Gratifyingly, for the past several decades the lyrical poetry of Philip the Chancellor (d. 1236) and its music have enjoyed an increased resurgence of attention in literary and musicological circles. His dozens and dozens of songs, encompassing a wide variety of genres and styles, are at last being plumbed for the significance they hold for the musical efflorescence now commonly known as the Notre Dame school. This new book by Anne-Zoé Rillon-Marne, arguably the first of its kind in terms of both its length and its musicological focus on Philip, presents an important and welcome new contribution to the literature on this individual and his accomplishments in the realm of medieval song.

Charting a different course from previous studies of Philip's efforts, Rillon-Marne delves into the most prodigious of the various genres that he cultivated as a poet and (likely) composer. Earlier musical investigations of his poetry (including much of my own work) have tended to focus on Philip's activity in the polyphonic genres of the motet and his prosulas to such multi-voiced pieces as sections of liturgical organum or caudae of two- or three-part conductus. All these types together, though, pale in number when considered next to his monophonic songs. The sixty-odd compositions of this type that are ascribed to Philip in medieval sources represent the most numerous of his lyrical/musical efforts, and by themselves these form a body large enough to provide a workable sample for a study such as the one undertaken here.

In this book, the author devotes her attention primarily to a subset of Philip's works with texts she designates as ‘moral’. Such pieces are characterised by criteria that include the deploration of mankind's incentive towards evil conduct, a frequent use of biblical citation or paraphrase, and an attempt to reform the subject's behaviour. Rillon-Marne identifies twenty monophonic compositions that fall into this category, and investigates them for their appropriation of rhetorical techniques that are displayed not only in the poetry of these works, but also in the music that accompanies them. The great majority of this volume is given over to closely reasoned, deep analytical readings of how certain rhetorical tropes range over the repertory at hand. Verbal and musical figures are given equal weight, and the author stresses the myriad ways that each of the two elements may act in concert with or independently from the other.

The book is divided into eight chapters and closes with a collection of the twenty moral conductus that serve as the foundation of the investigations undertaken throughout the rest of the work. The main source for most of these pieces is the Florence codex (Florence, Biblioteca Medicea-Laurenziana, Pluteus 29.1, abbreviated here as F), and they are presented in the order in which they occur in this source. The final three pieces, absent from F, are edited from the manuscript generally known as LoB (BL, Egerton MS 274), the only extant source where a collection of Philip's poems is transmitted both with attributions and with musical notation. Each of the edited compositions is preceded with a table that lays out the formal structure of the piece, the primary source for the edition, concordances and contrafacta, and such bibliographical information as its appearance in catalogues, prior editions of the music and text, and a selection of literature. A transcription of the verbal text with an accompanying French translation follows, and each item concludes with the presentation of the piece itself. There is a minimum of editorial interference and commentary. The occasional readings that differ from the base source are presented as footnotes, the music appears without rhythmic indications as unstemmed noteheads, and with indications of ligatures by horizontal brackets and dashed slurs for coniuncturae. There is no collation of variant readings. The result is a clearly presented collection that allows for quick reference of the main material covered within the book.

The opening two chapters of the book serve primarily to place Rillon-Marne's study in a historiographical framework and to orientate the reader to the bases used for the choice of the repertory under investigation. The author takes pains to emphasise the novelty of her approach to the subject and the scope of her inquiry. Rightly recognising that musicological investigation into Philip's corpus has been dominated by an emphasis on polyphonic works and their historical and chronological development, she underscores the necessity of considering his monophonic collection, the largest body of all the various types of songs he has left behind. The history of the genre, as it obtains in Philip's pieces, is not to be a concern here. Rather, the author's intention is to explore what is contained in the works themselves as examples of musical and verbal expression that may be found throughout the repertory; she is interested in the typical, not the unusual. Furthermore, to avoid the complications and possible perils associated with determining which pieces were indeed written by Philip, she avoids the labyrinth of scholarly inquiry into additional attributions that engaged many earlier studies by relying nearly exclusively on the three larger collections that preserve his poetry under his name: LoB; Darmstadt, Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek 2777 (Da); and Prague, Castle Archive, Metropolitan Chapter Library, N VIII (Praha). This is a useful stratagem, as it avoids sabotaging the topic before it is able to get underway and still results in a significant number of pieces that are available for discussion.

One striking claim that pervades the whole book is the unapologetic assertion that Philip was indeed a composer. This allegation is particularly important in a work like this that seeks to demonstrate the closely intertwined nature of the rhetorical effects that underlie both the poetic texts and their accompanying music, as the results work even more forcefully with the likelihood that both words and melody proceed from the same hand. Earlier assertions (such as my own) that Philip's contributions lay primarily on the side of supplying the lyrics to his songs almost certainly were underpinned by a too cautious interpretation, influenced to a great extent by the concentration of Philip's role as a creator of prosulas and motets, works in which the music is often pre-existent. The assumption is also affected in no small way by the ascription to the chancellor of the poetry to Perotin's monophonic conductus Beata viscera, a work mentioned by the theorist Anonymous IV. There is no reason though, that these claims should outweigh other forms of evidence. Philip, for example, is described explicitly as a composer by the poet Henri d'Andeli in the dit he wrote in praise of the chancellor after his death. Also striking is the fact that nearly his entire attributed poetic corpus is transmitted with melodies within the earliest sources. In view of the repertory under consideration in this book, there should be little hesitation in accepting Philip's authorship of the melodies to many of his own poems.

Chapter Three of Rillon-Marne's book sets about separating the specific body of moralistic conductus as a type unto itself. The arguments put forth here for viewing the textual subjects as the main determiner of the typology, rather than, say, poetic structure or musical form and style, are convincing, since textual content per se is not a prime determinant of the musical framework of a conductus. The focus here is on delineating the seminal characteristics of the moral conductus: deploration of evil, an emphasis on biblical citation and paraphrase, and the admonition to adopt correct behaviour. With them emerge two primary themes that work towards the goal of persuasion. The first is an emphasis on contemptus mundi, the notion that the ephemeral, transitory state of human life exemplified by the temptations of the profane world should be disregarded so as not to jeopardise the possibility of the human soul reaching salvation. The other is the emphasis on criticism of clerical morality, where the larger concerns of mankind's salvation are set in contrast to the spiritual community that is appointed to help it achieve that transcendent state. Here in particular the vices of ambition, avarice, vanity and hypocrisy practised by a corrupt clergy are especially insidious, as their misdeeds can victimise the populace as a whole and threaten its acquisition of eternal life.

Within these thematic groups, common rhetorical actions obtain for both, given over to the necessity to establish communication with the listening audience and to convince it to hearken to the admonitions of the speaker/singer. For the former, this is accomplished primarily through the use of apostrophe, while persuasion often relies on the use of exclamation and rhetorical questions to move the auditors. Both of these techniques work in engaging the audience's attention in order to establish a direct line from speaker to hearer, the most basic step of any convincing performance. Once the speaker has his listener's ear, the stage is then set for the deployment of rhetorical colores, specific verbal ornaments used to construct and give aesthetic substance to a speech or poem. The demonstration of how such figures work is explored in the subsequent chapter of this book, where their usage is expanded to encompass the musical elements of the conductus.

In implementing rhetorical colores as an analytical tool to investigate the music from the medieval Parisian repertory, Rillon-Marne's methodology will doubtless remind readers of the similar strategies employed in Guillaume Gross's book of 2007.Footnote ¹ In that earlier work, passing references to the musical use of colores by the seminal music theorists Johannes de Garlandia and Anonymous IV allowed Gross to expand the small template of figures described by Garlandia to encompass a diverse set of melodic gestures that show close analogies to verbal rhetorical ornaments. These were then harnessed to provide an analytical basis for assessing the musical workings of the organa tripla and quadrupla of the Notre Dame repertory.

Rillon-Marne's inquiries rely on the same associations as Gross and present similarly impressive results. There are notable differences, though, in the material under investigation. The three-and four-part pieces investigated by Gross present a completely different type of construction from Philip's monophonic works. Not only are the various vocal lines of the tripla and quadrupla interconnected with each other as part of an intricate polyphonic complex coordinated by specified rhythms, but also the melodic content of the parts is at the same time more logically organised. It is more thoroughly repetitive, and relies to a much greater extent on motivic recall and interplay – both within each of the individual voices and among them. This may, indeed, be the reason why both theorists raised the issue of colores within the context of their discussions of polyphonic organa and conductus. As a result, in comparison with the much larger battery of figures that Gross is able to identify, Rillon-Marne is reduced primarily to two types: anaphora or repetitio, musical repetition that runs the gamut from exact restatement to looser connections of melodic contour; and gradatio, the use of melodic sequences, also varied in the types of treatment it may employ.

Nonetheless, despite the differences in the repertory examined by Rillon-Marne, the monophonic works examined here abet this type of analysis by the fact that they contain a far greater complement of verbal text than organa, poetry that is itself conducive to the implementation of rhetorical tropes. As she proceeds in her demonstrations in Chapter Four of how colores may be variously deployed within specific segments of the twenty moralistic conductus, the author highlights the use of verbal figures (principally repetitio and annominatio, or word play) as well as their musical parallels. The effect is to demonstrate that musical colores may not only undergird the same types of rhetorical techniques displayed in the lyric, but that they may also go their own way to inform elements in the pieces that are not immediately prompted by or apparent within in the text. These can lead ultimately to symbolic or allegorical interpretations of the material in the poem, providing a sort of musical exegesis for the individual conductus.

The ways that such a rhetorical analysis may apply to complete works are explored in the seventh chapter through the close reading of two differently configured conductus chosen as case studies to demonstrate the methodology. The first work, Homo considera, is a strophic composition with a repetitive form and syllabic setting that features a noticeable propensity towards recitational phrases akin to a psalm-tone. The other work, Ad cor tuum revertere, is an elaborate, melismatic four-stanza work with through-composed text and music. Despite this variety, both pieces work towards the goals of the moralistic conductus by trying to convince the hearer to change his behaviour for the better to acquire salvation. Each of these works is put through a thorough interrogation that uncovers the multiplicity of effects produced by the poetry and its melodic setting as a means towards achieving the poet-composer's moralistic end.

Prior to this demonstration, though, Rillon-Marne lays further groundwork in two chapters that first correlate the repertory of the moral conductus directly with sermons and sermon-making, and then demonstrate how the analogy of the sermon, with its own performative, orally realised construction and delivery, informs both the verbal and the musical resources deployed in the conductus. It is these claims above all that serve to anchor the concluding sections of the book. The connection to the homily of Philip's moral conductus, which often demonstrate a highly acerbic level in their criticism of mankind or clerical misdeeds, has been suggested before, as the author admits, but here the affinities are explored in greater depth and with a wider purview. The results provide a solid foundation for the readings of individual compositions that follow. The outcome is all the more persuasive in the demonstration of its contacts with the clerical milieu in which Philip worked and the relationships evinced by his own wide-ranging collection of sermons.

When all these affinities are ultimately brought together, the author is able to show successfully how a definable subset of the conductus repertory uses practices from a variety of intellectual domains inherent in the clerical culture in which Philip the Chancellor moved. The culmination of the book proposes seeing this group of moral conductus as a reflection of a type of musical ‘ministry’. The moral conductus is not a generic category per se, but a segment of the repertory that brings together fundamental principles also inherent in the pastoral duties of preaching: to communicate, instruct and persuade a listening audience towards the aims of God's word as communicated through scripture. The result is a fascinating study that not only encompasses Philip's own works, but also looks outward to the larger clerical and pastoral culture that informed the music of the Notre Dame school.