The Department of Music is pleased to announce that Associate Professor Emily Zazulia’s latest book–Where Sight Meets Sound–is the recipient of two recent awards: the Early Music Award from the American Musicological Society and the Emerging Scholar Book Award from the Society for Music Theory.
Released from Oxford University Press in 2021, Professor Zazulia’s book explores music notation during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries—a critical period in its development. Many pieces of music from this period required their singers to manipulate the music they saw before them in order to execute the composer’s intended sound. In the fourteenth or early fifteenth century, a musician might be asked to sing a line slower or faster, with a different rhythmic disposition, or starting on a different pitch than what is written. By the end of the century composers had begun crafting elaborate puzzles that force singers to read lines backwards, upside-down, or even to perform the notes in a different order than they appear on the page. In addition to situating these practices in the music theory and practice of the period, Zazulia opens up to questions that concern musicologists and scholars of all stripes: How is the experience as musicians and musicologists shaped by the intermediary of writing? What is the relationship between a musical creation and the tools available to create it? How do we overcome issues of cultural literacy in a land where we’re all foreigners? The Press' website attests that this book “reframes our understanding of late-medieval musical notation as a system that was innovative, cutting-edge, and dynamic―one that could be used to generate music, not just preserve it.”
Speaking on Professor Zazulia’s book, Berkeley Musicology Professor Mary Ann Smart said “Where Sight Meets Sound is everything I want in a scholarly book. Emily presents complex ideas in an engaging language, showing the reader why and how details of notation matter to how music sounds and to the evolving understanding of what music is. These arguments have implications far beyond the world of medieval music. She takes nothing for granted--an important part of the book's character comes from Emily's commitment to interrogating received wisdom and unseating musicological clichés. And she writes with a lively and often playful authorial voice that makes the book a total pleasure to read.”
In their citation accompanying the award, the American Musicological Society touched on the impact Professor Zazulia’s book could have on music historians, stating “...At a moment when music (thanks to the internet and Spotify) seems to have been thoroughly dematerialized, Where Sight Meets Sound reminds us of the ways it has always been dependent on mediation, and for most of its history in the West, upon inscription. The book traces the history of late medieval European works that are built upon transformed repetitions of musical material, magisterially combining close readings of myriad musical and music-theoretical sources with critical consideration of the semiotics and ontology of musical notation. Zazulia shows us how systems of notation were never simply neutral channels of the musical events they prescribe: they were instead ways of thinking that helped to shape musical discourse. This book is not only for specialists of tenor motets and canon, but is of relevance to everyone working on the history of music encoding throughout the Western tradition.”
The Society of Music Theory appreciated the book’s thought-provoking exploration of notation’s use, stating “Notation is commonly understood as a technology for representing musical sounds. Yet this book argues that notation can also shape musical structure, aesthetics, and theoretical concepts. Combining music analysis and music history, the book…offers insights about the creative and ontological significance of notation.”
The Music Department offers a heartfelt congratulations to Professor Zazulia on these accomplishments. For more information on Where Sight Meets Sound, visit the book’s page on the Oxford University Press website.