In this book, which calls itself modestly an essay and an ‘oratiuncula’ (pp. 86–7), and which indeed contains less than 100 pages including the bibliography, Blair Sullivan seeks to address, once more, the ancient roots of the association between the disciplines of grammar and music. She seeks fundamentally to explain the crossover of terms and ideas from these two disciplines, which, she argues, has been described by many but lacks a thorough analysis. Therefore, the matter is here addressed again, laying out the texts from antiquity that shaped the Carolingian thought on the subject, and evaluating the Carolingian sources in their light. At the outset, Sullivan chooses to approach the texts through the bold new theory of cognitive psychologist David R. Olson about the evolution of Greek alphabetic writing, explained in his book The World on Paper: The Conceptual and Cognitive Implications of Writing and Reading (Cambridge, 1994). Alphabetic writing, Olson argued, preceded the conceptualisation of the sound of human speech rather than shaping it. In other words, the awareness that the spoken word can be broken up into individual sounds and can in turn be represented by letters is a product of the writing system, and not its origin. A similar approach is taken by Sullivan: she examines discourse about music and the first attempts of writing music in theoretical treatises from the standpoint of how the ancient learned tradition shaped the cognition and conceptualisation of music, and finds that grammar, in this sense, played a major role in the development of medieval music theory.

The book has five chapters, an introduction and a conclusion. In the first chapter, Sullivan addresses the basic analogy: the models for musical sound based on the elemental structure of language, or, in other words, the simile of letters as basic elements of human speech, and of discrete pitches or notes as the basic elements of a melody. She includes ancient, late antique and medieval passages to show how alphabetic writing shaped the basic understanding of both musical sound and the sound of human speech. In the second chapter, she moves on to ancient passages that theorise about sound, both in speech and in music, showing how a universal distinction is made between articulate sound and undifferentiated sound, the first of which can be written, either by letters or by signs for music notation, the second not. In the third chapter, passages are analysed in which the two disciplines are explicitly linked. Sullivan addresses the foundational mythologies of both disciplines: the myth of Theuth, discovering the elements of human speech, and the myth of Pythagoras, finding the numerical principles of harmony when walking past a smithy. This brings us to the core ingredient of the ancient tradition of music theory which seemingly does not match up that well with a grammatical analogy: the numerical philosophy of musical sound. Nevertheless, Sullivan shows, the mathematical principles of music have a grammatical counterpart in the realisation that both speech and music are subjected to natural philosophical rules, which makes certain combinations ‘right’ and others ‘wrong’. She shows, again, how these ideas are found in Plato, Aristotle and Aristoxenos, and live on in the Carolingian context.

In Chapters 4 and 5, Sullivan shifts her focus to the ninth-century world, and shows how the grammatical paradigm gains in importance in the context of the Carolingian renovatio. She argues that the grammatical discipline is treated and taught along very similar lines to the discipline of music, coloured by the Carolingian attempt to bring structure and unity to the Latin language and the liturgical repertoire. In the last chapter, music notation systems developed by the Carolingians are analysed to assess the relationship between theoretical text and image.

In the conclusion, Sullivan distinguishes three levels in the transmission and transformation of ancient music theory in the early Middle Ages, just as Michel Banniard recognised three levels of transmission for the grammatical discipline: a fossilised transmission of the Pythagorean mythology, transmitted but rather empty of meaning; a static transmission of the concepts and definitions; and a dynamic level – the Carolingian adaptation and extension of transmitted knowledge to make it match contemporary liturgical requirements. The argument is convincing on the one hand (the concepts and methodology of the grammatical discipline did indeed influence the discipline of music), but flawed on the other: one could equally argue for a dynamic level of transmission of the Pythagorean myth, since the idea of the harmony of the cosmos was shaped in antiquity, but transmitted with endless variations and new meanings in the Middle Ages. Similarly, the transmission of the concepts and definitions was not a static process: ancient terms were used, but in new meanings.

This book left me puzzled. Although I found most of it to be well written and clearly organised, at times I failed to grasp the point the author wanted to make. Many of the ideas in the book have been studied and explored by others, and it seems to rely heavily on the works of musicologists such as Calvin Bower, Nancy Phillips and Charles Atkinson on the one hand – I found Susan Rankin's work oddly (and unforgivably) missing – and on the works of John Contreni, Vivien Law, Michel Banniard and Rosamond McKitterick on the other, for the interpretation of Carolingian cultural life in general. This is not a shame, of course, but apart from applying Olson's cognitive paradigm to the assembled set of texts, I did not see new things in this book. I am not sure, furthermore, whether the cognitive paradigm of Olson can be thus applied to the area of Carolingian music theory. In my view, the disciplines of grammar and music definitely hang together in this crucial period for the development of music theory and practice, but general elements that are applicable to other artes liberales also play a role. It would be interesting to compare the influence grammar had on the development of music theory against that of dialectic, for example, or arithmetic. Sullivan hints at this when she mentions the role of diagrams in altering the understanding of music theory, but I would look forward to reading a more careful analysis.

The conclusion ends with a remark that states the ambitions of the book: to pass on the author's own sense of fascination and excitement about the subject at hand. The book may reach this goal for readers with a more superficial background in the history of music theory. Let us hope that the book inspires them to go beyond its present scope, and that they will then be stimulated to explore the history of Carolingian music and scholarship from a broader perspective.