Published by the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, this volume examines the relationship between the theorization of speech and musical sound beginning in antiquity through the Carolingian ninth century. Sullivan, a musicologist associated with the UCLA Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, considers the ancient origins of the association between speech and music and statements of structural similarity between them in ninth-century music handbooks and treatises--Aurelian of Réôme's Musica disciplina, Hucbald of St. Amand's Musica, and the anonymous Musica enchiriadis and Scolica enchiriadis--and the implications of the use of this traditional association by ninth-century Carolingian scholars in their efforts to investigate the essential nature of music, to identify the fundamental principles that govern its appearances, and to apply those principles to the study and practice of contemporary liturgical music. She uses the work of cognitive psychologist David R. Olson to establish the model applied to the sound of speech and music (the alphabetic-phonetic system of writing that appeared around 750 BCE), then considers the "linguistification" of musical sound that proceeds from ancient Greek discussions of the nature of the physical material of speech and music, the origins of how human speech and musical sound were theorized with respect to the justification of specific privileged combinations of elements of each, how the grammatical discipline became a paradigm for the study of liturgical music, and evidence on the similarity in function of musical notation to alphabetic writing in the textualization of classroom performance. There is no index. Annotation ©2012 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com) Read Less