Timothy McGee, editor, with A. G. Rigg and David N. Klausner. Singing Early Music: The Pronunciation of European Languages in the Late Middle Ages and Renaissance (original) (raw)

Reviewed by Eric Rice The principal title of this book underscores its kinship with Harold Copeman's Singing in Latin (1990), a pioneering work that has become an important resource for conductors and singers of Latin-texted music. Copeman painstakingly analyzes puns, spelling, and descriptions of phonology from various periods, offering suggestions for pronunciation in the performance of music along the way. While Copeman's book has been widely praised for its utility, it has also been criticized for "fall[ing] between two stools: it is neither a totally scholarly presentation of sources with an added commentary nor a practical handbook with guidelines to performers clearly set out" (Ledsham 1993). Singing Early Music, on the other hand, is designed primarily as a practical handbook for performers based on sound linguistic scholarship. It offers important advice to singers and choral conductors, and it is of interest to musicologists and literary scholars as well. Much of the information presented was not easily accessible to performers prior to the book's publication, and this information has been gathered and presented in a clear, concise, interesting, and, above all, convenient fashion. This is an eminently useful book, but it needs to be used with discretion. Easy access to information has clearly been an important criterion for the organization of the book. It is divided into sections dealing with regions of Western Europe: Germany and the Low Countries, Britain, France, the Iberian Peninsula, and Italy. Each of these sections contains a set of chapters dealing with languages, including Latin, spoken in the various regions. Mter some general remarks, most chapters present a brief summary of evidence for the pronunciations proposed; short bibliographies are provided for the benefit of those whose curiosity is less easily satisfied. Diachronic sound charts are provided so that one can see the changes in sound in relation to orthography that occurred over time, and sample texts from musical works are printed with transcriptions in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). An introduction provides clear, concise overviews of phonetics and European languages, and a phonetic chart is provided at the end to help the reader interpret the symbols of