Parergon

The essays in Music, Myth and Story in Medieval and Early Modern Europe examine how the conceptual understanding of myth, story, and music changed through the medieval and early modern period. Each essay investigates an area of connection between these three concepts through some of the less-studied allegorical narratives and musical materials produced and performed during this extended period. While the individual chapters showcase strong interdisciplinary methodology, it is the tight orientation of the contributions towards two thematic streams that raises the whole above the usual miscellaneous nature of an edited volume.

The collection is divided into seven sections that broadly address two themes: myth/story in relation to either musical theory and philosophy or musical performance and practice. The sections are arranged chronologically, from the fifth century to the early eighteenth century. This allows the two themes to be addressed multiple times, effectively illustrating how these concepts changed over time. The editors mitigate the breadth of chronology by limiting the geographic coverage to Italy and England.

Section 1, with essays by John MacInnis, Ferdia Stone-Davis, and Elina Hamilton, addresses the theme of myth and the philosophy of music through [End Page 187] studies of the melding of classical and biblical myth to conceptualize music as a reflection of celestial harmony and as a force exercised by humanity to maintain this harmony. Hamilton’s essay is especially effective in highlighting the repercussions of this worldview through her study of the influence of origin myths on identity-creation in late medieval England. In Section 3, Jacomiens Prins argues that the popularity of the Orpheus myth is a result of the flexibility it afforded writers to justify music’s positive moral and intellectual influence within the changing philosophical framework of Renaissance Italy. Katherine Butler furthers Hamilton’s examination of musical origins through a study of interrelated biblical and classical myths that justified the moral action of music in early modern England. In Section 6, Katie Bank provides a novel study of how myth and satire play a similar literary role in navigating the relationship between reality and fiction. Aurora Faye Martinez brings the conversation on musical philosophy back to the allegorical use of biblical myths to understand the human relationship with sin through Matthew Locke’s musical setting of Marvell’s ‘Dialogue between Thyrsis and Dorinda’.

The theme of myth and story in relation to musical performance begins with Section 2, in which Jason Stoessel examines musical iconology/graphy through to the Renaissance, with a fascinating study of the depictions of musica/Musica in a variety of artforms in Western Europe. Tim Shephard and Patrick McMahon similarly use representations of the myth of King Midas to tease out the moral repercussions of good or bad musical judgement. Their most intriguing example is of the images on a polygonal virginal, where the position of the player determines a particular meaning to the pictorial narrative. In Section 4, Jamie Agpar shows how the political narrative in early medieval England influenced the use of alternating, or responsive, performance, and Ljubica Ilic frames seventeenth-century musical depictions of the Echo myth in relation to the modern development of the idea of the reflective self.

Sections 5 and 7 expand this theme, examining how music-related myth is communicated in performance. Samantha Bassler’s application of a framework of disability studies to the literary portrayal of female madness in Shakespeare provides a new dimension through which depictions of mental health can be understood through musical characterization. Sigrid Harris effectively depicts how the fear induced by mythological women singers was transferred onto real female performers in early modern Italy. Finally, in Section 7, Amanda Eubanks Winkler and Erica Levenson examine the adaptation of music-related myths for the English stage in the eighteenth century. Levenson’s discussion of the political elements...