The Oxford Handbook of Music and Medievalism provides a snapshot of the diverse ways in which medievalism--the retrospective immersion in the images, sounds, narratives, and ideologies of the European Middle Ages--powerfully transforms many of the varied musical traditions of the last two centuries. Thirty-three chapters from an international group of scholars explore topics ranging from the representation of the Middle Ages in nineteenth-century opera to medievalism in contemporary video game music, thereby connecting disparate musical forms across typical musicological boundaries of chronology and geography. While some chapters focus on key medievalist works such as Orff's Carmina Burana or Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings films, others explore medievalism in the oeuvre of a single composer (e.g. Richard Wagner or Arvo Pärt) or musical group (e.g. Led Zeppelin). The topics of the individual chapters include both well-known works such as John Boorman's film Excalibur and also less familiar examples such as Eduard Lalo's Le Roi d'Ys. The authors of the chapters approach their material from a wide array of disciplinary perspectives, including historical musicology, popular music studies, music theory, and film studies, examining the intersections of medievalism with nationalism, romanticism, ideology, nature, feminism, or spiritualism. Taken together, the contents of the Handbook develop new critical insights that venture outside traditional methodological constraints and provide a capstone and point of departure for future scholarship on music and medievalism.
"Introduction [Stephen Meyer and Kirsten Yri] Section 1: Romanticizing the Medieval: The Longing for the Middle Ages in the Nineteenth Century 1. Medievalisms in Early Nineteenth-Century German Thought [Laura K. T. Stokes] 2. From Knight Errant to Family Man: Romantic Medievalism and Domesticity in Brahms's 15 Romanzen aus L. Tieck's Schöne Magelone, op. 33 (1865, 1869) [Marie Sumner Lott] 3. Liszt's Medievalist Modernism [Balázs Mikusi] 4. Soldiers and Censors: Verdi's Medieval Imagination [Liana Püschel] 5. The Distant Past as Mirror and Metaphor:ÂPortraying Medievalism in Historical French Grand Operas [Diana Hallman] 6. Medievalism and Regionalist Identity in Lalo's Le Roi d'Ys [Elinor Olin] 7. Romantic Medievalist Nationalism in Schumann's genoveva, Then and Now [Michael S. Richardson] 8. The Middle Ages in Richard Wagner's Music Dramas [Barbara Eichner] Section 2: Performing the Middle Ages 9. Medievalism at the University: Collegia and Choral Societies [Jacob Sagrans] 10. Medieval Folk in the Revivals of David Munrow [Edward Breen] 11. Re-sounding Carl Dreyer's La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc [Donald Greig] Section 3: Medievalism and Compositional Practice in the Twentieth Century 12. Medievalism and Anti-Romanticism in Carl Orff's Carmina Burana [Kirsten Yri] 13. Past Tense: Creative Medievalism in the Music of Margaret Lucy Wilkins [Lisa Colton] 14. Hucbald's Fifths and Vaughan Williams's Mass: The New Medieval in Britain Between the Wars [Deborah Heckert] 15. Complexity and Appeal of Codex Chantilly Six Hundred Years Hence [Aleksandra Vojcic] 16. Linear Practices in the Music of Arvo Pärt [Laura Dolp] 17. The Postmodern Troubadour [Anne Stone] Section 4: Reimagining the Medieval Woman 18. Tolling Bells and Otherworldly Voices: Joan of Arc's Sonic World in the Early Twentieth Century [Elizabeth Dister] 19. Medievalism and Rued Langgaard's Romantic Image of Queen Dagmar [Nils Holger-Petersen] 20. Nature as Enlightenment in Vision-Aus dem Leben der Hildegard von Bingen [Jennifer Bain] 21. Disciplining Guinevere: Courtly Love and the Arthurian Tradition from Henry Purcell to Donovan Leitch [Gillian L. Gower] Section 5: Echoes of the Middle Ages in Folk, Rock, and Metal 22. Early Music and Popular Music: Medievalism, Nostalgia, and the Beatles [Elizabeth Upton] 23. ""Ramble On"": Medievalism as Nostalgic Practice in Led Zeppelin's use of J. R. R. Tolkien [Caitlin Carlos] 24. A Gothic Romance: Neomedieval Echoes of Fin'amor in Gothic and Doom Metal [Ross Hagen] 25. Viking Metal [Simon Trafford] 26. Medievalism and Identity Construction in Pagan Folk Music [Scott R. Troyer] Section 6: Medievalism of the Screen 27. From the Music of the Ainur to the Music of the Voiceover: Sounding Medievalism in The Lord of the Rings [Stephen C. Meyer] 28. Faith, Fear, Silence and Music in Ingmar Bergman's Medieval Vision of The Virgin Spring and The Seventh Seal [Alexis Luko] 29. Hope Against Fate or Fata Morgana? Music and Mythopoiesis in Boorman's excalibur [David Clem] 30. The Many Musical Medievalisms of Disney [John Haines] 31. Evil Medieval: Chant and the New Dark Spirituality of Vietnam-Era Film in America [James Deaville] 32. Fantasy Medievalism and Screen Media (Game of Thrones) [James Cook] 33. Gaming the Medievalist World in Harry Potter [Karen M. Cook]"
Stephen C. Meyer is Professor of Musicology at the University of Cincinnati's College-Conservatory of Music. He is the author of Carl Maria von Weber and the Search for a German Opera (2003) and Epic Sound: Music in Postwar Hollywood Biblical Films (2015) as well as numerous articles on topics ranging from nineteenth-century German opera to film music to the history of recorded sound. He is editor of Music in Epic Film: Listening to Spectacle (2016), and from 2014 to 2018 he served as the Editor-in-Chief for the Journal of Music History Pedagogy. Kirsten Yri is Associate Professor of Musicology at the Faculty of Music at Wilfrid Laurier University in Canada. She has published widely on the role of the early music revival and the intersections between music and medievalism in American Music, Intersections, Early Music, and Women and Music. Her work on medievalism and rock music (Dead Can Dance, Black Sabbath, and Corvus Corax) has been published in Current Musicology, Popular Music, and Postmedieval. Her recent research examines parody, gender, and social programs in Carl Orff's Trionfi against a context of German contemporary literary and philosophical debates.
