Giving voice to love - Judith Ann Peraino

Grafting musicology and literary studies together in an unprecedented manner, Giving Voice to Love: Song and Self Expression from the Troubadours to Guillaume de Machaut investigates the "courtly love" songs of the twelfth to late fourteenth centuries and explores the paradoxical relationship of music and self expression in the Middle Ages. While these love songs often conceive and express the autonomous subject - the lyric "I" represented by a single lineof melody - they also engage highly conventional musical and poetic language. This paradox was understood by the poets and became the basis for irony, parody and intertextual referencing, which instilled the lyrics with a characteristic self-consciousness that reflected the unstable conditions forself-expression. Author Judith Peraino illustrates that similar operations are at work in the musical settings. Examining moments where voice, melody, rhythm, form, and genre come dramatically to the fore and seem to comment on music itself, Giving Voice to Love strives not only to hear self-expression in these love songs, but to understand how musical elements give voice to the complex issues of self and subjectivity encoded in medieval love.Through its approach to the exploration of "courtly love" songs, Giving Voice to Love serves as a model for methodological integration and provides musicologists, literary scholars and medieval historians with a common analytical ground.

Judith A. Peraino is Professor of Music at Cornell University. Her publications include articles on medieval secular songs and motets, the rock artists PJ Harvey and Blondie, and Henry Purcell's opera Dido and Aeneas. She is the author of the book Listening to the Sirens: Musical Technologies of Queer Identity from Homer to Hedwig (2006). Peraino is also a faculty member of the Medieval Studies Program and the Feminist, Gender, and
Sexuality Studies Program.

Giving Voice to Love, then, itself presents a plurality of voices - postmodern, traditionalist, overt, and covert - making this book by Judith A. Peraino a valuable contribution to the study of medieval song, as well as to debates on the future direction(s) of medieval musicology.

Henry Hope, Music and Letters

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.. deeply thought provoking.

Elizabeth Eva Leach, Early Music