This book has been thoroughly researched, so anyone wishing to follow the ins and outs of medieval modal theory will be amply rewarded. But when the first chapter is headed ‘A Music in Search of a Theory’, it must be wondered what theory has to do with music; if the matter were thus, the horse has been looking for the cart. That modal and tonal theory, both in medieval treatises and in modern literature, were, and are, wildly out of step with real music, is clearly evident in Dr McAlpine's pages.

If a harmony textbook of the sort used in the late 1940s (say Kitson, Lovelock or the rest) was to be perused for guidance as to the style of Schoenberg or Stravinsky, the thirtieth-century musicologist would be in the same position as the Cretans in Robert Graves's futuristic novel, Seven Days in New Crete. Their eccentric knowledge of English, by then extinct, was somewhat dependent on the discovery of ‘The Liverpool Find’. This, a hoard of Christmas cards, was hardly the key to the long-dead English language. Even when well-meaning books such as Walter Piston's Harmony quote real music, they fall into the trap (as does our author on p. 20 and elsewhere) of assuming that there was a ‘Common Practice Period’. If there were, then why does Brahms sound different from Bach, and indeed Bach from Handel?

Theorists, or chance fragments of information, are no guide to What Happened in History. This is particularly true in regard to medieval music, especially because its early theorists were clerics, and therefore saw life through ecclesiastical windows, high above the ground. Saturnalian events were beneath them, the Dominical activities of the choir their lofty concern; so they were ill-versed as to the realities of musica mundana, but too well read in the theory of musica sphaerarum.

So, when they came to try to explain the eight-mode system (p. 70), the theorists knew too much (the Greco-Syrian octoechos, the Platonic harmoniae, the Alypian tonoi) and mixed everything up into an impenetrable mess, just as a child mixes the colours of a paint-box with the enthusiastic abandon which tends to produce khaki. The eight-mode system (which had more in common with Gaevert's ‘melodic types’, p. 66) was equated with eight scales by later theorists who, in common with Guido, had to side-step the problem that there were ‘seven pitches … but only four modes’ (p. 58). Not only were the Greek echoi therefore made to conform to the notion of two sets of four scales, ‘authentic’ and ‘plagal’, but the theorists also had to choose eight scales out of a possible fourteen in order to reconcile the irreconcilable. Moreover, some of the names of the Alypian tonoi were allocated to them, but in a topsy-turvy manner.

With this ‘music in search of a theory’, such chants as the Credo (p. 178) and ‘Pange lingua’ (p. 202, but with no mention of the intractable problem of the inherent E flat or F sharp in the melody of ‘Pange lingua’ and the Sarum solution to write it in a non-existent ‘mode’) and all the melodies belonging to the Tonus Peregrinus were stranded: they were washed up like beached whales on the shores of this ill-fitting modal theory.

Guido himself falls into this trap at one point in his Micrologus (13.18), when he speaks of the ‘flawed semitone’ in the Tritus or F-scale, on account of which, he says, the Tritus is rare (‘propter subiectam semitonii imperfectionem videtur’). This is a crucial admission: the subsemitonal cadence was the Mark of Cain of the vernacular tavern songs, the secular dances of the village green: at all costs, this cadence must be suppressed from the music of the church. To argue that the Trobadors were the first to espouse this music is as ludicrous as supposing that they had to follow Latin models in order to invent vernacular verse (p. 259). One should rather listen for echoes of the unwritten secular, vernacular substrate.

One shadow of this unwritten art may be discerned on the page where the well-known ‘In hoc anni circulo’ is first preserved. Its charming tune exists with alternative Occitan and Latin texts in barely legible neumatic notation (BNF lat. 1139, fol. 84r), but is hardly untranscribable: apart from the clearly marked B flat in this manuscript, many later sources (studied long ago by Anglès and others) show that this song is in what we now call F major, complete with subsemitonal cadences; furthermore, as these sources of what became a popular carol make clear, it was in the equivalent of rhythm. Thus, far from ‘tonality’, rhythm and so on being invented in the twelfth, thirteenth or fourteenth centuries, they were already present in the shrouded substance of secular song and dance. True, some of the substrate tunes, as with Philip the Chancellor's rondel ‘Veni sancte spiritus’ or the French tune ‘Tout leis en mis les prez’ (also found as Guillaume d'Amiens' rondel ‘C'est la gieus en mi le prez’ and its ‘Notre dame’ equivalent ‘Decet vox letiticie’), were ‘modalised’ in their ecclesiastical guise; but we have the Montpellier and other versions to tell us that they were originally in the equivalent of C major and in time.

Even more curious is the Occitan ‘A l'entrada del tens clar’, which in common with ‘Veni sancte’ is patently chordal: despite being twice ‘modalised’ for the purposes of polyphony, it is plain that the original tune was in G major; furthermore, it has the audacity to end its refrain on D, the dominant extension of the key.

In any event, the hunt for the chimera of ‘tonality’ which McAlpine is engaged upon is, in the view of many of us, futile. As far as I know, it was Fétis, in his Traité of 1844, who coined the term ‘tonal’. He used it to connote the ‘harmonic and melodic affinities of the sounds of the scale’, ignoring the claim in his earlier Esquisse (1840) that Monteverdi invented the ‘dominant seventh’ – a dud coin which has been palmed many times since. But Fétis did emphasise the importance of the fourth and seventh degrees in identifying the heptatonic scale: so ‘tonal’, as used by Fétis, embraces what McAlpine calls ‘modal’; therefore what she is seeking is something else, which might be called ‘tonicality’, the aural recognition of a destination-note in songs and chants. This is a different matter. Some chants have a recognisable destination-note which is suggested by the neumatic formulas in that chant (the Greek understanding of echos and ethos); so, too, medieval songs often display ‘tonicality’ in that the final note seems predictable to our ears. Equally, however, as McAlpine explains, both chants and songs encompass many instances where this is not so: these are indeed ‘tonal’ in the Fétis sense, but they are not ‘tonical’ in regard to the expectation of someone listening to Baroque and later music.

Theories about the ‘invention of polyphony’ (p. 361) and that ‘strict’ parallelism ‘gave way to the drone-based style of Guido or the Winchester Troper’ (p. 438) have to do with treatises, not with musical reality. Bagpipes had drones, diauloi and such instruments were not of their nature monodic, and although ‘let my right hand forget her cunning’ may not tell us much about the kinnôr technique of the exiled Jews (Ps. 137), there are plenty of contemporaneous representations of Babylonian and other performers on harps and the like which clearly show players simultaneously plucking with both hands.

Charlemagne was famously crowned Emperor in the Byzantine manner, being lifted upon a shield while an acclamation was sung. We do not know exactly what this acclamation was, or its music, but this kind of musical salute was probably similar to that offered to Caesar by the gladiators of the Roman Circus; indeed, the mosaic found at Zliten, Tripoli in Libya shows a trumpet (tuba), two horns (cornua) and an organ (hydraulis) participating in a victory fanfare ending a gladiatorial contest. Moreover, we do have the music of the acclamation used at the crowning of Byzantine emperors, the polychronion (which more or less means ‘O King, live for ever’), and the hippodrome where it took place would have had a hydraulis, and we also know the Byzantine word for a drone, ison. It is easy to reconstruct an imperial polychronion from these materials and to see that this would have been polyphony of a sort, with or without the brass instruments. And since another borrowed Greek word for hydraulis was organum in Latin, it may be imagined without difficulty that this reconstructed acclamation would have anticipated the ‘drone-based style of … the Winchester Troper’: it must also be remembered that Winchester had an organ of which it was rather proud, which must have played something, after all.

So ‘polyphonic rules’ (p. 418) and the rest are no more necessary to salvation than Fux's rebarbative summary of the style of Palestrina was necessary instruction for later suppliants at the altar of polyphony. There is a good deal of evidence that ground basses, far from being invented in the Renaissance, existed for centuries (probably even for a millennium at least) earlier, and with that, polyphony, tonality and rhythm were alive when Nero watched Rome burning: whatever his manifold failings, the Neronic strumming was hardly ‘music in search of a theory’.

Apart from these generalities, there are some minor shortcomings in the book, one being bizarre word-spacing in several places, particularly in the footnotes (e.g. pp. 233–4), which appear to be the result of some malign typesetting system, but which a proofreader should have adjusted. The index is far from adequate: I had seen that Grocheio was mentioned somewhere but failed to note the page number; the index, too, has failed to note him. This is a pity, for he is the one medieval theorist who more or less comes clean about the tonality of secular music but is comparatively rarely quoted. It is true that some of his discourse is obscure and, being in Latin, it is sometimes difficult to equate his terminology with what we know of the music itself; but one of his remarks is telling: he says that to apply the system of ecclesiastical tones to all music is wrong, continuing thus: ‘Non enim per tonum cognoscimus cantus vulgarem’ (‘We cannot recognise [classify] popular song [or music] according to a [plainchant] tone’).

On another matter, perhaps minor, Abelard is widely thought to have composed sequences (p. 234), but no certainty can be attached to this assertion: the Paraclete Hymnal has some hymns which are arranged in sequence style, and he is known to have written six planctus, but there are no extant Abelardian sequences, stricto sensu.

Reading this book, I was reminded of the original boffin. Dickens, in Our Mutual Friend, characterised him thus: ‘What to believe, in the course of his reading, was Mr Boffin's chief literary difficulty indeed; for some time he was divided in his mind between half, all, none; at length, when he decided, as a moderate man, to compound with half, the question still remained, which half? And that stumbling block he never got over.’