Margot Fassler's Music in the Medieval West and its companion Anthology for Music in the Medieval West comprise the long-awaited first volume in the new Norton series entitled Western Music in Context: A Norton History. Among the unifying themes of the series are the patronage, creation and use of music in public and private spheres, the technologies of musical creation and transmission, women as patrons, composers and performers, the relationship between music and identity, and methods of musical training and education. Each volume is generously illustrated and is accompanied by an anthology of musical examples and analytical commentary. Sturdy yet lightweight and reasonable in price, the volumes are designed with the student in mind.

Fassler describes Music in the Medieval West as ‘a lover's work, inspired not only by sheer personal pleasure in and intellectual engagement with the music itself, but also by a sense of delight – of astonishment, really – in the extraordinary accomplishments of my peers, the scholars who have spent and are spending their professional lives working to understand medieval music and its manifold connections to cultural history’ (pp. xvii–xviii). Fassler's pleasure and delight in her field are infectious. Five themes guide her richly contextualised interdisciplinary narrative: the organisation and exchange of ideas across geographical, political, social and artistic boundaries, music as an art of memory, music as mediated by the written record, music as a method of making and re-enacting history, and individual women and images of the female in medieval repertories. Yet the volume is much more than a historical narrative: throughout, Fassler encourages the reader to engage in practical exercises of manuscript study and transcription, and to perform the musical examples informed by historical and theoretical knowledge on the one hand, and by imagination and a willingness to experiment on the other. Fassler presents complex ideas clearly, but never simplistically, defining terms and concepts for the reader as her story unfolds.

Music in the Medieval West is divided into four parts, each comprising three chapters: Part I ‘Founders and Foundations of Western Music’; Part II ‘Conquest and Devotion in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries’; Part III ‘Schools and Urban Sounds in the Thirteenth Century’; and Part IV ‘Musicians and Patrons in the Fourteenth Century’. Each chapter is organised along topical lines that defy conventional boundaries between the analysis of music and the study of its cultural context, between music and the visual arts, between the theory and practice of music, and between the sacred and the secular. For example, Fassler's opening case study of the hymn Ave maris stella skilfully introduces the problem of musical and textual variants in sources, the paradoxical images of women in medieval culture, and the phenomena of intertextuality and musical borrowing – interrelationships Fassler describes as ‘intrinsic to the art of memory that sustained all musical practices’ (p. 11). In her chapter on twelfth-century song, entitled ‘Poet-Composers in the Age of the Individual’, Fassler segues from Peter Abelard's stunning Easter sequence Ephithalamica to the music and poetry of the troubadours, to early Gothic aesthetics, to the Victorine sequence repertory and the art of memory, and finally to the liturgical chants and drama of Hildegard of Bingen. In this manner, Fassler provokes her reader to consider the profound connections between what are often thought of as distinct repertoires and practices. While her rich and nuanced interdisciplinary approach delighted some of my students, others found it overwhelming. The editor's suggestion that an instructor might use ‘one or more volumes in a single semester’ (p. xvi) seems impractical to me. Fassler's volume needs to be digested slowly: it provides plenty of material for a semester-long survey, and offers many opportunities for expansion into related sources and bibliography.

Intended as a companion for Music in the Medieval West, the Anthology for Music in the Medieval West is also designed to stand alone as a source for study and performance. Fassler emphasises the open-endedness of the medieval source, unlike the modern score, explaining that ‘[t]here is not now, and never has been, one way of working with and out of the medieval sources. From matters of orthography to the question of whether or not to superimpose rhythmic values or how and when to add accidentals, every scholar and performer will have decisions to make’ (p. xvi). It is in appreciation of the complex task of interpreting medieval sources, Fassler explains, that the editors take care to identify the source of each selection, and to explain decisions made in transcription and recording. One problem that results from selecting musical examples from a range of manuscripts and earlier editions is that they are transcribed in many different ways. Some melodies appear in simple note heads, others in modern crotchets, and with a variety of strategies expressing textual divisions, ligatures and special neumes. While this variety of notation demonstrates the kinds of decisions that must be made by the transcriber, it can be very confusing for the student reader. A standardisation of notation would have been particularly helpful in the case of a pair of sequences set to the Occidentana melody: the West Frankish Rex omnipotens, as transcribed by Richard Crocker, and Notker's Sancti spiritus assit nobis, as transcribed by Calvin Bower. Not only does the notation of the two selections differ, but also the numbering and layout of their verses, making a parallel reading of the two examples extremely difficult. Aside from this problem of notation, my students had nothing but praise for the variety of the examples, the detail and clarity of the commentary, and the beautiful translations that accompany each selection.

One of the great strengths of Music in the Medieval West is its thirty-two page appendix, A Medieval Primer, which offers a practical introduction to the use of manuscript sources and reference works, the interpretation of medieval notation, modal theory, performance practice and the organisation of the medieval liturgy. The enormously useful Primer is thoughtfully included both in the text and in the anthology, so that those who purchase only the Anthology can benefit from its instruction. Another resource provided by Music in the Medieval West is the associated Norton StudySpace, freely available at http://wwnorton.com. This offers an audio playlist with links to recordings. Previously published recordings are indexed by WorldCat record, and may be streamed via links to Naxos, Amazon and iTunes. For those selections for which no commercial recording is available, the StudySpace streams free recordings performed by Richard Crocker, Margaret Louise Switten et al. and the Schola Antiqua of Chicago, which contributed ten new recordings to accompany the anthology. Extensive chapter bibliographies with links to WorldCat and JSTOR records are also available in StudySpace. The author's own website (referred to, but not provided in the text or on StudySpace) may be found at https://mediaevalmusic.wordpress.com. This site provides lessons in the study of digital facsimiles corresponding to each chapter, along with extended chapter bibliographies, and promises to be updated yearly. Together, these three resources potentially save both instructor and student a great deal of time.

No text or anthology can satisfy every reader with every choice; surely, those more interested in secular music may object that Fassler's book is overwhelmingly focused on the chant tradition and on the musical genres constructed therefrom. But this, after all, reflects the nature of our sources of medieval music. One choice that I found curious was the inclusion in the Medieval Music Primer of newly composed English mnemonic verses demonstrating the nine psalm tones. While these are doubtless useful to students of contemporary chant performance, they seem somewhat out of place in a study otherwise focused on minimally edited examples transcribed from manuscript sources. It seems to me that psalm tones are best learned in the context of the antiphon melodies with which they are paired. For this reason, I found it helpful to supplement the Primer with the modal exemplars found in John Cotton's De musica, which are readily learned and extremely helpful in understanding the typical melodic behaviour of each of the modes.

Overall, Margot Fassler's Music in the Medieval West and its companion Anthology are engaging and thought-provoking; both are welcome resources for the teaching of a survey course in medieval music history. The pair of volumes would also appeal to beginning performers of early music, and to general readers with a strong musical background.