The use of alliteration and consonance (the repetition of consonant sounds in close proximity) in Aquitanian monophonic repertoires has been noticed in existing scholarship; scholars including Andreas Haug, Jeremy Llewellyn, and Mary Channen Caldwell ascribe various structural and mnemonic functions to it. In this article, I re-examine the presence of alliteration and consonance in Aquitanian versus and trope repertoires by focusing on the kinds of bodily engagement that they demand from singers and on how such engagements might have contributed to matters of musical structure, narrativity and relationship between text and music – all areas in which Aquitanian repertoires innovated greatly. Indeed, the repetitions of consonant sounds in close proximity would have likely demanded singers to engage their speech organs (lips, tongues, jaws, palate and abdominal support) in ways rather different from what we tend to find in the everyday repertoire that monks would have sung in Aquitanian monasteries. My discussion draws upon a range of medieval understandings of the body: from the widespread absence of bodily and organic matters in medieval singing treatises, to communal understandings of the body which would have likely resonated with monastic communities. The aim is not necessarily to reconstruct the performance practice of this repertoire, but rather to prompt a re-examination of it through its sonic and bodily aspects, gaining new understandings on the relationship between music in this repertoire and on their contextualization in a world where ideas about music, music-making and the body were changing.
Eva Moreda Rodríguez (Mon,) studied this question.