The Look of the Voice
Seeing Medieval Song
Emma Dillon
Associate Professor of Music
University of Pennsylvania
Free. Public invited.
 Medieval
words were inseparable from the voices that produced
them. Even in the quiet of reading, the sight of the
word conjured up sounds: the imagined voice of the author
or the reader's own voice.
Penn musicologist Emma Dillon explores
the visual signs in music manuscripts that depict the
sound and timbre of the medieval word, ranging from
the notation of sacred chant and secular song to the
sometimes outrageous representations of noisy monsters
intruding into texts intended for murmured prayer. Join
us as Prof. Dillon explores the magic and mischief behind
medieval music.
Prof. Dillon studies French music and
manuscripts in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.
Her book, Medieval
Music-Making and the Roman de Fauvel, was published
by Cambridge University Press in 2002. She is currently
writing a book called "The Sense of Sound: Music
and Meaning in Thirteenth-Century France," which
explores a variety of non-musical sound worlds, problems
of their representation, and the ways they impinge on
the reception of the 13th-century motet.
Prof. Dillon has published articles and
reviews in Fauvel Studies, Journal of the Royal
Musical Association, and Plainsong and Medieval
Music. She took her Ph.D. at Oxford University.
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Suggested Reading
Wikipedia on the Roman
de Fauvel, a medieval French text renowned for its
political satire and allegories.
Emma Dillon. "The
Art of Interpolation in the Roman de Fauvel," Journal
of Musicology 2002; 19:223-63. Winner of the 2003
Jerome Roche Prize from
the Royal Musical Association. In awarding her this
honor, the committee wrote, "Emma Dillon's article
offers an interesting and original approach to a much-worked-over
musical source. . . [Her]conceptualization of the role
of music within a narrative context is particularly
striking, and raises provocative ideas about the act
of reading. Beautifully written and imaginatively presented,
the article is so clear that it engages the attention
of a far wider audience than the purely specialist."
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