Giving Voice to Love addresses monophonic song from the twelfth to the fourteenth century, drawing on an impressive range of scholarship. Peraino's musicological commentaries are for me (a literary, not a musical, scholar) highly illuminating; she writes about music in a manner both technical and yet arrestingly formulated, often bringing intriguing contemporary comparisons to bear on her analyses. She is primarily interested in forms of change, dissonance, tension, contrast and opposition, which she sees as manifestations of artistic originality and what she calls ‘expressiveness’; Peraino claims that her project is to ‘bring philosophical and theoretical notions about the self and subjectivity to bear on the nuts and bolts of music’ (p. 8).
The Introduction surveys the history of literary, cultural and manuscript studies in song (there is no equivalent musicological survey). In Chapter 1, Peraino looks at the Occitan tornada, comparing it with the refrain. Noting that the tornada is the ‘turning point’ at which songs change textual or musical direction to reflect imaginatively on their own production or some external or historical context, Peraino connects it with Althusserian notions of ‘interpellation’ as mediated by Judith Butler; the tornada is the ‘turn’ in which the subject responds to interpellation and recognises him- or herself as subject to language and culture. Chapter 2 focuses on the cultivation of dissonance and contradiction in the descort. Comparing the descort to ‘late’ art, characterised by Adorno and Said as an art of difficulty and irresolution, Peraino argues that the descort is a ‘belated’ or ‘delinquent’ genre of song, where we see practitioners reflecting on the forms of their art.Footnote 1 Chapter 3 traces an emerging sense of the belatedness of the chanson in the work of Adam de la Halle, but above all in the organisation of the thirteenth-century chansonniers, concluding with studies of three strophic chansons that have acquired new music in ‘trouv. M’ (BNF fr. 844). Chapter 4 investigates the hybridity of the monophonic motet, with its bias towards musical and textual citation, the interlacing of refrain materials and apparent musical references to the polyphonic motet. Organised round the motet ent é (glossed as a grafted ‘wordlet’, p. 197) and an excursus on courtly ‘grafting’, Peraino proposes that the motet ent é is a medieval version of ‘sampling’ in modern dance music. In Chapter 5, noting Machaut's description of the monophonic virelai as a chanson balladée, Peraino argues that this references both the chanson and the dance song, and claims that Machaut's virelais enact a belated return to earlier modes of song, but mediated by the mensural forms of dances: his refrains no longer evoke communal song, but instead articulate psychologically complex love language. But she also explores the complex tensions between textual and musicological phraseology here, arguing that Machaut's virelais have much in common with the descort.
I have learned a huge amount from this book, with its wide references and stream of critical insights. Its greatest strength, however, lies in the cumulative evidence of its close readings of individual songs, which make a powerful case for the continued inventiveness of the monophonic tradition well into the late fourteenth century. The book is linked up to pages on the publisher's website that stream recordings of most of the songs discussed, many of which were made collaboratively for Peraino by Hunter Hensley; some further transcriptions can also be found here. To read the book and to hear the songs is to acquire a deepening sense of what Peraino calls ‘musical delinquency’ (p. 104) and the many ways that textual and musical structures can work with and against each other and themselves. Peraino's inventive analyses of these songs will win her an audience beyond the musical world: witness her observation of the ‘diminishing returns’ of the multiple, shortening tornadas of Bernart de Ventadorn's Can vei la flor (p. 63), or her comment on how Adam de la Halle's ‘chains of plicated notes and two- or three-note ligatures … constantly change direction [and] keep the ear floating unmoored in pitch space’ (p. 150); and at the end of a striking analysis of the monophonic motet Bone amourete m'a souspris, we find her moved to speak of ‘the subtle transformation of a raised penultimate leading tone in a polyphonic rondeau to a beautiful chromatic inflection, hooked on or grafted and left hanging at the ends of these phrases like wondrously unexpected fruit’ (p. 228)!
However, the detailed mechanics of the book's argument, especially on the central topic of ‘self-expression’, is not always so persuasive. It is generally true that Peraino assimilates her scholarly and theoretical materials variably: the excursus on belatedness in Chapter 2 seems long, but other theoretical materials, such as the discussions of the body in psychoanalysis or the voice in ‘post-structuralism’ (pp. 22, 28), are so brief as to be of little use. The book is also prone to hasty theoretical asides and interpretations: what, for example, is the self understood as ‘prior to language’ (p. 80)? Does a poet's use of multiple genres really turn a ‘subjective voice’ into a ‘generic one’, and thereby into ‘an expression of the singular self’ (p. 154)? I am not sure why the reference to a ‘foreign beloved’ in a monophonic motet should refer us to ‘surrounding polyphony’ (p. 221). And, while I have some sense of what it means to describe the beloved as ‘the Other’, there are too many cursory usages of the idea (pp. 203, 258, 292).
Most importantly, I am not certain that Peraino has completely taken on board the implications of the work on subjectivity surveyed in the Introduction; this has consequences for the rest of the book. The importance of Sarah Kay's Subjectivity in Troubadour Poetry (Cambridge, 1990), for example, lies in the subtlety with which she negotiates the claims of structuralist/formalist work on the formal self-referentiality of Occitan and French song (the work of Paul Zumthor et al.) as against an interest in locating a particular or historical subject in this song. Peraino certainly notes that for Kay the expression of subjectivity involves ‘discursive generality’ and ‘historical specificity’ in a mutually ‘tempering’ relationship. This of course means that the formal play of the lyric may well be specified by the signs of gender, class, politics or performance, but also that these signs – which may themselves be illusory – are themselves specified by the song's paradoxical and figurative explorations of subjectivity (Kay, Subjectivity, pp. 4–7, 16, 150). However, such work means that we cannot any longer fall back on the old claim that the chanson simply expresses a ‘generalising’ or a ‘generic’ subject, for example (pp. 125, 126); nor can we invoke in an unqualified manner terms such as ‘the self’, ‘self-expression’, ‘the personal voice’, ‘the individual’, ‘the autonomous self’, ‘self-consciousness’, ‘spontaneity’, ‘independence’, even ‘authenticity’ – sprinkled liberally throughout the volume.Footnote 2 How do we, as Jacques Le Goff once asked, write biography after the history of mentalités?
Peraino's notion of the ‘turn’ of interpellation is problematic. Why (apart from a shared allusion to turning) is it particularly manifest in the tornada, with its tendency towards historical reference and self-reflexivity? If interpellation is the moment when the subject ‘turns’ to acknowledge him- or herself as the subject of language, then surely it is equally present in the strophes of the chanson? Peraino's bias towards the tornada is no doubt explained by her desire to see manifestations of ‘self-expression’ or even ‘transparent subjectivity’ (p. 30) in historical references to named individuals or places, and the manifestations of social situation and class; in this respect she seems to be closer to Michel Zink, for whom the thirteenth-century genres of the dits and the romans allow for a new specification of the subject. Elsewhere she resorts to a much looser idea that the songs express ‘hybrid’ or multiple ‘subjectivities’ (pp. 32, 163).
As the book progresses, however, Peraino comes increasingly to associate self-expression and originality with a distinctively ahistorical version of formal innovation – indeed, when music ‘is about the composition of music’. ‘Can we find such self-conscious self-expression’, she asks, ‘in the details of music? … we can, especially … where the specifically musical properties of song … come dramatically to the fore and seem to comment or reflect on music itself’ (pp. 189, 291). Paradoxically, such statements bring Peraino closer to the structuralist/formalist view of song – except, of course, that the theorists who tend to take this view have little theoretical place for the subject (or history). The tension between Peraino's psychological positivism and this highly formalist treatment of song can in fact already be seen on p. 29, when she explains that ‘in art historical terms, “expressive” and “expressionist” refer to a rendering of interior or psychological reality’, but describes this expressivity as the result of ‘stray[ing] from or disrupt[ing] tradition or norms’. Once again I missed a properly embedded sense of the ways in which formal variation is shaped by its historical moment and location, and also of the ways that formal variation reflects on, and may intervene in, its historical moment and location. Only this kind of work will allow us to identify meaningful traces – and can we say more? – of the subject at work. It is these traces, however, that the individual studies of the book (see, for instance, the discussion of Machaut's return to ‘the grand chant idiom’ in Chapter 5) illustrate so well.
