'The little pipe sings sweetly while the fowler deceives the bird': Sirens in the later middle ages

Music and Letters

Volumn 87, Issue 2, 2006, Pages 187-211

  Leach, Elizabeth Eva ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 43249162453     PISSN: 00274224     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/ml/gci250     Document Type: Article

References (112)

1. Kate van Orden, 'Sexual Discourse in the Parisian Chanson: A Libidinous Aviary', Journal of the American Musicological Society, 48 (1995), l-41;
2. Lcofranc Holford-Strevens, 'Tinctoris on the Great Composers', Plainsong and Medieval Music, 5 (1996), 193-9;
3. Linda Phyllis Austern, "'Sing Againe Syren": The Female Musician and Sexual Enchantment in Elizabethan Life and Literature', Renaissance Quarterly, 42 (1989), 420-48;
4. and ead., 'Nature, Culture, Myth, and the Musician in Early Modern England', Journal of the American Musicological Society, 51 (1998), 1-47.
5. See, however, Nancy A. Jones, 'Music and the Maternal Voice in Purgatorio XIX', in Leslie C. Dunn and Nancy A. Jones (eds.). Embodied Voices: Representing Female Vocality in Western Culture (Cambridge, 1994), 35-49;
6. Leofranc Holford-Strevens, 'Sirens in Antiquity and the Middle Ages', in Linda P. Austern and Inna Naroditskaya (eds.), Music and the Sirens (Bloomington, Ind., forthcoming);
7. Debra Hassig, Medieval Bestiaries: Text, Image, Ideology, (Cambridge, 1995);
8. Anthony Weir and Jim Jerman, Images of Lust: Sexual Carvings on Medieval Churches (London, 1986; repr. 1999), and n. 3 below.
9. On the gradual but out-of-phase iconographical and literary change from bird to mermaid see Jacqueline Leclercq-Marx, La Sirène dans la pensée et dans l'art de l'Antiquité et du Moyen Âge: Du mythe païen an symbol chrétien (Brussels, 1997).
10. In a recent article, Rob C. Wegman claims that a negative perception of polyphonic sweetness 'whether of consonance or of voice-production' is lacking in critiques of polyphony from before the Reformation; until then the ideal of sweetness is 'unassailable'. See Rob C. Wegman, "'Musical Understanding" in the 15th Century', Early Music, 30 (2002), 46-66 at 54, 56-7. His argument seems unsustainable in the light of literary sources such as those cited here.
11. The cuckoo is treated in this way in Jacob Senleches's En ce gracieux temps; see the comments on this piece in Reinhard Strohm, "La harpe de melodie" oder Das Kunstwerk als Akt dcr Zueignung', in H. Danuser et al. (eds.), Das musikalische Kunstwerk: Festschrift Carl Dahlhaus zum 60. Geburtstag (Regensburg, 1988), 305-16.
12. The Works of Sir John Clanvowe, ed. V.J. Scattergood (Cambridge, 1975). This poem has a narrative voice that seems to be one of the nightingale's partisans but whose reliability is undercut by the rhetoric of the poem.
13. For a fuller discussion see David Chamberlain, 'Clanvowe's Cuckoo', in id. (ed.), New Readings of Late Medieval Love Poems (Lanham, Md. and London, 1993), 41-65;
14. Lee Patterson, 'Court Politics and the Invention of Literature: The Case of Sir John Clanvowe', in D. Aers (ed.), Culture and History, 1350-1600: Essays on English Communities, Identities and Writing (New York and London, 1992), 7-42;
15. and, in particular, Helen Barr, Socioliterary Practice in Late Medieval England (Oxford, 2001), ch. 7.
16. The parrot gives the sermon at Venus' mass in Jean de Condé's satirical Messe des Oiseaux (early 14th c). In Chaucer's Parlement (c. early 1380s) the parrot is full of the concupiscence that leads old men to be lovers. In Cupide, the cuckoo calls the nightingale a 'papyngay' and the old narrator's desire to be a lover leads him to seek out the nightingale's song (see Chamberlain, 'Clanvowe's Cuckoo', 56-8).
17. Indian rose-ringed or Alexandrine parakeets (the parrots known to medieval Europe) were widely kept in the Middle Ages, along with jays and magpies, precisely for their ability to mimic human speech. See Brundson Yapp, 'Birds in Captivity in the Middle Ages', Archives of Natural History 10 (1981), 479-500.
18. Denis Foulechat, Le Policratique de Jean de Salisbury (1372), Litres I-III, ed. Charles Brucker (Publications Romanes et Françaises; Geneva, 1994).
19. The 14th-c. French translation reads 'par briseure de notes et de soubtil fleuretis'. The 'breaking' of notes corresponds to the widespread use of the Latin 'frangere' in theoretical descriptions of the rhythmic subdivision of notes. The phrase 'subtle flourishes' or 'flowerings' also indicates the rhythmic subdivision of long notes into smaller notes, the latter word being close to Petrus frater dictus palma ociosa's expression 'flores musice rnensurabilis' (flowers of measured music, that is contrapunctus diminutus), or the floratura of Franco and Jacques of Liège; Johannes Wolf, 'Ein Beitrag zur Diskantlehre des 14. Jahrhunderts', Sammelbände der Internationalen Musikgesellschaft, 15 (1914), 504-34 at 516;
20. Luminita Florea Aluas, 'The Quatuor principalia musicae: A Critical Edition and Translation, with Introduction and Commentary' (Ph.D. diss., University of Indiana, 1996), 140-1 and nn. 616-20.
21. See App., no. 1. I translate from the 14th-c. French text because of its greater temporal proximity to Arnulf of St-Ghislain (discussed below). Foulechat's translation updates some of the technical description of music, presumably to reflect current practices. See Foulechat, Le Policratique, ed. Brucker, I, 6, 11. 26-31, pp. 115-16.
22. For the Latin text, see Ioannis Sarisburiensis Policraticus I-IV, ed. K. S. B. Keats-Rohan (Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaeualis, 118; Turnhout, 1993), 1. 6, pp. 48-9.
23. Confessions, 10. 49-50.
24. For a discussion, see Bruce W. Holsinger, Music, Body, and Desire in Medieval Culture: Hildegard of Bingen to Chaucer (Stanford, 2001), 69-78.
25. De musica 1. 4-6.
26. Citing the parrot specifically, in his Hexameron Ambrose comments that with some birds one would think a man and not a bird had perpetrated the utterance; see St Ambrose, Hexameron, Paradise, and, Cain and Abel, trans. John J. Savage (Washington, DC, 1977), 200.
27. An epigram by Martial about the pica (woodpecker, jay, or magpie) to this effect is found in bestiaries. See F. MacCulloch, Medieval Latin and French Bestiaries (University of North Carolina Studies in the Romance Languages and Literatures, 33; Chapel Hill, NC, 1960), 142-3.
28. Christopher Page, 'A Treatise on Musicians from ?c. 1400: The Tractatulus de differentiis et gradibus cantorum', Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 117 (1992), 1-21.
29. see Michael Bernhard, 'La summa musice du Ps.-Jean de Murs: Son auteur et sa datation', Revue de musicologie, 84 (1998), 19-25,
30. 6; Munich, 2003), 55-7.
31. Page, 'A Treatise on Musicians', 20 (trans.), 16 (text). This paragraph on women comes between a discussion on the theme of the art of Musica and Nature's gifts, which might suggest that it is a scribal addition, especially when its illogicality (the unholy kitchen-sink mixture of angels, [pagan] goddesses, and earthly sirens) is considered. However, there is no obvious visual change in the manuscript and links between this passage and Alan of Lille's De planctu Naturae (links shared with the rest of the treatise; see below) tend to support its authorial status.
32. Volez vous que je vous chant (from the chansonnier Paris, Bibliothèque de 1'Arsenal 5198); text and translation in Songs of the Troubadours and Trouvères: An Anthology of Poems and Melodies, ed. Samuel N. Rosenberg, Margaret Switten, and Gérard Le Vot (New York and London, 1998), 195-6.
33. Wendy Pfeffer, The Change of Philomel: The Nightingale in Medieval Literature (New York, 1985), 1,
34. citing French text from Two Old French Poems of Saint Thibaut, ed. Raymond Thompson Hill (Yale Romanic Studies, 11; New Haven, 1936), stanza 139,11.656-9.
35. This clerical condemnation has deep roots in 3rd- and 4th-c. patristic sources in which the siren served as a stock clerical way of criticizing female participation in secular music-making, particularly the music made at debauched wedding banquets. See James McKinnon, Mask, in Early Christian Literature (Cambridge, 1987), 1-6, where 'banquets' are extensively indexed.
36. See also Leclercq-Marx, La Sirène, ch. 2.
37. Alternatively, the different authorial voices of these two poems - the Augustinian suspicion of the embodied voice, and the troubadour celebration of it as socially ethical - might be seen to correspond to those discussed in Stephen G. Nichols, 'Voice and Writing in Augustine and in the Troubadour Lyric', in A. N. Doane and C. B. Pasternak (eds.), Vox intexia: Orality and, Textuality in the, Middle Ages (Madison, Wis., 1991), 137-61.
38. Timothy J. McGee, The Sound of Medieval Song: Ornamentation and Vocal Style according to the Treatises (Oxford, 1998), 24-5;
39. Holsinger, Music, Body, and. Desire, 137-8;
40. Page, 'A Treatise on Musicians', 13-14.
41. The description of the musical practice of Arnul Ps sirens is especially intriguing. In singing, says Arnulf, this group 'freely divides tones into semitones with a sweet-sounding throat, and divides semitones into indivisible micro tones'. Page finds this reference 'uncertain', asking what it means and why it should be considered a particularly female accomplishment ('A Treatise on Musicians', 13). Whether Arnulf is here even describing such a practice as a genuine 'female accomplishment' is open to question. The unequal division of the semitone and the resulting sub-tonal intervals were, within the context of a theoretical framework received from the Greeks, perceived as feminine in themselves, without necessarily being performed by women. Ancient Greek theory deems 'feminine' music that is soft, feral, and unstable, and associates it particularly with the chromatic genus, whose sub-tonal divisions were variable. The form in which the vocabulary and moral judgements of aspects of Greek music theory washed up on the shores of the 14th c. affected the theoretical reception and legitimation of musica ficta and the sub-tonal intervals used in contrapuntal cadentiae. I treat the late medieval gendering of the leading note in 'Gendering the Semitone, Sexing the Leading Tone: Fourteenth-Century Music Theory and the Directed Progression', Music Theory Spectrum, 28 (2006).
42. See Holford-Strevens, 'Sirens in Antiquity and the Middle Ages'. Holford-Strevens thinks it likely that one of the two Homeric Sirens combined the skills of singing and playing the cithara.
43. They are often depicted with long hair and a mirror to represent the vanitas or luxuria of Venus, although Thomas of Cantimpré's long-haired siren is described as being ugly. Ibid., and Hassig, Medieval Bestiaries, 104-5.
44. For the classification of the bestiary types see MacCulloch, Medieval Latin and French Bestiaries, esp. pp. 166-9 for the entry on the siren.
45. It should be noted that one of the four short versions of Pierre's bestiary forms part of the La Clayette manuscript, Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, n.a.f. 13521, which contains a large number of polyphonic motets. An examination of siren representations in bestiaries, both text and image, shows that she is usually described in the text as a woman-bird instrumentalist or singer but is often depicted as the now more familiar mermaid-like fish-woman - a tradition deriving from Hugh of Fouilly (Folieto). See The Medieval Book of Birds: Hugh of Fouilly's De avibus, ed. Willene B. Clark (Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 80; Binghampton, NY, 1992).
46. Servius' 5th-c. AD commentary on Vergil notes that 'The Sirens, according to myth (secundum fabulam), were three part-maidens part-birds . . . One of them sang, another played the double aulos, the other the lyre . . . Those whom they enticed by their music they led into shipwreck. But in fact (secundum, ueritatem) they were harlots; it was because they reduced passers-by to beggary that the fiction arose of their causing shipwrecks.' Cited in Holford-Strevens, 'Sirens in Antiquity and the Middle Ages'. Holford-Strevens points out that Isidore's 7th-c. account (Etymologies, 11. 3. 30-1) uses very similar words.
47. This is the sense in which nature and reason are opposed in the case of humans, since it is natural to the fallen human state that desires are unchecked by the grace humanity no longer has. While it is natural for a man to desire many women or endless food, it is not morally correct in the light of human reason, as Aquinas, for example, stresses; see Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (New York, 1948-9), 2. 2. 148. 2.
48. My attention was drawn to this passage by Denis Vlahovic's paper on 'Aquinas on the Causes of Intemperate Desire', given at the 38th International Medieval Congress, Kalamazoo, 2003.
49. See also the comments on natural law in Hugh White, Nature, Sex, and Goodness in a Medieval Literary Tradition (Oxford, 2000), ch. 1.
50. Fulgentius, Mitologiae 2.8, in Fabii Planciadis Fulgentii V. C. Opera, ed. Rudolfus Helm (Leipzig, 1898), 48-9
51. See Susan Boynton, 'The Sources and Significance of the Orpheus Myth in Musica Enchiriadis and Regino of Prüm's Epistola de Harmonica, Institution', Early Music History, 18 (1999), 47-74.
52. Ruth Mazo Karras, 'Prostitution in Medieval Europe', in Vern L. Bullough and James A. Brundage (eds.), Handbook of Medieval Sexuality (New York and London, 1996), 243-60.
53. She explores these themes more fully in Ruth Mazo Karras, Common. Women: Prostitution and, Sexuality in Medieval England (Oxford, 19961.
54. MacCulloch, Medieval Latin, and French Bestiaries, 167.
55. See W. B. Clark and M. T. McMunn, Beasts and Birds of the Middle Ages: The Bestiary and its Legacy (Philadelphia, 1989), 180.
56. Cistercian clerics appear to have been in the forefront of 12th- to 14th-c. condemnations of the theatrical gestures and 'lascivious', 'effeminate' singing styles of choirs, whose members Ailred of Rievaulx calls effeminate and lust-inspiring; see McGee, The Sound of Medieval Song, 22-4. It has been suggested that the papal decretal Docta sanctorum (1324-5), which condemns singing practices (rather than, as is commonly supposed, notational or compositional practices) in terms similar to those used by John of Salisbury and Ailred, was issued in response to pressure from Cistercians and may even have been modelled on Cistercian statutes already in existence. Article IX of the Statues of the General Chapter of the Cistercian Order (1320) refuses to tolerate ridiculous novelties, including sincopationibus notarum and hockets. Both are banned as being dissolute rather than devout.
57. See William Dalglish, 'The Origin of the Hocket', Journal of the American Musicological Society, 31 (1978), 1-20 at 9;
58. S. J. van Dijk, 'Saint Bernard and the Instituta Patrum of St. Gall', Musica Discipline 4 (1950), 99-109.
59. See e.g. Weir andjerman, Images of Lust. An extensive set of images of sculpted sirens can be found in the Appendix to Leclercq-Marx, La, Sirène.
60. On female minstrels see Kay Brainerd Slocum, 'Confrérie, Bruderschaft and Guild: The Formation of Musicians' Fraternal Organisations in Thirteenth- and Fourteenth-Century-' Europe', Early Music History, 14 (1995).
61. On the carole see New Grove II, 'Carole';
62. Jacques Chailley, 'La Danse religeuse au moyen âge', in Arts libéraux et philosophie au moyen âge: Actes du quatrième congrès international de philosophie médiévale (Université de Montréal, Montréal, Canada / 27 août - 2 septembre 1967) (Montreal, 1969), 363;
63. Christopher Page, Voices and Instruments of the Middle Ages: Instrumental Practice and Songs in France 1100-1300 (London, 1987), 77-84,
64. and The Owl and the Nightingale: Musical Life and Ideas in France 1100-1300 (London, 1989), 110-33.
65. Lines 322-5: 'Cil qui aiment tragitaours / Tumeresses et juglaours / Cil ensevent, ce n'est pas fable / La procession an deable.'Paul Meyer, 'Le Bestiaire de Gervaise', Romania, 1 (1872), 420-43 at 430. Perhaps Gervaise shows some scepticism with his 'if it isn't just a story'-the rhyme could have been achieved equally well with 'sanz nulle fable' (in truth).
66. See the sermon from London, British Library, MS Harley 3823 cited in Page, The Owl and the Nightingale, 14-15.
67. See Joan Cadden, Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages: Medicine, Science, and Culture (Cambridge, 1993), chs. 3-4.
68. On this odd derivation see Noel Swerdlow, "'Musica dicitur a moys, quod est aqua'", Journal of the American Musicological Society, 20 (19671, 3-9,
69. and Albert Van der Linden, 'Gloses sur l'étymologie du mot "musique"' in Karel Constant Peeters and Robert Roemans (eds.), Miscellanea J. Gessler (Deurne, 1948), ii. 735-41.
70. De musica mensurata: The Anonymous of St. Emmeram, ed. Jeremy Yudkin (Bloomington, Ind., 1990), 66-7.
71. See also Swerdlow, '"Musica dicitur a moys'"'.
72. Isidore (Etymologies, 3. 19);
73. see Source Readings in Musk History, ed. Oliver Strunk, rev. edn., ed. Leo Treitler, ii: The Early Christian Period and the Latin Middle Ages, ed. James McKinnon (New York and London, 1998), 40-1;
74. Isidori Hispalensis episcopi Etymologiarum sive originum libri XX, ed. W. M. Lindsay, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1911).
75. Aribo, De musica, ed. J. Smits van Waesberghe (Corpus scriptorum de musica, 2; [Rome], 1951), 36-7. 'Syrtes' refers to quicksands, especially those off Libya; Syrus is the Syrian slave in Terence's Heautontimorumenos. The opening 'not unreasonably' could also be read as 'not discordantly'. For these points and the translation I thank Leofranc Holford-Strevens.
76. On this derivation using Isidorean categories, see also Gabriela Ilnitchi, 'Aribo's De musica: Music Theory in the Cross-Current of Medieval Learning' (Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1997), 171-2 n. 90.
77. This term is from the excellent analysis of Jan M. Ziolkowski, Alan of Lille's Grammar of Sex: The Meaning of Grammar to a Twelfth-Century Intellectual (Speculum Anniversary Monographs, 10; Cambridge, Mass., 1985).
78. Modern edition in Nikolaus Häring, 'Alan of Lille De planctu Naturae', Studi medievali, 19 (1978), 797-879.
79. See Holsinger, Music, Body, and Desire, 137-9.
80. Isidore condemns male masturbation in much the same terms, since the body remains languid. This is part of the gendered nature of complexion (see above) in which men are naturally active, women naturally passive in sex. The temporarily warming function of the active thrusting of the male in coitus was seen to strengthen the naturally colder woman. This would stimulate her desire, but since coldness is her natural state it could never be sated. Excessive coitus was thought, for the same reason, to weaken (and thus make effeminate) the man. See Joyce E. Salisbury, 'Gendered Sexuality', in Bullough and Brundage (eds.), Handbook of Medieval Sexuality, 81-102.
81. As Häring notes ('Alan of Lille De planctu Naturae,' p. 816), the term 'gumphos' comes from Calcidius' commentary on Plato's Timaeus whose reading leads him to preserve 'inuisiblies' in Alan's text, although most sources, especially those copied before Arnulf, have 'indiuisibiles'. Arnulf s text probably read 'indivisibiles'; Arnulf s 'atoms' is a synonym for gumphos.
82. Alan of Lille, The Plaint Nature, trans. James J. Sheridan (Mediaeval Sources in Translation, 26; Toronto, 1980), 165, 166.
83. See also Ziolkowski, Alan of Lille's Grammar of Sex, 33-4.
84. See Richard Hamilton Greene, 'Alan of Lille's De plnctu naturae', Speculum, 31 (1956), 649-74.
85. See Leach, 'Gendering the Semitone'.
86. See Ruth Mazo Karras, From Boys to Men: Formations of Masculinity in Late Medieval Europe (Philadelphia, 2003), 67-108.
87. Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius, Fundamentals of Music, trans. Calvin M. Bower (New Haven and London, 1989), 2-3.
88. Policraticus, 1. 6.
89. Translation Joseph B. Pike, Frivolities of Courtiers and Footprints of Philosophers: Being a Translation for the First, Second, and Third Books and Selection from the Seventh and Eighth Books of the Policraticus of John of Salisbury (Minneapolis, 1938), 33.
90. The French translation shifts the focus to the church: 'But the style [maniere] of Phrygia and the other dissolutions, attracting [listeners] to corruption by means of foolish pleasure, are not useful to holy institutions, but declare the malice of those who abuse them' (Foulechat, Le Policratique, ed. Brucker, 1. 6,11. 25-6, p. 115).
91. The complete distich is 'Noli homines blando nimium sermone probare; / Fistula dulce canit, volucrem dum decipit auceps.' The second line of this text is used by Aegidius of Zamora in his music treatise, Ars musica, ed. Michel Robert-Tissot (Corpus scriptorum de musica, 20; n.p., 1974), 122.
92. The Medieval Book of Birds, ed. Clark, 242-3: 'It is reported that many swans fly to the singing lyricists in the northern regions, and join properly in the mode.'
93. The clapstick is a visual equivalent of the vagina dentata, a fact reflected in its German terminology (the word Klobe could also mean vagina, making it a kind of Charybdis-like maw whose two grooved wooden sticks snapped shut on the birds the 'birdsong' of the fowler had enticed to land upon it). See John Cummins, The Hound and, the Hawk: The Art of Medieval Hunting (London, 2001), 243.
94. Chapter 138, 11. 62-8 of Les Livres du Roy Modus et de la Royne Ratio, ed. Gunnar Tilander, 2 vols. (Paris, 1932), i. 309.
95. 'he doop as a foulere pat taaketh first a brid and maakep perof a wacchebrid and settep it bisyde his net for to synge. And panne whanne pat oother briddes seen it and heeren it syngc pei fallen alle doun to it. And pe foulere drawep his net and so taaketh hem. And summe of hem he sleep, and summe he keepep to maake wachbriddes of for to bigyle with alle the wachbriddes and eeke pilke pat he taketh. And rizt so pe feend, whan he may taaken a leccherous man, he feedith hym ofte with pe foule lustes of his flessh and of pe worlde als. And panne he taakep hyrn and maakep of hym his wach for pat he shulde with enticynge and euel ensaumple maaken moo to fallen and to been ykauzt in pe feendes net'; The Works of Sir John Clanvowe, ed. Scattergood, 71.
96. The Works of Sir John Clanvowe, ed. Scattergood, 72.
97. See Sylvia Huot, From Song to Book: The Poetics of Writing in Old French Lyric and Lyrical Narrative Poetry (Ithaca, 1987], 136-8,
98. and Jeanette Beer, Beasts of Love: Richard de Fournival's Bestaire d'amour and the Response (Toronto, 2003).
99. For the French text see Li Bestiaires d'amours di maistre Richart de Fonrnival e li response du bestiaire, ed. Cesare Segre (Documenti di fil-ologia, 2; Milan and Naples, 1957).
100. Richard had opened his poem vowing to abandon 'song', that is, lyric poetry, 'because of my fear of the swan's death when I sang my best, and of the cricket's death when I sang most easily, I abandoned song to make this arrière-ban [a last-ditch attempt to call for military aid], and I sent it to you as a sort of counterstatement'; Richard de Fournival, Master Richard's Bestiary of Love and Response, trans. Jeanette Beer (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London, 1986), 5; one source has a nightingale rather than a cricket for this example.
101. Li Bestiaires d'amours, ed. Segre, 29-31.
102. See Helen Solterer, 'Seeing, Hearing, Tasting Woman: Medieval Senses of Reading', Comparative Literature, 46 (1994), 129-45 at 135.
103. Richard's Bestiary opens by quoting Aristotle's Metaphysics; the reference here is probably to De anima, 2. 5-11, which treats the senses. This ranking is equally Platonic and may be found, for example, in Alan of Lille's Anticlaudianus. See also Elizabeth Sears, 'Sensory Perception and its Metaphors in the Time of Richard of Fournival', in W. Bynum and R. Porter (eds.), Medicine and the Five Senses (Cambridge, 1993), 17-39.
104. Richard de Fournival, Bestiary of Love, 13. Richard briefly treats this in a way that is reminiscent of the theoretical treatment of music's effect, mentioning the use of music at weddings and funerals.
105. This Platonic idea features in a number of the references to sirens in music theoretical writings in connection with the description of Er from Plato's Republic. Plato has a siren singing a note of constant pitch atop each of the eight circles of the spindle to make up a scale. That these celestial sirens were held in the Middle Ages to be unrelated to the Sirens of the Odyssey may be seen in attempts to explain or emend Plato's text. Macrobius, for example, explains that these are in fact muses, making the same point found in Alan of Lille, that Plato cloaks truth (about the harmonic proportions of the heavens) with a fiction (about their music being the song of sirens). Other writers tend to report that they are in truth angels in nine orders. See Giorgio Anselmi, De musica: Dieta prima de celesti karmonia, dieta secunda de instrumentali karmonia, diefa tertia, de cantabili karmonia, ed. Giuseppe Massera ('Historia musicae cultores' biblioteca, 14; Florence, 1961), 103.
106. 1.
107. See also Jean-Marie Fritz, Paysages sonores du Moyen Âge: Le versant épistémologique (Paris, 2000), 146-9. It is important in this connection that Arnulf stresses that his sirens are terrestrial; therefore, they are not figuring extra-mundane divine truths but more earthly (even earthy) verities.
108. Cf. Macrobius: 'Is it at all strange if music has such power over men when birds like the nightingale and swan and others of that species practice song as if it were an art with them.' Macrobius Ambrosius Theodosius, Commentary on the Dream of Scipio, trans. William Hams Stahl (New York, 1952), 195.
109. Text and translation in Sister Mary Protase LeRoux, RSM, 'The "De harmonica Institutione" and "Tonarius" of Regino of Prüm [Latin Text with English Translation]' (Ph.D. diss., Catholic University of America, 1965), 43.
110. See Jacques de Liège, Speculum musicae, ed. Roger Bragard, 7 vols. (Corpus scriptorum de musica, 3; Rome, 1955-73), Book 1, ch. 18.
111. Page, 'A Treatise on Musicians', 11.
112. Jean de Murs, Écrits sur la musique, ed. Christian Meyer (Paris, 2000), 134-7. Johannes de Muris explicitly harmonizes Boethius' treatise with Aristotle's ethical and political writings.