professor of music and Associate Dean of Research for the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Dalhousie University. Named to the Royal Society of Canada’s College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists of , she has received numerous grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.Her publications focus on the reception and analysis of medieval music and the development of digital chant research tools and her book Hildegard of Bingen and Musical Reception: The Modern Revival of a Medieval Composer, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2015. Edward Breen is the coordinator of the music department at the City Literary Institute, London, and a regular contributor to Gramophone Magazine. He studies the early music revival of the 1960s and 1970s with an emphasis on musicians who worked with David Munrow. Caitlin Vaughn Carlos is a visiting assistant professor at the University of Redlands, where she teaches courses for music majors as well as general education courses. She is currently completing her PhD in musicology at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research focus is on nostalgia and pastoral imagery in British and American rock music of the early 1970s. She holds an MA in historical musicology from the University of Southern California and an MM in voice performance from the University of Redlands. David Clem teaches courses in music history and film music as an instructor of music history at the Greatbatch School of Music, Houghton College, in Houghton, New York. He has published on the role of music in filmic adaptations. His research interests include intersections between philosophy, cultural criticism, and musical multimedia. This includes taking hermeneutic approaches to analyzing film and opera and the study of preexisting music that is recontextualized in multimedia settings. Lisa Colton is a reader in musicology at the University of Huddersfield and the author of Angel Song: Medieval English Music in History (Routledge, 2017). Her research focuses on medieval music, on twentieth-century British composers, and on aspects of music, gender, and sexuality. Recent publications include a book chapter on medievalism in the soundtrack to The Wicker Man (Recomposing the Past: Early Music on Stage and Screen, Routledge, 2018) and a chapter on “Physical and Conceptual Boundaries in English Devotional Music, 1250–1500” (Devotional Interaction in Medieval Britain and Its Afterlives, Brill, 2018).

xii   notes on contributors James Cook is a lecturer in early music at the University of Edinburgh. He works on music of the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries and has written for journals such as Music & Letters and Early Music. He also investigates the representation of early music in film, television, and video games, most recently coediting Recomposing the Past: Representations of Early Music on Stage and Screen. Outside the university, James serves as membership secretary for the Society for Renaissance Studies and is a scholar in residence for the Binchois Consort. Karen M. Cook is assistant professor of music history at the Hartt School, the University of Hartford. She specializes in late medieval music theory and notation, with current book projects including a monograph on the development of ever-smaller rhythmic note values. She also focuses on the intersections of music and identity in media such as television and video games, with special regard to musical medievalism. Recent and forthcoming works appear in Studies in Medievalism, Music in the Role-Playing Game: Heroes & Harmonies, The Medieval Disability Sourcebook, and postmedieval. James Deaville  is a professor at the School for Studies in Art & Culture: Music at Carleton University. He has published in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, Journal of the Society for American Music, American Music, Journal of Musicological Research, and Music and Politics and has contributed to books published by Oxford, Cambridge, and Routledge, among others. He also edited Music in Television: Channels of Listening (Routledge, 2011) and coedited Music and the Broadcast Experience with Christina Baade (Oxford, 2016). He is currently coediting the Oxford Handbook of Music and Advertising and is working on a monograph about music in cinematic trailers. Elizabeth Dister received her PhD in music from Washington University in St. Louis in 2015. Her research focuses on French music and politics in the twentieth century, in particular on musical representations of Joan of Arc in the 1930s and 1940s. She works at Webster University’s Faculty Development Center, where she focuses on teaching and learning issues related to student engagement and motivation and creates programming for faculty on topics such as teaching and technology, engaged learning, and inclusive teaching. Laura Dolp  is an associate professor at Montclair State University. Her interdisciplinary research explores the historical agency of music as a site of human transformation, including music and spirituality, the interrelation of music and social spaces, mapping and musical practices, and the poetics of the natural world. She is the editor of Arvo Pärt’s White Light: Media, Culture, Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2017) and a coauthor for The Cambridge Companion to Arvo Pärt (2012) and Artistic Citizenship: Artistry, Social Responsibility, and Ethical Praxis (Oxford University Press, 2016). Her research also appears in 19th-Century Music and Journal of Musicological Research.

notes on contributors   xiii Barbara Eichner is a senior lecturer in music at Oxford Brookes University. Her work in nineteenth-century German music focuses on questions of nationalism, historicism, and identity; she is the author of History in Mighty Sounds: Musical Constructions of German National Identity, 1848–1914 (2012) as well as articles and chapters about the music of Richard Wagner. In her other research area, she investigates monastic music in the early modern era. Gillian L. Gower received her PhD from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 2016 and is currently Interim Program and Research Developer at the UCLA Center for the Study of Women. Her research mainly focuses on the intersections between power, gender, and sacred music in late medieval England, with a particular focus on queenship. She has also written about cultural depictions of British queens in postmedieval contexts, including popular music and music for stage and screen. Donald Greig  began his career as a lecturer in film studies before becoming a professional singer. Over the past thirty years, he has sung with numerous early music ensembles and is particularly associated with The Orlando Consort, of which he is a founding member, and The Tallis Scholars, with whom he sang for over twenty-five years. He has created several projects for The Orlando Consort, including a soundtrack of music from the lifetime of Joan of Arc to accompany screenings of Dreyer’s La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc. The project was the basis of his doctorate in music at the University of Nottingham where he is currently an Honorary Research Fellow. He has published articles in Screen and Early Music and has contributed chapters to various academic publications. Ross Hagen  is an assistant professor of music studies at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah. He holds a PhD and an MM in musicology from the University of Colorado at Boulder. Dr. Hagen’s research interests include black metal, music fan cultures, twentieth/twenty-first century avant-garde music, and music and ritual. He is a coeditor of the upcoming volume Medievalism and Metal Music Studies: Throwing Down the Gauntlet. In addition to his academic work, Dr. Hagen is an active composer and performer of electroacoustic music, and extreme metal. John Haines is a professor of music and medieval studies at the University of Toronto. He has published on early music and its modern reception in a variety of journals, both musicological—from Early Music History to Popular Music—and nonmusicological— from Scriptorium to The Sixteenth Century Journal. Recent books include Music in Films on the Middle Ages: Authenticity vs. Fantasy (Cambridge, 2014) and Chants du diable, chants du peuple: voyage en musique dans le Moyen Âge (Brepols, 2018). Diana R. Hallman is an associate professor at the University of Kentucky. She centers her musicological research in nineteenth-century French opera and cultural history, with a particular focus on French grand opera and the composer Fromental Halévy. She is the author of the book Opera, Liberalism, and Antisemitism in Nineteenth-Century

xiv   notes on contributors France: The Politics of Halévy’s La Juive (Cambridge, 2002, 2007), as well as articles in The Cambridge Companion to Grand Opera (2003), Music, Theater, and Cultural Transfer: Paris, 1830–1914 (2009), Le Concours du Prix de Rome de la musique (2011), Jewishness and the Arts (forthcoming, 2020), and Histoire de l’opéra français (2020). Current projects include a study of social-political representation in opéra comique of the July Monarchy and the preparation of a multi-authored edited collection to be titled America in the French Imaginary. Deborah Heckert teaches in the Department of Music at Stony Brook University. She is the author of Composing History: National Identities and the English Masque Revival, 1860–1925 and has essays in the volumes Elgar and His World and British Music and Modernism, 1995–1960. Her current research interests focus on British modernism in the early decades of the twentieth century, the role of history in the identity politics of the English musical renaissance, and the intersections between British music and the visual arts. Alexis Luko  is an associate professor of music in the School for Studies in Art and Culture and the College of the Humanities at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. She holds a PhD from McGill University and previously worked as a visiting professor at the Eastman School of Music and the College Music Department at the University of Rochester. She is a musicologist specializing in film music, opera, music of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, and early music analysis. Her book Sonatas, Screams, and Silence: Music and Sound in the Films of Ingmar Bergman was published in 2016 by Routledge. Stephen C. Meyer holds a PhD from Stony Brook University and worked for many years in the Department of Art and Music Histories at Syracuse University. He is currently a professor of musicology at the College-Conservatory of Music of the University of Cincinnati. He is the author of Carl Maria von Weber and the Search for a German Opera (Indiana University Press, 2003) and Epic Sound: Music in Postwar Hollywood Biblical Films (Indiana University Press, 2014) and the editor of Music in Epic Film: Listening to Spectacle (Routledge, 2016). In addition, he has published articles in numerous scholarly journals, including the Journal of the American Musicological Society, 19th-Century Music, The Musical Quarterly, and the Cambridge Opera Journal. From 2014 until 2018, he also served as the editor in chief of the Journal of Music History Pedagogy. Balázs Mikusi holds a PhD from Cornell University and has been the head of music at National Széchényi Library in Budapest since 2009. He navigates a double career as a musicologist and music librarian. From 2016 to 2019 Mikusi served as both president of the Hungarian Musicological Society and Vice President of the International Association of Music Libraries. . He has published research articles in Nineteenth-Century Music, Eighteenth-Century Music, Journal of Musicological Research, Ad Parnassum, The Musical Times, Mozart Jahrbuch, and Haydn Studien and is at work on two monographs

notes on contributors   xv about the history of secular part songs in Germany ca. 1780–ca. 1815 and Joseph Haydn’s personal music collection, respectively. Elinor Olin is a member of the music history faculty at Northern Illinois University. Her research has focused on melodrama, nineteenth-century opera, and cultural nationalism in France. She has written articles for 19th-Century Music, The Journal of Musicological Research, MLA Notes, and publications of the Lyric Opera of Chicago. Dr. Olin led the Santa Fe Opera Seminars between 2014 and 2018, and is the founder of Opera Immersion Seminars. She has read papers at meetings of the American Musicological Society and the Musicological Society of Australia, and has been an invited speaker at international conferences at Oxford University and the University of Nottingham. She has presented workshops and lectures for the Lyric Opera of Chicago, Chicago Symphony, Grant Park Music Festival, and Ars Musica Chicago. Nils Holger Petersen  is an associate professor emeritus of church history at the University of Copenhagen, with a research focus on medieval liturgy, music and drama, and their receptions in the postmedieval world. He is the main editor for the book series Ritus et Artes: Traditions and Transformations (Brepols) and an area editor for music for the Encyclopedia of the Bible and Its Reception (De Gruyter, 2009–). He has been involved in many international research collaborations and was project leader for an international project on medieval saints and their cultural receptions under the European Science Foundation (2011–2014). Liana Püschel is a teaching assistant of musicology at Università degli studi di Torino, Humanities Faculty. Her research focuses on the relationship between music and literature in the works of composers of the late nineteenth century. In June 2017, she was awarded the prize Una vita nella musica, in the category Young Musicologist. Püschel is currently participating in an e-learning project on music and cinema at Università degli studi di Torino. Michael  S.  Richardson  is an assistant professor of musicology at the University of St. Thomas in Houston, Texas. He completed his PhD in music history and theory at Stony Brook University in 2016, and he received a DAAD grant to conduct dissertation research in Germany for the 2012–2013 academic year under the guidance of Annette Kreutziger-Herr. His research interests include late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German, French, and Russian opera, nineteenth-century European folklorism and nationalism, and medievalism and medieval music reception. His forthcoming monograph, Medievalism and Nationalism in Early Nineteenth-Century German Opera: Euryanthe to Lohengrin, will be published in 2020. Jacob Sagrans  is a musicologist and performer who specializes in the early music revival, sacred choral music, musical medievalism, and music and gender. He holds a PhD in musicology from McGill University, where he wrote his dissertation on “Early Music and the Choir of King’s College, Cambridge, 1958 to 2015.” He has taught at Boston conservatory at Berklee, McGill University, Tufts University, and Brown

xvi   notes on contributors University. He is also a member of Coro Allegro, Boston’s acclaimed LGBTQ+ and allied classical chorus. Laura K. T. Stokes is the performing arts librarian at Brown University, where she has also been a visiting lecturer in music. She holds a PhD in musicology from Indiana University: her dissertation is titled “Music and Cultural Politics during the Reign of Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia.” Her research focuses on music and politics, music for public ritual, performance history, publishing history, nineteenth-century medievalism, and women in music, as well as Fanny Hensel, Felix Mendelssohn, and Giacomo Meyerbeer. She is the author of Fanny Hensel: A Research and Information Guide (Routledge, 2019), and her essay on Felix Mendelssohn's Deutsche Liturgie will appear in Rethinking Mendelssohn (Oxford, forthcoming). Anne Stone is an associate professor of musicology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Her medieval research centers on song manuscripts, the cultural and intellectual history of music writing, and the, relationship of song to latemedieval poetic subjectivity and autobiography. Her twentieth-century research considers medievalism in the work of modernist composers. She is currently a member of the editorial team preparing a new edition of the complete works of Guillaume de Machaut and is writing a book provisionally called Reading Late Medieval Song. Marie Sumner Lott is an associate professor of music history at Georgia State University in Atlanta. She is the author of The Social Worlds of Nineteenth-Century Chamber Music: Composers, Consumers, Communities (University of Illinois Press, 2015). In addition to several essays in book-length collections published by Cambridge University Press, Orpheus Editions, and the University of Rochester Press, she has published articles and reviews on the music of Carl Czerny, Louise Farrenc, the Schumanns, and Johannes Brahms in peer-reviewed journals such as Ad Parnassum, the Journal of Musicological Research, and MLA Notes. Simon Trafford is a lecturer in medieval history at the Institute of Historical Research, University of London. His principal research interests lie in the history and archaeology of northwestern Europe in the early Middle Ages, but he is also interested in usage and appropriation of the medieval by popular culture from the nineteenth century to the present. He is convener of the University of London Interdisciplinary Seminar on Medievalism and has published widely on the representation of the Middle Ages in pop music, especially Viking metal. Scott R. Troyer is an independent scholar and administrator working the the Cincinnati area. His MM thesis, entitled “Layers of Meaning: Intertextuality in Early Anabaptist Song,” received the University of Cincinnati’s Distinguished Master’s Thesis award in the humanities category and was submitted to the 2018 Midwestern Association of Graduate Schools distinguished master’s thesis competition on behalf of the university. His primary research interests concern music–text relationships and musical references in the sixteenth century. In 2017, he worked as a musical analyst for the Citations: The

notes on contributors   xvii Renaissance Imitation Mass project creating a searchable online database of musical citations in the imitation mass repertoire. Elizabeth Randell Upton is an associate professor of musicology at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the author of Music and Performance in the Later Middle Ages (Palgrave, 2012), which identified and examined evidence about social context, performers, and the listening experience in fourteenth- and early fifteenth-century music by Du Fay and others. Her new book project explores the influence of popular music and folk music revivals of the 1950s and 1960s on the early music revival of the 1980s in the United Kingdom and the United States. Aleksandra Vojčić  is an associate professor of music theory at the University of Michigan and former faculty member at the Juilliard School. Her primary research interests are rhythm and meter, focusing on the music of the long twentieth century. Lectures and papers have been presented and published in the United Kingdom, Lithuania, Austria, and the United States. Abroad, her work has been published by the Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theater, Gesellschaft für Musiktheorie, Kunstuniversität Graz, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, and Cambridge University Press. In the United States, her articles have appeared in Perspectives of New Music, Theoria, and Current Musicology. She is currently working on a monograph titled Rhythmic Form: Structure and Process in 20th-Century Repertoire (under review at Oxford University Press). Kirsten Yri is an associate professor of musicology at Wilfrid Laurier University. She has maintained an interest in medievalism since her dissertation, “Medieval Uncloistered: Uses of Medieval Music in Late Twentieth-Century Culture.” She has published a series of articles on the medieval music revival in Early Music, American Music, Women and Music, and A Companion to Guillaume de Machaut. Her articles on medievalism and rock music appear in Current Musicology, Intersections, Popular Music, and postmedieval. She is currently writing a monograph on the musical aesthetic of parody in works by Carl Orff.

I n troduction Kirsten Yri and Stephen c. Meyer

Medievalism—broadly construed as retrospective immersion in the images, sounds, narratives, and ideologies of the European Middle Ages—has left a powerful mark in both art music and popular music culture of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Although scholars across the humanities have been studying this phenomenon in art, film, theater, literature, and historiography and there is now an impressive bibliography of works on the subject, musicology has been slower to participate in this scholarly endeavor. One explanation is that musicology has tended to organize itself chronologically and geographically, producing a disciplinary environment in which the medievalism of Wagner’s Lohengrin (for example) is disconnected from the study of medieval chant or medievalism in Arvo Pärt’s Miserere. The fact that the various musical genres in which medievalism is manifest (e.g., rock, fantasy film, video games, nineteenthcentury opera, mid-century twentieth-century modernist works) each have their own specialized technical, musical, and theoretical knowledge makes dialogue and intellectual exchange even more difficult. This handbook provides a snapshot of the growing field of music and medievalism. Its contents develop new critical insights that venture outside chronological and geographical boundaries and provide a capstone and point of departure for future scholarship on music and medievalism. The publication of this handbook is motivated in part by the rapid growth in the scholarly study of medievalism over the past several decades. No publication has contributed more to this growth than Studies in Medievalism, the annual journal that has recently published its twenty-seventh volume. Each issue of this journal—as many readers of this handbook will know—is given its own distinct title; the first two volumes, for example, were devoted to “Medievalism in England” and “Medievalism in America,” respectively. Although every emerging academic field must to some degree stake out its own distinct corner of the academic landscape, the fact that four of the twenty-seven volumes of Studies in Medievalism bear titles that reference questions of definition testifies to the special importance that this topic has had in the field.1 Medievalism, we might say, is inherently self-reflective, informed by questions of self-identity that supply much of its intellectual energy.

2   Introduction One of the most important of these questions concerns the distinction between medievalism and medieval studies and the extent to which such a distinction is possible and/or desirable. It would seem that the difference between the two terms has to do with both form and intentionality. Medieval studies is essentially an academic term and finds its most natural expression in books and articles that are dedicated to establishing historical knowledge about the “real” Middle Ages. Medievalism, by contrast, seems to encompass a much broader range of cultural forms, including not only written materials, but also buildings, paintings, set designs, and music. In this regard, medievalism could be viewed as a cultural phenomenon or style, with its medieval cultural forms classified as medievalist. With regard to literary works, the distinction between these two classifications appears at first to be relatively clear. The philological efforts of J. R. R. Tolkien and other scholars to establish the authoritative text of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, on the one hand, would be an example of medieval studies. Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s fantasy reimagination of medieval England in his 1848 historical novel Harold, the Last of the Saxons, on the other hand, belongs clearly in the category of medievalism. Beginning in the postwar period and accelerating through the 1980s and 1990s, however, scholars of medieval studies began to recognize that positivist scholarship on the Middle Ages was inevitably informed by the political, nationalist, religious agendas or the subjective experiences of those doing the inquiries. The acceptance of medievalism as an academic discipline thus acknowledges multiple discourses of the Middle Ages, various histories, if you will, going so far as to understand its recovery as one embroiled as much in contextual modes as in scientific methods. Thus, scholars began to see that the academic discipline of medieval studies overlapped in large part with the more “fictional” versions of the Middle Ages against which they were distinguished. The sections on the medieval period in Michelet’s Histoire de France—to take a concrete example— could be viewed as an example of medieval studies since they were grounded in the “scientific” methodologies of source studies.2 But Michelet’s account is so powerfully shaped by ideology that it approaches the form and tone of a novel, suggesting that the medieval sections of the Histoire de France should be more properly categorized as examples of medievalism. Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe (to take an opposing example) engages in medievalism. And yet, although nearly all the characters in Scott’s novel are imaginary, his work reveals a deep and rich understanding of late twelfth-century England; a case could be made that Ivanhoe (or at least certain sections of it) approaches a form of medieval studies. What makes the discussion of the divide between medieval studies and medievalism more complicated in the discipline of musicology and music history particularly is the fact that, especially for music written prior to 1200, little is definitive in terms of providing a record of medieval sound. The notational systems used in the Middle Ages lack basic information concerning instruments, scope of ensemble, and sometimes even melodic shape, harmony, rhythm, or meter. Although musicians from the nineteenth century (the period with which our handbook begins) had some access to musical materials from the Middle Ages, few could read medieval musical notation or understand

Introduction   3 the concepts contained in medieval musical treatises. Especially during this period, the realization of medieval music was always at least to some extent a work of fantasy. The semantic ambiguity of musical notation stands in marked contrast to the status of medieval literature. Although there will always be gaps in context, meaning, and/or linguistic use, literary texts from the Middle Ages can offer significantly more information to later periods than their musical counterparts. The recovery and performance of medieval music—to put this in terms of the dichotomies that we are discussing here— has never fit completely securely under the aegis of medieval studies. The work of the Benedictine monks of Solesmes provides an instructive example of  this insecurity. Their efforts to recover the music of the early church were surely informed by a desire to establish authentic historical knowledge about Gregorian chant, and in this sense we might subsume it under the category of medieval studies. But as Katherine Bergeron and others have pointed out, the work of the monks also reflected the political and ideological tensions of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.3 Like A. W. Pugin’s medievalist designs for the houses of Parliament, the typefaces of the Liber usualis represented a repurposing of medieval forms for use in the present: In this sense they are perfect examples of medievalism. The monks of Solesmes were hardly the only scholars interested in preserving and transmitting medieval music. Scholars and performing musicians from the nineteenth century to the present day have made enormous efforts to understand all aspects of medieval musical notation and to establish critical editions of musical texts: Many of these efforts were far more scientific than those employed at Solesmes. They have used information gleaned from literature and the visual arts in an effort to establish authentic performance practices of medieval music. As in literary studies and other fields, however, musicologists increasingly understood this recovery work as inextricably bound up with questions of contemporary ideology and aesthetics; in this sense, it functions simply as another form of medievalism. Questions about authenticity and intentionality also inform the distinction between neomedievalism and medievalism, a distinction that is central to much of the recent scholarship in this field. Even within the essays of this collection (let alone across the field more generally), the term is used in various ways and with varying degrees of centrality. Neomedievalist works might be understood as those which reference and reuse medievalist forms, not those of the Middle Ages themselves; in this sense we may regard neomedievalism as synonymous with two-storied medievalism.4 With its references to Beowulf and other works of medieval literature, to take one example, J. R. R. Tolkien’s legendarium can be understood as an example of medievalism. Role-playing games such as Dungeons & Dragons or Magic, by contrast, refer (albeit in a general way) back to Tolkien and earlier examples of medievalism. Largely unconcerned with the original medieval phenomena, they can be classified as examples of neomedievalism. As with the distinction between medieval studies and medievalism, however, that between medievalism and neomedievalism seems much less secure when it is applied to specific musical forms. As the contributions to this handbook attest, the very nature of the medieval music revival on recordings has resulted in significant points of contact between art music and musicians in the popular and film music industries. Here again,

4   Introduction questions of intentionality and form blur the boundaries between classifications. While many ensembles seek to faithfully reconstruct a medieval musical work or moment in medieval history, rock bands and film composers, who follow the different rules of their genres, frequently borrow, reinvent, or reinterpret medieval figures not necessarily to narrate the past, but to draw connections to the present. Looking beyond the high/low divide that is often erected to distinguish popular music and film music from medieval music or music in the academy, we may consider the medieval musical allusions in both popular culture and historically informed medieval music in terms of the medievalism/ neomedievalism divide. The Pagan bands that Scott Troyer discusses in his contribution to this volume, for example, often appropriate texts from the Middle Ages “directly,” and in this sense they function as examples of medievalism. The fact that they so frequently reference medievalist fantasies that have little or no grounding in historical texts, however, would lead us to classify them as neomedievalist. The 2009 Margarethe von Trotta film Vision—Aus dem Leben der Hildegard von Bingen that Jennifer Bain discusses in her contribution to this handbook provides another example of the fluid border between medievalism and neomedievalism. Based as it is on the biography of the most famous medieval female composer, the film references many concrete details from the real Middle Ages. The emergence of Hildegard as an iconic figure in the history of medieval music is very much indebted to the work of many scholars, and her compositions were a key part of the early music revival and the historically informed performance movement of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. But the film also builds on medievalist tropes concerning music, nature, and spirituality; in this sense it is as neomedievalist as other films that are less historically grounded. Indeed, a similar kind of classificatory ambiguity haunts other musical works and genres discussed in this handbook. As with the boundary between medieval studies and medievalism, therefore, that between medievalism and neomedievalism is difficult, if not impossible, to determine. The fluidity and the contested nature of these boundaries help to account for another distinctive characteristic of medievalism, namely, the number of taxonomies that the field has generated. One of the most influential of these taxonomies has been the list of “Ten Little Middle Ages” that Umberto Eco included as part of his 1973 essay, “Dreaming of the Middle Ages”; indeed, references to this work appear in many of the essays in this collection.5 Eco was primarily interested in the purposes for which medieval images and ideas were deployed in postmedieval texts; the categories of his taxonomy therefore articulate distinct rhetorical functions. The Middle Ages of “national identities,” for example (the sixth of Eco’s “Ten Little Middle Ages”), would include a diverse group of novels, paintings, quasi-academic collections of folk songs, and other materials that evoke the Middle Ages to buttress the sense of a distinct nationhood. In presenting this taxonomy, Eco is for the most part following an overtly deconstructionist agenda, setting up the “little Middle Ages” to expose their artificiality. His eighth category—“of philological construction”—stands in opposition to the rest by insisting on a kind of authority, a truth against which to compare the remaining nine Middle Ages. Herein lies the largest shift in medievalism since the 1990s: Authors (including contributors to this handbook) now use Eco’s taxonomy as a point of departure and recognize that the

Introduction   5 engagement with the Middle Ages may not always require historical accuracy. In those cases, it makes little sense to test its authenticity against authority. For the contributors to this handbook, Eco’s classificatory system has perhaps been less important than the fourfold taxonomy included by Annette Kreutziger-Herr in her entry “Medievalism” for Oxford Music Online.6 Building on the four models of medieval reception proposed by Francis Gentry and Ulrich Müller, Kreutziger-Herr identifies four forms of medievalism7: 1) productive, creative medievalism, in which topics, themes, forms, works of art, and individuals of the Middle Ages are formed into a new work of art; 2) reproductive medievalism, in which medieval works are reconstructed through musical performance or renovation (of a painting or a building) and perceived to be authentic; 3) scientific medievalism, in which authors, works, events, or facts are studied and explained with methodologies regarded as authentic within the diversity of medieval studies; 4) political and ideological medievalism, in which works, themes, ideas or persons are exploited for political reasons.8

If Eco’s taxonomy places the emphasis on the rhetorical function of medievalist works, Kreutziger-Herr’s classification moves this emphasis toward methodology. As she herself points out, the borders between the categories of her taxonomy are extraordinarily fluid. Individual works frequently partake of more than one type of medievalism, and different interpreters may classify the same work in different ways. Either of these taxonomies—or, indeed, another of our own invention—might conceivably have functioned as a means to organize this handbook. Instead, we have chosen to group the essays into sections on the basis of the historical periods, themes, or genres that they share. We begin the handbook with a section on nineteenth-century medievalist music and the ideological assumptions by which this music was informed. Our decision to begin with the music of the nineteenth century (and not that of some other period) needs explanation. If medievalism is most broadly understood as the postmedieval borrowing of medieval ideas, narratives, images, and sounds, then it might be said to have begun at the end of the Middle Ages themselves (whenever that might have been). By this definition, Dürer’s 1512 portrait of Charlemagne might be considered a medievalist work, as would Pierre Corneille’s 1653 drama Pertharite, roi des Lombards (loosely based on the history of a seventh-century Lombard king). Correspondingly, certain seventeenth- or eighteenth-century musical works, such as Handel’s 1725 opera Rodelinda, Regina de Langobardi (whose libretto was based on the Corneille drama just referenced), could also be regarded as medievalist. For the purposes of this handbook, however, we have chosen to exclude these earlier works and instead to begin with the nineteenth century. The early years of this century, as Richard Utz explains in his essay “Medievalitas Fugit: Medievalism and Temporality,” saw the emergence of a modern temporality—a sense of the Middle Ages as a distinct Other that could be investigated with new science-like methodologies.9 In this sense, questions about the chronological boundaries of medievalism are bound up with a second distinction of the self-referential questions that we articulated in the opening paragraphs of this introduction, concerning

6   Introduction the distinction between medievalism and medieval studies. The nineteenth century witnessed the beginnings of scholarly attempts to recover (or reconstruct) the historical materials of medieval music. As Laura K. T. Stokes shows, nineteenth-century medievalists worked to differentiate their scholarly enterprise from the more “fanciful” image of medievalism; the attempts of nineteenth-century historians and theorists to “reconstruct” medieval music mark a clear break with earlier forms of medievalism. In terms of our previous discussion, their work could be seen as an effort to bring the philological approaches of literary studies into the field of music. The scholarly scientific work of reconstruction functioned in a fascinating and complex dialogue with musical compositions intended in various ways to evoke or represent the medieval period. In part because “authentic” examples of actual medieval music were not yet widely available, references to the Middle Ages in these works tended to rely more on literary themes and other extramusical references. To use terms from Kreutziger-Herr’s taxonomy, then, we could say that the medievalism of the nineteenth century was largely creative. Although some composers were interested in using medieval melodies in their works, medieval references were far more likely to be produced by more general markers such as modal harmonies, melodic simplicity, rhythmic con­sist­ ency, and parallelisms. In this sense, the approach that Kreutziger-Herr calls scientific medievalism played a less important role in the nineteenth century than it did in the musical culture of later periods. This does not mean, however, that medievalism itself was unimportant: quite the contrary, in fact. Readers of this handbook hardly need to be reminded of the diverse ways in which nineteenth-century artists, architects, novelists, and poets embraced texts and images of the Middle Ages, from Tennyson’s Idylls of the King to the rebuilding of the Cologne Cathedral, from Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe to the paintings of the Pre-Raphaelites. Despite the relative paucity of authentic medieval musical texts, then, it is hardly surprising that nineteenth-century composers should also be interested in expressing the character of the Middle Ages and in using medievalist themes to further their aesthetic and ideological goals. Needless to say, these aesthetic and ideological goals were quite diverse. As was the case in the arts, many nineteenth-century composers were deeply invested in the legacy of the Middle Ages as an expression of national or regional identity, while for others, medievalism was bound up with nostalgia for a lost Catholic or imperial unity. Some engaged with medieval images as part of a romantic escape from modernity, while some used medieval themes or settings as a means of commenting on contemporary social or political structures. The essays in the first section of this handbook take up some of these complex “deployments” of the Middle Ages in the nineteenth century. As we might expect, many of these essays concern opera, arguably the most popular musical form of the nineteenth century and the one in which the connections to the other arts are most apparent. In their contributions to this handbook, Michael S. Richardson and Elinor Olin consider two works (Genoveva and Le Roi d’Ys, respectively) to reveal crucial and perhaps unexpected ways in which medievalism functioned in nineteenth-century opera. Diana R. Hallman takes up the vital role that medievalism played in French grand opera, while Liana Püschel and Barbara Eichner discuss different forms of

Introduction   7 medievalism in the works of Verdi and Wagner, respectively. In her contribution to this handbook, Marie Sumner Lott discusses the intersection between medievalism and bourgeois ideologies, while Balázs Mikusi considers the changing role that medievalism played in the works of Franz Liszt. Taken together, the essays of Section 1 testify to the remarkable breadth of medievalism in the musical culture of the nineteenth century, a period before the real music of the Middle Ages was widely known or understood. At first glance, the essays in Section 2 of this handbook seem to have little in common with those of the first. The topic of this section, “Performing the Middle Ages,” points to the revival and reconstruction of medieval music in the twentieth century. As performers and scholars of medieval music will already know, the first wave of the medieval music revival sparked a pursuit for authenticity that matched the professionalization of the discipline of medieval music within the academy. Painstaking theoretical and editorial work (what Kreutziger-Herr would characterize as scientific medievalism) was central both to performers and to academicians during this period, in which the pursuit of authenticity, that is, fidelity to the score, the performance tradition, and, of course, the intentions of the composer (insofar as these could be determined), was the paramount concern. A new stage in the development of these approaches was marked by the 1988 publication of Nicholas Kenyon’s symposium Authenticity and Early Music, some of whose contributors questioned whether such authenticity was even possible or, indeed, how valuable it was.10 Questions about performance practice—which paralleled and contributed to broader deconstructionist and poststructuralist trends in the academy—began to dominate musicological discourse on this topic. Richard Taruskin, for example, denied the possibility of historical performance as authentic reconstruction, suggesting that the attention to composer’s intentions and original instruments has obscured what is in fact a very modern practice.11 Daniel Leech-Wilkinson’s book, The Modern Invention of Medieval Music—which highlighted the inescapably modern interventions involved in restoring medieval music traditions—was also instrumental in shifting understandings of medieval performance.12 As Leech-Wilkinson showed, personality, culture, and taste were at least as important as concrete evidence in the reconstruction of medieval music. In this sense, the revival of medieval music may be as embedded in the ideologies of the producers as the romantic medievalism of the nineteenth century.13 The particular sound and aesthetic that King’s College developed for their Lessons and Carols services (discussed by Jacob Sagrans in his contribution to this handbook) provides a case example of the ways in which an ideological investment in historicism and English nationalism functioned in a purportedly medievalist setting. As Sagrans notes, the Lessons and Carols services built on the authority of medieval tradition to create a sense of identity, serving distinctly twentieth-century national agendas and suggesting modes of belonging defined by race, religion, and gender. The medievalism of these King’s College services is thus better classified as an example of what Kreutziger-Herr describes as reproductive medievalism. Although music historians and performers freely acknowledge the presentism of their engagement with the past, this acknowledgment has not resulted in a rejection of

8   Introduction historically informed performances; rather, it merely acknowledges that performances of medieval music can be free to serve contemporary, artistic, functional, and popular needs as well. As Edward Breen notes in his essay for this handbook, for example, David Munrow’s efforts to recreate medieval music clearly reflect the influence of the folk revival of the 1950s and 1960s. The medieval sound developed by David Munrow and others was, in turn, refracted onto the 1970s folk-rock genre and beyond. The revival of medieval music, in short, unfolded in a complex dialogue with twentieth-century forms and genres, even when (or especially when) the link to modernity was disavowed. The Orlando Consort’s score for Carl Theodor Dreyer’s silent film La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc, discussed by Donald Greig in his contribution to this handbook, can be understood in these terms, as an effort to combine historical awareness and creativity in order to “import” medieval music into a twentieth-century genre. The film is acclaimed for more than its historical reconstruction of the life and trial of the medieval figure—its creative and artistic vision, forged in the aesthetics of modernism, were also central to the film’s success. The consort’s soundtrack for the film—which integrates historically and regionally appropriate music into a contemporary artistic aesthetic—mirrors and reinforces this vision by creating a musical medievalism that both embraces and questions historical alterity. The enormous scholarly efforts to recover, edit, and interpret the music of the Middle Ages may not have solved questions about authentic performance practice; indeed, the end result of the “authenticity wars” of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s may have been simply to show us that authenticity is a chimerical goal. The influence of these scholarly efforts on twentieth-century composition, however, was undeniable. Carl Orff ’s choral works—to take one example—were informed, in part, by Rudolf von Ficker’s scholarship on Gothic polyphony, as well as the sound of organum as it was reconstructed at the end of the 1920s. Arvo Pärt’s tintinnabuli technique also shows some indebtedness to medieval sacred music and the sounds of early music. On a more general level, medieval concepts of rhythm—including but not limited to proportionality and isorhythmic ideas—influenced a wide range of composers, even while others were attracted to modal harmonies or certain aspects of the texture of medieval music. As composers became more informed by real medieval compositional techniques or musical practices, they found more diverse ways to engage with the idea of the Middle Ages. Section 3 of this handbook focuses on twentieth-century works created with these medievalist techniques in mind. The musical medievalism of works such as Carmina Burana and A Ceremony of Carols is reinforced by the incorporation of texts from the Middle Ages. But twentiethcentury musical medievalism is not always so overt. In some cases, composers who were attracted to particular aspects of medieval composition—for example, lack of harmonic direction or rhythmic modes—could incorporate these aspects into their own compositional idiom, mixing them seamlessly with “modern” compositional ideas so that they became an intrinsic part of the composer’s individual language. Works created in this manner do not necessarily purport to be medieval, but they do claim to be informed by real medieval compositional techniques or ideas. While certainly

Introduction   9 something of the medieval idiom might be said to remain and, indeed, even be audible in these cases, the nature of these medievalist references is transformed. In this sense, these works evince the self-reflective quality that we have identified as a more general feature of medievalism. In both a technical and a semantic sense, therefore, twentieth-century composers seemed to be referencing the Middle Ages in radically new ways, and the medievalist music of this period frequently sounds much different than that produced in the previous century. Indeed, as Kirsten Yri points out in her essay on Orff ’s Carmina Burana, twentieth-century composers could employ musical medievalism to counter the wellworn tradition of romanticism. But if the means by which twentieth-century composers incorporated the medieval into their works differed from those pursued by their counterparts in the previous period, their ideological goals remained in some cases quite similar. As Lisa Colton shows in her contribution, composer Margaret Lucy Wilkins’s exploration of medieval compositional techniques allowed her to distance her musical language from modernity. Ralph Vaughan Williams, whose Mass in G minor forms the subject of Deborah Heckert’s contribution, turned to the Middle Ages to articulate a sense of national identity. If the romantic critique of modernity was a central part of nineteenth-century medievalism, so too was the medievalism of composers such as Pärt and Tavener a means of countering the modernist enterprise to articulate a space for spirituality and reflection. In her essay, Laura Dolp provides a detailed account of this process as it unfolded in Pärt’s oeuvre. Aleksandra Vojčić and Anne Stone take somewhat different approaches to the topic of medievalism in twentieth-century compositional practices by focusing on the legacy of a specific medieval codex (in the case of Vojčić) and a specific medieval figure (in the case of Stone). In the music of the twentieth century, then, just as in that of the nineteenth century, medieval ideas and images were used for a diverse and even contradictory set of goals. The Middle Ages might answer the more general call for simplicity and directness, but they were just as often used in connection with modernist complexity. As many of the essays from this section show, the desire for a music of the future inevitably intersected with a yearning for the music of the past. This desire for a music of the future has been frequently bound up with the desire for social transformation, and in this sense, medievalism can be inherently ideological. The essays of Section 4 take up some of these ideological ramifications by focusing on four female figures: Hildegard of Bingen (in the essay by Jennifer Bain), Joan of Arc (in Elizabeth Dister’s contribution), Queen Dagmar (in the essay by Nils Holger Petersen), and the Lady of Courtly Love (in Gillian L. Gower’s contribution). These essays illustrate some of the diverse ways in which compensatory history, nationalism, romanticism, and feminist interests have impacted the way the Middle Ages and medieval women are reimagined in our culture. The connections between female figures, romanticism, and nationalism certainly play a role in the reception of music dedicated to Queen Dagmar and Joan of Arc, who offered inspiration and solace during the Nazi occupations of Denmark and France, respectively. The figure of Hildegard von Bingen—who is often constructed as a feminine mystic battling against the strictures of the Catholic

10   Introduction Church—takes on a more iconoclastic role. Viewed as an Enlightened figure, Hildegard is frequently understood as a scientific medical practitioner and healer, and her music is therefore aligned with the natural world. A very different image emerges with the figure of Guinevere, who takes on the guise of an idealized feminine consort at the same time that she embodies a threat to the dominant order. Taken