Where Sight Meets Sound: The Poetics of Late-Medieval Music Writing

Emily Zazulia’s inaugural monograph offers a detailed account of late medieval music notation. Rather than providing a practical guide on how to read it, the focus is on examining its role in late medieval literate musical poetics and its contribution to musical creativity. Through the metaphors of technology, language, and discourse, the author explores how composers used the underlying conceptual framework of mensural music notation (which is quite different from modern music notation) in their compositions to transform their musical subjects systematically. Zazulia limits her scope to examples drawn from the principal structural voices (tenors) of motets and polyphonic masses from the second half of the fifteenth century that witness transformations of a notated musical subject. When a musical subject was not newly invented, it was often borrowed (and rhythmized if not already in mensural notation) from sources such as a Gregorian chant, a secular polyphonic song, or existing traditions in the motet and Mass.