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📜 Upton, Elizabeth Randell. 2013. Music and Performance in Later Middle Ages, New York: Pelgrave Macmillan.
This book is informed by game studies in details, while staying strictly within musicology; although an early reference to "Musicking" maybe puts it (automatically) on progressive fringes of the discipline. Game connection is signalled early and has an interesting background: author's husband is Brian Upton, who was writing "The Aesthetic of Play" at about the same time.
Before focusing on play let's have a swift overview. A lot of space of the book is committed to verbal descriptions of music, so enjoyed by musicologists, apart from that we can see a lot of historical details, an original methodology, and polemics with earlier scholarship. Two main musical sources are manuscripts: "Chantilly Codex" and "MS. Canon. Misc. 213" (neither have been precisely dated, but Chantilly is older and both may be approximated to early 15th century or its turn). A composer that shows up most often, at a few points, is Guillaume Du Fay.
N.B. There is a general dispute on the topic of instrumentation of medieval music. Years back, there was a trend of treating many parts as instrumental, while this book's author is with the scholars who prefer much more vocal (or fully vocal) performances. In the book this is both corroborated and consequential, but, alas, most currently available recordings are instrumental takes.
Play
Play topic is mostly visible in chapter 4. Notably, game studies are indeed referenced here (Huizinga, Zimmerman, Juul, aforementioned Upton). The definition used is one of the more general: "free movement within a system of constraints" and it serves a rather narrow task, namely analyzing situations of composers, performers, and listeners. The experience of different music participants is the basic frame of reasoning even before introducing the play research motives.
Horizon of intent — A set of desirable moves at the given stage of the game.
Here in this chapter (titled "Listeners experience"), the "play" term immediately facilitates theorizing the role of repetition in medieval songs (mainstream musicology usually deals with less repetitive music). And, in general, the considerations are about what makes listening "fun" for the audience, with B. Upton's horizon of intent as an unnamed basis.
It's clear that games are quite a loose jumping off point for musicological insights. Also, it's worth noting that video games are a more suitable reference for author's aims, due to their real-time, moment-to-moment action. Of non-digital games, chess are used as an example more than one time, and Monopoly makes also a momentary appearance.
Nitpicks
Methodologically, the book advocates for using circumstantial evidence, asking questions about both practical restrictions and artistic intentions behind observed musical solutions. This type of reasoning gets complicated very fast, and it's easy to notice some shaky conclusions from scarce material, as the author proposes creative interpretations, while forgoing more mundane, like:
- from a specific setting of a sacral text (e.g. p. 70), book's author draws interpretative intentions; an example alternative, the fact that text setting may depend on fixed earlier modes of liturgical declamation is not discussed.
- from the fact that acrostics are present in the lyrics, book's author suggests that a song was functioning in written form, maybe as a gift (e.g. p. 95), but a possibility of the poem having an earlier life completely independent from a later musical setting is not ruled out.
You may also consider other claims unconvincing, it's natural for the matter, but all in all, the tone of such proposed findings is not overtly assertive, and they often may be easily interpreted as "example hypotheses" drawn from considerably early sources. Still, the very fact of bridging music and games stays a great feature of this well-written book.
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