Elizabeth Eva Leach
University of Oxford, Music, Faculty Member
- Guillaume de Machaut, Philosophy, Late Middle Ages, Music Theory, Early Music, Musicology, and 15 moreMusic, Intellectual History, Critical Theory, Cultural History, Digital Humanities, Music History, Troubadour and Trouvère Song, Medieval musicology, Medieval Literature, Medieval French Literature, Medieval Latin Literature, Medieval Music, Medieval Studies, Ars nova, and Medieval Music Theoryedit
- Medievalist. Feminist. I blog about my research at http://eeleach.wordpress.com, which also has a full list of public... moreMedievalist. Feminist. I blog about my research at http://eeleach.wordpress.com, which also has a full list of publication with many downloadable in full text pdfs.
Doctoral applications for subjects to work on music in the period c.1270-1400 are welcome. Read some of my work first to get a feel for the kind of approaches that I'm keen to foster.edit
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Anyone who has wondered at the tension between the seemingly clichéd language of medieval love song and its apparent expression of deep personal emotion will get much from Judith Peraino's new study, which 'attempts to make a... more
Anyone who has wondered at the tension between the seemingly clichéd language of medieval love song and its apparent expression of deep personal emotion will get much from Judith Peraino's new study, which 'attempts to make a contribution toward understanding musical self-expression in medieval love songs'(p. 4). Giving voice to love is a complex book, offering a valuable contribution to a part of musicology ripe for theorization along precisely the line that Peraino pursues. Taken as a whole, the book is deeply ...
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The two handsome red cloth-bound volumes of this publication will be an asset to the library collection of any university that is serious about the material and musical culture of fifteenth-century Europe. The fatter facsimile volume... more
The two handsome red cloth-bound volumes of this publication will be an asset to the library collection of any university that is serious about the material and musical culture of fifteenth-century Europe. The fatter facsimile volume gives a good sense of the source, whose pages it ...
This new collection of essaysmost derived from papers given at a conference in Liège in 1998takes as its central theme a composer whose received biography changed markedly during the second half of the 20th century. The documentary... more
This new collection of essaysmost derived from papers given at a conference in Liège in 1998takes as its central theme a composer whose received biography changed markedly during the second half of the 20th century. The documentary evidence still leaves a ...
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The two handsome red cloth-bound volumes of this publication will be an asset to the library collection of any university that is serious about the material and musical culture of fifteenth-century Europe. The fatter facsimile volume... more
The two handsome red cloth-bound volumes of this publication will be an asset to the library collection of any university that is serious about the material and musical culture of fifteenth-century Europe. The fatter facsimile volume gives a good sense of the source, whose pages it ...
Guillaume de Machaut. Le Livre dou Voir Dit (The Book of the True Poem). Edited by Daniel Leech-Wilkinson; translated by R. Barton Palmer. Garland Library of Medieval Literature 06A; Garland Reference Library of the Humanities 1732. New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1998. cxv + 769 pp. ISB...more
But here the problems start. In recent years Hildegard has been pushed to public attention, mainly as a medieval witness to modern ecological, esoteric or alternative trends, but also as the originator of an especially individual corpus... more
But here the problems start. In recent years Hildegard has been pushed to public attention, mainly as a medieval witness to modern ecological, esoteric or alternative trends, but also as the originator of an especially individual corpus of music–'the visionary who is also an artist'. In countless books her music is being described as the product of a highly original thinker, turning her into 'our'woman in the twelfth century and presenting her as the missing link between the past and a politically correct view of Western music history. But legends ...
CJO storage migration Due to a necessary storage migration, Cambridge Journals Online will be unavailable between 10: 00 am and 11: 00 pm BST,(09: 00 and 10: 00 am GMT) on the 9th September 2012. Microscopy Today and Materials360 Online... more
CJO storage migration Due to a necessary storage migration, Cambridge Journals Online will be unavailable between 10: 00 am and 11: 00 pm BST,(09: 00 and 10: 00 am GMT) on the 9th September 2012. Microscopy Today and Materials360 Online between 09: 00am and 01: 00pm. We apologise for any inconvenience this may cause.
When I was approached by Michael Tenzer and asked to contribute a chapter to a follow-up volume to his Analytical Studies in World Music I have to admit to being a little mystified.
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94 ology but all focused on the musical education and training of child singers in a range of ecclesiastical institutions. The editors' modest aim is to 'enrich our understanding of the important role (sometimes unfamiliar to modern... more
94 ology but all focused on the musical education and training of child singers in a range of ecclesiastical institutions. The editors' modest aim is to 'enrich our understanding of the important role (sometimes unfamiliar to modern musicians) that young singers have played in the history of Western music'(p. 18).
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This new collection of essays—most derived from papers given at a conference in Liège in 1998—takes as its central theme a composer whose received biography changed markedly during the second half of the 20th century. The documentary... more
This new collection of essays—most derived from papers given at a conference in Liège in 1998—takes as its central theme a composer whose received biography changed markedly during the second half of the 20th century. The documentary evidence still leaves a number of puzzling loose ends, explored further here in Philippe Vendrix's opening essay and in David Fallows's paper on Ciconia's late songs.
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This article examines a group of five ballades which stand at the very opening of those set to music in the Machaut manuscripts. The importance of manuscript order to arguments about chronology has led to the neglect of order's role in... more
This article examines a group of five ballades which stand at the very opening of those set to music in the Machaut manuscripts. The importance of manuscript order to arguments about chronology has led to the neglect of order's role in the construction of meaning. While they are ostensibly individual lyric items, Machaut's first five music ballades collectively outline a very cogent narrative, from the je-lover's declaration of love to his death from refusal. In parallel with such an amorous progress, there is a poetic and musical progress as the authorial persona of the poet-composer poses and solves problems of formal musical organization, ultimately narrating a parallel (and arguably equally fictive) story of the creation of the polyphonic ballade. The duplication of one of these five ballades within several of the central Machaut sources is viewed as an invitation to read parallels between the opening five ballades in the music section and the opening 11 ballades in the music-less lyric section, the Loange des dames. Between them, the openings of these sections explain the emotional and professional situation of a writer whose very success as a poet-composer almost requires his je's failure as a lover-protagonist.
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Middle Ages. Within its walls the teaching of music to young singers—in the earlier period, often child oblates—sought very deliberately to ally musical utterance with linguistic utterance, not least because 'grammatica et... more
Middle Ages. Within its walls the teaching of music to young singers—in the earlier period, often child oblates—sought very deliberately to ally musical utterance with linguistic utterance, not least because 'grammatica et cantus' represented the twin subjects of basic study and shared the same fundamental material: vox. Since the musical practice being taught was the liturgical song of the Christian Church, such a close linking was both proper and useful, tying the intoned performance of sacred texts to musica as a pedagogical ...
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Another response to Sarah Fuller
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Our modern experience of songs and singing, whether expert, amateur, or entirely uninformed and passive, is almost completely misleading when it comes to appreciating the singing of late-medieval lyric. My focus in this article is on... more
Our modern experience of songs and singing, whether expert, amateur, or entirely uninformed and passive, is almost completely misleading when it comes to appreciating the singing of late-medieval lyric. My focus in this article is on polyphonic songs that align several texts for simultaneous delivery—a somewhat special category of work. 1 However, the fact of music's indispensability for these pieces reflects the broader cultural use of music as a meaningful—and not just a pleasant—component of lyric performance. 2 My ...
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. One of the texts of Machaut's double balade, Quant Theseus/Ne quier (B34) is ascribed in Machaut's Voir dit to a certain Thomas Paien. The present article suggests that this Thomas was one of... more
. One of the texts of Machaut's double balade, Quant Theseus/Ne quier (B34) is ascribed in Machaut's Voir dit to a certain Thomas Paien. The present article suggests that this Thomas was one of Machaut's peers, being like him a canon of Reims and a court secretary. Figures with similar names (and the pervasive idea that a character cited in a work of fiction might not be a real person at all) have confused earlier attempts at identification. A possible occasion for the composition of B34's texts–also involving a balade on the same ...
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Johannes, the eleventh-century glossator of Guido of Arezzo, is the earliest of several theorists who indirectly associate the semitone with cross-dressing, using a Vergilian citation about Phrygian men. Taking this as a starting point,... more
Johannes, the eleventh-century glossator of Guido of Arezzo, is the earliest of several theorists who indirectly associate the semitone with cross-dressing, using a Vergilian citation about Phrygian men. Taking this as a starting point, this paper explores the gendered nature of sub-tonal intervals. The femininity of the semitone is initially a theoretical commonplace drawn from Greek antiquity, but in the context of medieval antifeminism on the one hand and the new placement and tuning of semitones afforded by the directed progression on the ...
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Abstract The anonymous rondeau Tres doulz regart is uniquely copied with musical notation in the early 15th-century manuscript I-Moe α. M. 5.24 (ModA). The two missing poetic lines of this16-line form can be supplied from its appearance... more
Abstract The anonymous rondeau Tres doulz regart is uniquely copied with musical notation in the early 15th-century manuscript I-Moe α. M. 5.24 (ModA). The two missing poetic lines of this16-line form can be supplied from its appearance in a late 14th-century dialogue-based treatise designed to improve the Anglo-French of English readers. The treatise, which specifically describes Tres doulz regart as being sung, can be found in no fewer than five manuscripts of English provenance from the later 14th and early 15th centuries. This ...
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Medieval music Literature Mass media Performing arts Literature.
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Esperance qui masseure (B13) and Je ne cuit pas quonques a creature (B14), copied adjacently in the music section of the Machaut manuscripts, are musically paired: Wulf Arlt has termed them" sister balades." 1... more
Esperance qui masseure (B13) and Je ne cuit pas quonques a creature (B14), copied adjacently in the music section of the Machaut manuscripts, are musically paired: Wulf Arlt has termed them" sister balades." 1 This pairing makes meaningful their many contrasts, in particular the very different musical and poetic functions of their refrains. Arlt's musico-textual approach will here be combined with Sylvia Huot's analysis of Machaut's book as a scribal-authorial collection in which manuscript order creates additional meanings. 2 One effect of ...
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Popular notions of value in art���even popular definitions of art itself���are much indebted to the idealist narratives of late romanticism and its maximalised form, elite modernism. Since artistic value is normally imputed to one side of... more
Popular notions of value in art���even popular definitions of art itself���are much indebted to the idealist narratives of late romanticism and its maximalised form, elite modernism. Since artistic value is normally imputed to one side of a dialectically related pair of oppositional terms, two principal strategies exist by which to ascribe value to the music you love, find interesting, or want to study: either show how it merits the positive term of the valorising pair (if necessary redefining the specific markers of that term), or attack the narrative ...
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Abstract The figure of the siren serves as a metaphor for human singing and musical femininity in a number of texts ranging from the sixth to the fourteenth centuries. Bird comparisons in general allowed medieval writers to signal a... more
Abstract The figure of the siren serves as a metaphor for human singing and musical femininity in a number of texts ranging from the sixth to the fourteenth centuries. Bird comparisons in general allowed medieval writers to signal a mismatch between positive musical features (attractive song, singer, and sound) and negative ethical features (the sin of sweetness as a form of gluttony or lechery), a dichotomy that seems to have been felt acutely in the later Middle Ages. References in John of Salisbury's Policraticus, bestiaries, music ...
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Machaut's balades//mest avis (hereafter B22) and Defortune (hereafter B23), adjacent in the music section of the Machaut manuscripts, form a diptych on the theme of Fortune. 1 In relation to each other, their poetic texts... more
Machaut's balades//mest avis (hereafter B22) and Defortune (hereafter B23), adjacent in the music section of the Machaut manuscripts, form a diptych on the theme of Fortune. 1 In relation to each other, their poetic texts offer complementary perspectives on the power of Fortune: B22 is static, detached in tone, a clerk commentating in a public sententious statement upon the political manifestations of Fortune; conversely, B23 is personal and dynamic, a spurned lady's personal testimony to the power of Fortune to change ...
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The Chantilly codex is a particularly important document of the influ-ence of Guillaume de Machaut as both poet and musician because it contains the only known copy of F. Andrieu's musical setting of two ballade texts by Eustache... more
The Chantilly codex is a particularly important document of the influ-ence of Guillaume de Machaut as both poet and musician because it contains the only known copy of F. Andrieu's musical setting of two ballade texts by Eustache Deschamps that celebrate Machaut's death. Taking this song as a point of departure, this essay will examine Machaut's wider fame and influence within the music of Ch against the backdrop of the increasing textualisation of fame and individualisation of posterity in fourteenth-century society. Although music's situation ...
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The cyclic cantus firmus Mass of the 15th century has been the centre of attention in musical scholarship on this period for almost as long as there has been musicology. 96 early music febraury 2011 in the context of the twin notions of... more
The cyclic cantus firmus Mass of the 15th century has been the centre of attention in musical scholarship on this period for almost as long as there has been musicology. 96 early music febraury 2011 in the context of the twin notions of an increased fear of purgatory and a heightened perception of Christ's 'Real Presence'in the consecrated elements of the Eucharist, led effectively to the invention of the cyclic Mass. The rationale here is that 'the ultimate force between the creation of the cyclic cantus firmus Mass and its celebrated ...
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(Herald havpcd 360, rec 2009, 70!) brings to fruition a project envisaged by Mary Berry but left incomplete at her death in 2008. David Hiley, who provides the booklet notes here, helped source the music in the two surviving manuscripts,... more
(Herald havpcd 360, rec 2009, 70!) brings to fruition a project envisaged by Mary Berry but left incomplete at her death in 2008. David Hiley, who provides the booklet notes here, helped source the music in the two surviving manuscripts, giving respectively Mass and Office chants, from the Jerusalem Temple before 1244: a Gradual now divided between Rome and Cambridge and a Breviary now in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. Rather than presenting a complete liturgical service, the disc is focused around a group of three ...
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Despite a focus on what might seem to be an arcane and marginal technique, this volume of papers presented at a november 2008 early music 623 conference in Leuven in 2005 is wide-ranging. With 22 essays (two each in German and French and... more
Despite a focus on what might seem to be an arcane and marginal technique, this volume of papers presented at a november 2008 early music 623 conference in Leuven in 2005 is wide-ranging. With 22 essays (two each in German and French and the rest in English) in nearly 500 pages, full discussion of them all in a short review is impossible, and as many bring to light new material at some length, replicating their extensive descriptions would be redundant. However, some sense of the scope of the volume can be given that should ...
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Je suix de haute amor Espris novellement De dame de vallor A cui mes cuers se rant; Mais je ne sai comant Je li puixe mue¤ s plaire... 1.6 Par servir loialment Porai s' amour atraire![Avrai aligement Plaixans et debonaire? De... more
Je suix de haute amor Espris novellement De dame de vallor A cui mes cuers se rant; Mais je ne sai comant Je li puixe mue¤ s plaire... 1.6 Par servir loialment Porai s' amour atraire![Avrai aligement Plaixans et debonaire? De merci desirant Fais ver vous mon repaire.] 1.12
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At just under 600 pages of text with essays by twenty contributors Antoine Busnoys is a big book. Happily it is also an excellent one: the contributions are of a consistently high standard, are well organized and well written, and many... more
At just under 600 pages of text with essays by twenty contributors Antoine Busnoys is a big book. Happily it is also an excellent one: the contributions are of a consistently high standard, are well organized and well written, and many address similar or related issues with a fair degree of cross-referencing in their footnotes. The book is introduced with essays by the editor, Paula Higgins, and by David Fallows, whose contributionÐa version of his keynote address from the 1992 conference that initiated the bookÐoffers pertinent ...
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Background The fourteenth-century French balade Depetitpo (hereafter B18) is one of the most widely transmitted examples of its genre, in terms both of the number of surviving manuscript copies and their geographical distribution. 1 Both... more
Background The fourteenth-century French balade Depetitpo (hereafter B18) is one of the most widely transmitted examples of its genre, in terms both of the number of surviving manuscript copies and their geographical distribution. 1 Both text and music were written by one of the century's most important Western European poets and composers, Guillaume de Machaut (ca. 1300���1377), who was a Christian cleric in minor orders employed by the royal houses of Bohemia and Navarre (see Earp 1995: 3���51 and the revisions in Bowers 2004). ...
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A strong strand in narratives of sonic beauty in Western music history warns of the power of beautiful sound—frequently figured as female singing—to overcome reason, to enchant, to beguile. Such singing can lead its listeners astray,... more
A strong strand in narratives of sonic beauty in Western music history warns of the power of beautiful sound—frequently figured as female singing—to overcome reason, to enchant, to beguile. Such singing can lead its listeners astray, ultimately even to their deaths. A complementary set of stories, however, relies on the idea that the beauty of sound was guaranteed by its reflection of the harmonic ratios of the universe. The sound of beauty thus represented something uniquely rational and divine. “The Sound of Beauty” explores both negative and positive understandings of the beauty of sound from antiquity to the present. What emerges is a history of varied human judgments of music, arguments over the ethics of music’s power, and disagreements over music’s proper place in defining individual humanity.