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Response to TMR 17.12.08, Nancy van Deusen's review of Andrew Hicks, <i>Composing the World: Harmony in the Medieval Platonic Cosmos</i> (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).

Response to TMR 17.12.08, Nancy van Deusen's review of Andrew Hicks, <i>Composing the World: Harmony in the Medieval Platonic Cosmos</i> (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).


The recent TMR review of my book, Composing the World: Harmony in the Medieval Platonic Cosmos, is poorly written and inaccurate, even when reporting the book's most basic elements--the ISBN (recte: 978-0-19-065820-5), the series title (recte: Critical Conjunctures in Music and Sound), and the spelling of the book's dedicatee (recte: Édouard Jeauneau). Here I will respond to only a few of the most egregious errors.

At one point, the reviewer characterizes the book as a "project of relating music to what [the author] refers to as the 'school' of Chartres." The scope of the book extends well beyond Chartres, and I pointedly do not advocate for the long-contested "School of Chartres." The phrase appears on only two pages (9-10) and there only refers to literature that uses or discusses the idea. I provide a brief history of the concept and in fact approvingly cite its most prominent critic, Richard Southern. [1] After this brief two-page discussion, neither the "School of Chartres" nor modifiers such as "Chartrian" ever again appear in the book.

The reviewer characterizes my discussion of twelfth-century musical writings (in the book’s introduction) as a hunt “for something on the order of a modern textbook on music (indicated also by the heading of this section, 'Where are the writers on music?')." The full title of the section to which the reviewer refers is "Historical Motivations: 'Where are the Writers on Music?'" (5-11); the question in the heading is in quotation marks because it is not mine. It was posed originally by Lawrence Gushee in his 1973 article, "Questions of Genre in Medieval Treatises on Music." [2] My book provides one answer, and it is precisely the opposite of what is claimed in the review. As I argue on these pages and throughout the book, looking beyond a narrow focus on technical musical writings "offers sometimes surprising correctives to the 'standard history' of medieval music theory as viewed from the standpoint of the 'technical tradition'" (8).

The rest of the review fares no better. I gladly encourage readers to heed the reviewer's own referral to another review that "thoroughly addresses the contents of this book with excellent comments." [3]

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Notes:

1. Richard Southern, "Humanism and the School of Chartres" in Medieval Humanism and Other Studies (Oxford: Blackwell, 1970), 61-85; Platonism, Scholastic Method, and the School of Chartres. The Stenton Lecture 1978 (Reading: University of Reading Press, 1979).

2. Lawrence A. Gushee, "Questions of Genre in Medieval Treatises on Music," in Gattungen der Musik in Einzeldarstellungen: Gedenkschrift Leo Schrade, ed. Wulf Arlt, Ernst Lichtenhahn, and Hans Oesch (Munich: Francke, 1973), 365-433. At the beginning of his section on "writers of the eleventh and twelfth centuries," Gushee writes (410): "There is an extremely odd facet of this period which does not appear to have received sufficient attention: where are the writers on music west of the Rhine?" I cite and discuss Gushee's question throughout this section of the book.

3. Antonio Donato, Bryn Mawr Classical Review, 2017.09.41. See also Penelope Gouk's review in The British Journal for the History of Science 50 (2017): 545-547.