Music, Body and Desire in Medieval Culture: Hildegard of Bingen to Chaucer

Comparative Literature, Winter 2003 by Ginsberg, Warren

MUSIC, BODY, AND DESIRE IN MEDIEVAL CULTURE: HILDEGARD OF BINGEN TO CHAUCER. By Bruce W. Holsinger. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001. xviii, 472 p.

The subject of Bruce Holsinger's Music, Body, and Desire in Medieval Culture is the "corporeality of musical culture and musical experience in the European Middle Ages" (p. 2). "Corporeality" is the key word in this opening announcement: for Holsinger, medieval sonority is emphatically a practice of the flesh. Unlike Pythagoreans and Platonists, who strove to mute the clang of hammer on anvil so that they might hear the inaudible proportions that make sounds companionable, Christian ascetics, hagiographers, theologians, artists, and poets insisted on the musicality of the human frame; skin, tendons, throat, torso could be beaten, stretched, plucked, blown through, and strummed to produce resonances that were in accord with the pitch and timbre of the crucified Jesus, whose exposed ribs and extended sinews turned him into the harp of salvation in countless medieval allegories. Because music inheres in and is part of human physicality, it has played a central role in the constitution and representation of carnal and transcendent desire; because the sonorous body often generated its harmonies in pain, music can unveil the violence that often was occluded in the discourses, spiritual or otherwise, that appropriated it. Music is thus not only an art but also a mode of performance for Holsinger, through which the material cultures of the Middle Ages enacted their sustaining ideologies; anyone who seeks to recover its full range and consequence must discuss its place in poetic theory, theology and devotional practice, liturgical performance, pedagogical transmission, and the production and reception of the visual arts. Holsinger does all this and more: he has written a sweeping, ear and eye opening book that crosses many disciplinary boundaries and breaks much new ground.

If only for its scope, Holsinger's work is bound to be controversial. Although Hildegard of Bingen and Chaucer are the figures who stand at either end of the period Holsinger studies most intensively, his purview extends far beyond the two and a half centuries that separate them. In the first two chapters of his volume, he discusses the ways in which early Church fathers stressed "the resonances of the flesh" and "the rhythms of embodiment' to make classical musical theory consonant with their belief in an incarnate God. In his last chapter, he follows Orpheus's fate well into the Renaissance. Holsinger's reach is clearly encyclopedic; at the same time, he is very aware that had he addressed his book to one or another professional audience, musicologists, as well as philosophers, theologians, and literary scholars might claim he does not treat one or another subject with the detail it requires. The real audacity of Music, Body, and Desire, though, does not reside in its reach but in the challenges it poses to the idea that it is a history of medieval musical thought. For Holsinger, music is cultural critique; his thesis is that the materiality of vocal and instrumental expression during the Middle Ages necessarily disturbed and revised the assumptions that shaped perceptions of music then and our reconstructions of those perceptions today. If Hildegard recognized that the holy chants she composed opened an avenue for women to express their sexuality, the fact that they were sung by nuns suggests that we ought to read their performance, in Judith Bennett's phrase, as a "lesbian-like" experience. If Chaucer assures us his Prioress is all "conscience and tendre herte," the tale she tells reveals how her devotion relies on the musical torture of liturgical pedagogy. These are the terms under which Holsinger frames his arguments; they are the terms under which I think they should be judged.

Holsinger divides Music, Body, and Desire into four parts. In the first section he demonstrates that the musical legacy antiquity bequeathed to the earliest doctors of the Church was not limited to platonic harmonics of number and ratio. Stoic naturalism and Roman oratory acknowledged the fundamental importance of the performing body, and the Greek and Latin fathers imported precepts from both traditions when they incorporated musical materialism into their biblical hermeneutics. By distinguishing between the body and the flesh, Clement of Alexandria, for example, redeemed the dust and clay that houses the imperishable soul by calling attention not only to its concordant composition but also to the concinnity of the melodies it emits in martyrdom. In the West, Augustine would restore in different keys a similar collision between the anxieties and pleasures of song and flesh; while he continually located music's merit in its incorporeal proportions, he increasingly insisted on its palpability when he discussed its role in the creation, vivification, and resurrection of human bodies.

Holsinger elaborates many more ideas in these first two chapters than I can mention here, and a penetrating intelligence distinguishes all his analyses, even when on the rare occasion a reader may feel he overstates his case. In arguing for the significance Augustine accords the "pleasure of the ears," for instance, Holsinger concludes that in the Confessions, song, even as it fades away, "must always carry with it the flesh that gives it life" (p. 78). This seems to me to misconstrue the thrust of Augustine's discussion; he conceives of song as "formed sound" in order to see the inseparability of matter and form as an analogy or vestige of God's creation of the embodied soul. Whether song or soul, it is the form that inspirits the matter and gives it its life. Nevertheless, in these opening chapters Holsinger assembles a repository of concepts that serve him well as background against which he illuminates the relations between music, desire, and the body in the next section of his book, which he calls "Liturgies of Desire" The musical repertories he examines here are the writings of the twelfth-century abbess and visionary Hildegard of Bingen and the polemics that were occasioned by the introduction of polyphony, especially at Notre Dame around 1200.