CHAPTER ONE

 

THE TROUBADOURS AND MUSICOLOGY

 

Introduction

 

The refined and courtly art of the troubadours continues to exert its fascination on both specialist and amateur alike. The already extensive bibliography of literary studies is constantly augmented by new contributions that often modify older perspectives as they attempt to bring us closer to the living reality of that art in its original setting. The problem of textual transmission, for example, which used to be addressed only insofar as it impinged on the making of editions and manuscript stemmata, is now understood as having a much broader significance relating to oral performance, poetic individuality versus anonymous creation, and the whole aesthetic of composition. And for those who simply wish to experience the poetic and musical legacy of the troubadours as directly as possible, new recordings and concerts are more generously available than before, with renditions that are often strikingly different from the older ones.

In surveying musicological studies of troubadour music over the past century, however, one is faced with a rather mixed result. Certainly our knowledge has come a long way since the first serious attempts to broach the topic by Restori and others at the turn of the twentieth century. There is an accurate edition of the melodies, though it only appeared as late as 1984,[1] and a thorough paleographical study of the largest of the four main music manuscripts.[2] Some important studies by Friedrich Gennrich and Hans Spanke from the 1930s attempted a formal typology of the songs premised on their historical development out of earlier repertoires. In the 1960s and 70s, several studies by Hendrick van der Werf challenged a number of previously held views on rhythm, transmission, and the nature and role of the musical aspect of the troubadour songs. There have also been two book-length studies of music/text relations in the works of individual poets, as well as numerous articles on various topics.[3]

A great deal of uncertainty nevertheless afflicts the current status of troubadour musical studies, some of it attributable to deficiencies in the sources, some perhaps due simply to divergent subjective opinions. A number of analytical approaches have been suggested, without any one achieving general acceptance and legitimacy. On the question of rhythm, which absorbed so much of the attention of earlier generations of scholars, there is no real consensus, even if the modal theory appears to have been finally laid to rest. Scholars who at first might seem to hold compatible views on the problem, such as John Stevens and Hendrik van der Werf, are instead at pains to point out the differences and flaws in the other's ideas.

On the interrelated questions of the intrinsic value of the melodies and their relation to the texts, one finds opinions so far apart that one wonders if it is the same object that is referred to. In studies of text/music relations, which tend to have a structuralist orientation, as well as in Gennrich's older formal analyses, it is taken for granted that a certain amount of conscious, individual exercise of technical skill is responsible for the structures discerned. For some of the scholars who stress the oral nature of the compositional context for troubadour songs, however, there is little sign of art or craft in the surviving notations. Van der Werf has referred to them as "remembered improvisations," and sees a stark contrast between the finesse and ingenuity displayed by the poets in devising their metric schemes, and the absence of these qualities in the melodies. For him the music does not do justice to the poems, this task being up to the performer, and it would be idle to seek any purposeful connection between the two elements, whose relation is practically haphazard.

But an oral culture of creation and transmission does not necessarily imply an improvisatory musical style, for just as the troubadour poets were able to create elaborate, complex, and finely wrought poetic structures without the aid of writing, so, surely, were they capable of inventing and memorizing melodies of comparable complexity (especially when one considers the relative brevity of the typical troubadour stanza). My own conviction is that the evidence from contemporary discussions and from the musical sources supports an aesthetic of relatively equal balance between music and poetry in these songs, and one of the intentions of the following study is to demonstrate some of the manifold ways in which the musical sophistication and artistry of the troubadour poets is manifested in surviving notations. 

The main purpose of the study, however, is to lay the groundwork for a codification of the troubadours' musical style(s) and compositional procedures, taking the entirety of the extant repertoire into account, a task that has barely been touched upon until now. To that end, the central focus of the study is on the broadest parameter of musical composition, that of form. There is no sharp dividing line between musical form and musical style, however, and many of the points brought forth could also be considered aspects of style. The approach adopted here is descriptive rather than historical; such an approach will also serve to remedy some of the deficiencies in Gennrich's formal studies and typology, whose revision is long overdue. Gennrich's analytical catalogue of the musical forms for all the troubadour songs is also in dire need of replacement, and the present study therefore includes a new formal catalogue for all attributed troubadour songs. This should provide a more accurate and detailed reflection of the contents of the sources, and thereby a more solid basis for further study in the field.

The other main focus of the present study is on the question of tonal structure in the repertoire. A representative sample of the songs was examined for evidence of functional ranking or differentiation among pitches, according to selected criteria. The two major reference points for this part of the study were the medieval modal system and the concept of interval chains, both of which were found to have some application. The latter had not previously been tested in any thoroughgoing manner, but only suggested. In regard to the modal system, what distinguishes the present endeavour from others known to me is the stress on criteria of a functional rather than merely classificatory nature.

The remainder of this chapter gives a brief chronological review of the major musicological studies from the past century. Chapter II examines the role of musical form in the aesthetic of the Provençal canso. The relevant twentieth‑century contributions to the subject are assessed and then Dante's discussion in the De vulgari eloquentia is also examined. The chapter concludes with an exposition of the principles and methodology employed in the analysis, graphing, and classifying of the troubadours' musical forms. The songs are grouped into five broad categories, and each of these is discussed and explored in Chapter III. Chapter IV is devoted to the question of tonal structure, and in the concluding chapter some of the prospects for future research in the field are outlined.

 

 

Overview of Research

 

Although a number of scholars from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, such as Charles Burney, Jean-Benjamin de La Borde, Charles-Edmond-Henri de Coussemaker, François-Joseph Fétis, and August-Wilhelm Ambros, had mentioned the troubadours and trouvères in their general music histories,[4] it was not until Antonio Restori's pioneering study of 1895 that serious work began in this field.[5] In spite of its deficiencies and modest aims, his article provided the first inventory of all the manuscripts containing music notation for songs in Provençal, transcriptions of thirty‑six songs,[6] (five in multiple versions) including all those of Peirol, as well as historical background on the poets, and some consideration of musical style and metric/musical forms.

Restori's transcriptions of the notation into durational values seem to have been based on intuition rather than any kind of system, but the issue of rhythm soon came to dominate scholars' attention and continued to do so for many decades, often overshadowing other questions.[7] Hugo Riemann proposed fitting all the melodies within his vierhebigkeit system in a series of articles beginning in 1897,[8] and Pierre Aubry's adumbration of the application of modal rhythm to the melodies was first presented as a reaction against Riemann's ideas.[9] Aubry's exposé of the modal theory, now of purely historical interest, takes up his entire 1907 article. In 1909 Aubry issued a book intended for a wider audience, containing literary and historical information on poetic genres and the lives of the troubadours and trouvères, mostly derived from literary scholars such as Alfred Jeanroy and Gaston Paris, but without any further discussion of the music.[10]

Aubry's 1907 article provoked a reply in the same year from Johann Baptist Beck, claiming priority in the discovery and formulation of the modal theory, and hastily outlining his version of it.[11] The following year his dissertation, Die Melodien der Troubadours....  was published, and whatever the merits may have been in the plagiarism controversy, there is no doubt that Beck's is by far the more substantial work.[12] The first half of Beck's book contains a detailed description and catalogue of the troubadour and related manuscripts, partly based on Restori's, a survey of their notational features, and some comparison of multiple versions; the second half is wholly devoted to the rhythmic interpretation of the melodies using the first three modes of medieval theory, applied according to the supposed meter of the poetic line. Though many examples are given, it is curious that none of them extends beyond the first or second line of a given piece.[13]

It was not until the 1930s that musical studies went beyond the problems of transcription to consider other aspects of the troubadour songs. Several important studies from this decade addressed the question of form. Théodore Gérold's general history of the music of the Middle Ages devotes a chapter to the "character and structure" of the medieval lyric, and his book is notable for the generous space alloted to other aspects of lyric in the vernacular as well.[14] A more ambitious confrontation with the question of form is found in Friedrich Gennrich's Grundriss einer Formenlehre of 1932, which is an attempt at classifying the entire repertory of medieval song into a few categories determined by musical form.[15] There are four of these large categories, the litany, rondel, sequence and hymn, and each is divided into several subcategories. Though Gennrich borrows many of his terms from medieval genre designations, these can be misleading, since he then treats his formal types as somewhat independent of any specific genre with which they may be associated in a given instance. He also prefers to give the music pride of place as the determinant of form; rhyme scheme and meter are strictly secondary.

One of the problems with Gennrich's endeavour, apart from its too ambitious scope, is that the systematic and historical aspects are constantly at odds with each other.[16] On the one hand, the formal types are viewed as ideal, abstract essences guiding the medieval composer's Formwille as it seeks its actualization in particular works; the author compares them to geometrical forms like the pyramid or square, or the formulas that define the molecular structure of matter. On the other hand, Gennrich clearly implies an historical relationship between the forms grouped under one category. As Ronald Taylor has pointed out, "the entire critical structure is thus built on a series of historical presuppositions: the derivation of an individual song‑form—and therefore of an individual song—depends on the establishment of a specific, exclusive historical sequence; but this sequence cannot be proved.  Also, as development proceeds, forms are evolved which can be traced back to more than one such basic type—sometimes, indeed, to a basic type which Gennrich does not include at all."[17] And, as the only criteria used to assess a piece is its musical form, this can lead to an often arbitrary typology in the cases where musical form alone is obviously not sufficient as a determining element.   

Under the large category of sequence‑type forms, for example, Gennrich includes the lai, and with it some related forms such as the "strophic lai" and "lai‑segments."[18] One of the features that makes the lai resemble the sequence is the immediate repetition of a metrical scheme with the same music in groups of short lines, known as responsion. On the strength of the pattern of musical phrase repetition, therefore, Gennrich applies the label "strophic lai" to such songs. Thus, Guiraut Riquier's Amors, pos a vos falh poders (P‑C 248,10),[19] is used to illustrate this form because its third and fourth musical phrases are repeated for lines five and six, and Gennrich graphs it like this:[20]

 

 

I.

II.

III.

γ    δ

α   β 

b8    a8

ε    ζ

a8   b8

........

d10   d10

xγ   xδ

c7   c7

 

Although many meters and rhyme schemes used by the troubadours can be ambiguous regarding the division of the stanza into frons and cauda, in this case Guiraut has used one of the most conventional patterns of all, with a clear division after the fourth line; both rhyme, meter, and syntax support this. The musical phrase repetitions do not override or contradict the textual division, especially since there is a marked similarity among all phrases in the song, but rather add another pattern which modifies the strictness of the standard form. In a typical lai, the repeated lines tend to be very short, and the repetition includes both rhyme and meter, not only music; a lai has rather long stanzas with somewhat irregular meters, and of course, each stanza is set in a different metrical pattern with different music. Any relation between the form of a song such as this one and that of the lai seems superficial in light of the more important differences.[21]

Gennrich's derivation of both the oda continua and the ABAB form[22] from the hymn also appears less than well‑founded, since Bruno Stäblein's publications of the 1950s demonstrate a wide diversity of musical forms for the hymn.[23] Less excusable is his application of the term vers to the oda continua musical form with no repeated phrases. The term was used by the earlier troubadours as the equivalent of the later term canso, referring to the same genre of love poem; it had no connotations regarding musical form, and a vers could just as easily be in ABAB form as through‑composed.[24] (His use of the term canso for the ABAB musical form is confusing for similar reasons.)  Gennrich's work was nevertheless an important survey of medieval song forms for its time.[25] Continuing research into individual repertories has increased our appreciation of their diversity, and in some ways has made the prospect of a synthesis such as Gennrich envisioned seem more, rather than less, distant.[26]

Although Gennrich announced a complete edition of the troubadour melodies in his Grundriss, this was not to appear until decades later, so that Ugo Sesini's edition of all the melodies in G (Bibl. Ambrosiana R. 71 sup.), in the early forties, was an important addition to the few available in published form.[27] The introduction discusses the manuscript's paleography, compares its readings with those in the other sources,[28] and gives the author's ideas on rhythm and metrics.[29] Each song transcription is accompanied by a page of notes that include the metric and melodic schemes, division of the stanza, ambitus, and modality (there is no reference at all to Gennrich's formal types).

The first volume of Gennrich's complete edition, containing the transcriptions, appeared in 1958, with volumes of commentary and an historical introduction following in 1960 and 1965.[30] Though far from ideal, this was to be the only edition available with all the melodies for another twenty years.[31] Apart from his concern with rhythm, form, and the search for  contrafacts, Gennrich paid very little attention to questions such as melodic style or modality, nor did hardly anyone else until the 1960s and 70s, when a number of new perspectives began to be explored that made many of the older studies seem limited and dated.

Troubadour musical style in itself has never been the subject of a full‑length study; an article by Bruno Stäblein from 1966 stands out for its attempt to address the issue in general terms.[32] Taking a few troubadours such as Bernart de Ventadorn, Folquet de Marseille, and Peire Vidal as representative of their time, Stäblein discusses three periods of distinct stylistic features: an early period characterized by a classic balance and regular proportion in melodic design, form, and meter; a middle period showing a more convoluted complexity, more melismatic, and with a mixing of long and short line‑lengths; and a later period showing the influence of simpler styles from the North or from more popular song forms, more syllabic, regular, and obvious in design.

Other perspectives were opened up under the influence of structuralism and a new appreciation of the role of orality, transmission, and performance context in shaping the troubadours' art. In a series of important articles followed by a book, Hendrik van der Werf challenged and revised several established ideas on the nature of troubadour and trouvère song in its historical context.[33] The search for an original, single, authentic version of a song, such as Gennrich had undertaken in his edition, is based on a misconception of medieval oral traditions. The many variants found in multiple versions of troubadour and trouvère melodies are not to be dismissed as corruptions or scribal errors, but should rather be understood as legitimate variants probably stemming from different performers' interpretations.

This recognition of an inherent variability of transmission has direct implications for the making of editions,[34] but it also has wider implications for van der Werf. In contrast to Gennrich's elevation of form to the level of ultimate principle in the troubadour aesthetic, he finds a marked disparity in value between textual and musical structures in both troubadour and trouvère songs. "Considering the care with which the troubadours and trouvères designed the form of their poems," he says, "and considering the agreement among the manuscripts regarding rhyme and stanzaic form, one would expect the authors, composers and scribes to pay equal attention to detail regarding the musical form. But the manuscripts make it abundantly clear that the form of the poem must have been of far greater interest to everybody involved than the form of the melody. Convention and lack of sophistication in the form of the melody are typical, while originality and attention to detail are exceptional."[35] Van der Werf has also described trouvère melodies as "remembered improvisations" that do not do justice to the poems, and that rarely exhibit any interconnection with the versification.[36] In considering melodic structure, therefore, he prefers to distinguish more elementary, generalized features such as recitation tones and third chains that he sees as common to many songs, rather than form. Van der Werf has also been one of the most forceful critics of the application of modal rhythm to troubadour and trouvère songs. Here too it is possible to trace some of his arguments to the oral nature of the musical culture; the nature of the variants indicates a free, "declamatory" style of performance, while modal rhythm belonged to a more learned, clerical sphere of musical training and practice that relied on notation.

The structuralist movement made its impact on medieval literary studies more strongly than on medieval musicology, but it did offer a new approach to the troubadour songs, especially in the area of text/music relations.[37] This can be seen in the study of Bernart de Ventadorn by Gisela Scherner‑Van Ortmerssen,[38] and also to a lesser degree in Margaret Switten's book on Raimon de Miraval,[39] the only book‑length studies treating troubadour text/music relations that have been published so far. Scherner‑Van Ortmerssen's approach selects several elements of structural significance in text and music, such as syntax, meter, word repetition and theme words, and semantics for the text, and melodic form, highest or lowest pitches, ambitus, melismas, and cadences for the music; for each song tables are drawn up showing the articulations of each structure and their interaction in the stanza.

Switten's study of the poems with melodies of Raimon de Miraval, which also includes an edition, has much in common with the previous one, but is less mechanical in execution. Instead of parsing each song by means of the various structural "grids" referred to, the author devotes separate chapters to the main elements of the songs: melody, versification, syntax, and meaning. For each division, the kinds of processes and structures at work are discussed with examples from the songs. In the chapter on melody, for example, Switten considers such factors as range, intervallic progression, shape, mode, form, and the repetition of smaller units than the phrase. Three subsequent chapters discuss the interaction of elements at the level of the line of verse, the stanza, and the whole song.

The type of approach used in these two studies, and in others that can be conveniently labelled "structuralist," is not necessarily at odds with one that seeks to come to terms with the fluidity of the oral tradition, but it is striking how much at variance are the resulting images of the nature and value of the music in authors who adopt one or the other of these approaches. It can be seen not only in the studies just discussed, but in more recent ones as well.[40] In their most extreme forms, the two points of view suggest on the one hand that the troubadours' conscious technical skill as composers was negligible, and on the other that it was at least as fully developed as their poetic craft. This kind of divergent image can be taken as symptomatic of a general uncertainty that plagues the current thinking of troubadour scholars. The question of rhythm may never be settled, yet even among those who reject the modal theory there is lack of agreement on an alternative.[41] There is also a lack of consensus on analytical approaches or methodologies; a number of different ones have been suggested, but none has achieved general acceptance or legitimacy.

The following chapter takes a closer look at the problem of musical form in the troubadour songs and outlines the principles and rationale behind the approach adopted  for the present study.

 

Contents                                Chapter II  »


[1] The edition referred to is that of H. van der Werf and G. Bond, eds., The Extant Troubadour Melodies: Transcriptions and Essays for Performers and Scholars (Rochester, N. Y., 1984).

[2] This is the study of ms. R by Elizabeth Aubrey in her dissertation, "A Study of the Origins, History and Notation of the Troubadour Chansonnier Paris, Bibl. Nat. f. fr.22543," (University of Maryland, 1982).

[3] The following section provides an overview of musicological research in the field from the turn of the century to the present day.

[4] C. Burney, A General History of Music (London, 1776‑89); J.‑B. de La Borde, Essai sur la musique ancienne et moderne (Paris, 1780); C. E. H. de Coussemaker, Histoire de l'harmonie au moyen‑âge (Paris, 1852); F. J. Fétis, Histoire générale de la musique, 5 vols. (Paris, 1869‑76); A. W. Ambros, Geschichte der Musik (Leipzig, 1884‑87). Of course philologists and literary historians had been studying the Provençal poets, though not their music, for much longer; E. Vincenti, Bibliografia antica dei trovatori, Documenti di filologia 6 (Milan and Naples, 1963) covers the period from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries.

[5] A. Restori, "Per la storia musicale dei Trovatori provenzali," Rivista musicale italiana 2 (1895), 1‑22 and 3 (1896), 231‑60, 407‑51.

[6] In terms of number of transcriptions, only Higinio Anglès provided a greater quantity before the 1940s with his edition of all 48 songs by Guiraut Riquier: "Les melodies del trobador Guiraut Riquier," Estudis Universitaris Catalans 11 (1926), 1‑78.

[7] The controversy over the rhythmic interpretation of the troubadour and trouvère songs has continued right down to the present day, as even the strongest opponents of the modal theory, such as Hendrick van der Werf and John Stevens, cannot agree in their alternative proposals for a more text‑based, free rhythm. Though the topic is an important one, it is not the main focus of this study, and I have not surveyed all the various versions of the modal theory put forth at one time or another during this century. This has been done by Burkhard Kippenburg in his book, Der Rhythmus im Minnesang (Munich, 1962).

[8] H. Riemann, "Die Melodik der deutschen Minnesänger," Musikalisches Wochenblatt 28 (1897); "Die Rhythmik der geistlichen und weltlichen Lieder des Mittelalters, Musikalisches Wochenblatt 31 (1900); "Die Melodik der Minnesänger," Musikalisches Wochenblatt 33 (1902); 36 (1905).

[9] P. Aubry, "L'oeuvre mélodique des troubadours et des trouvères," La revue musicale 7 (1907) 317‑32, 347‑60; issued separately as La rhythmique musicale des troubadours et des trouvères (Paris, 1907).

[10] P. Aubry, Trouvères et troubadours (Paris, 1909).

[11] J.‑B. Beck, "Die modal Interpretation der mittelalterlichen Melodien der Troubadours und der Trouvères," Caecilia 24 (1907), 97‑105.

[12] J.‑B. Beck, Die Melodien der Troubadours, nach dem gesamten handschriftlichen Material zum ersten mal bearbeitet und herausgegeben, nebst einer Untersuchung über die Entwicklung der Notenschrift (bis um 1250) und das rhythmisch‑metrische Prinzip der mittelalterlich‑lyrischen Dichtungen, sowie mit Übertragung in moderne Noten der Melodien der Troubadours und Trouvères (Strasbourg, 1908).

[13] Beck did include six complete songs in his book, La Musique des troubadours, Les musiciens célèbres (Paris, 1910), which is a popularization comparable to that of Aubry.

[14] T. Gérold, La Musique au moyen âge (Paris, 1932).

[15] F. Gennrich, Grundriss einer Formenlehre des Mittelalterlichen Liedes als Grundlage einer musikalischen Formenlehre des Liedes (Halle, 1932). Gennrich's system is also outlined in an article, "Das Formproblem des Minnesangs. Ein Beitrag zur Erforschung des Strophenbaues der Mittelalterlichen Lyrik," Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 9 (1931), 285‑349.

[16] The reviews by Spanke and Appel discuss most of the problems with Gennrich's volume. See H. Spanke's review in Literaturblatt für Germanische und Romanische Philologie 55 (1934), 104‑14, and C. Appel's "Zur Formenlehre des provenzalischen Minnesangs," Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie 53 (1933), 151‑71.

[17] R. J. Taylor, The Art of the Minnesinger, Vol. II (Cardiff, 1968), 279.

[18] The term lai comprises a very wide variety of longer song forms, but one of its main features is that the stanzas are all set in a different poetic form with different music.

[19] The abbreviation P‑C refers to the standard listing of all troubadour poets and songs in A. Pillet and H. Carstens, Bibliographie der Troubadours. Schriften der Königsberger Gelehrten Gesellschaft, Sonderreihe 3 (Halle, 1933). The number before the comma identifies the poet, the number following the individual song, and both numberings are in alphabetical order. The P‑C number also provides a convenient reference to the best complete edition currently available of the surviving music for troubadour songs, that of H. van der Werf and G. Bond, The Extant Troubadour Melodies: Transcriptions and Essays for Performers and Scholars (Rochester, 1984).

[20] Gennrich, Grundriss, 184‑85. Gennrich's superscript x's are meant to show a rhythmic variant of the same melodic line; the neumes over the final syllables in these lines are distributed differently to adjust for the shorter fifth and sixth lines, but Gennrich's rhythmic transcription makes them equal in duration to lines three and four. (It should also be noted that the second half of line four in his transcription is misplaced.)

[21] There are four genuine lais in the Provençal repertory, where they are known as descorts: the two anonymous Lai nom par (P-C 461,122) and Lai Markiol (P-C 461,124); Ses alegratge (P-C 205,5) by Guilhem Augier; and Qui la vi en ditz (PC 10,45) by Aimeric de Peguilhan. They are excluded from van der Werf's edition but are found in Gennrich's and Fernandez de la Cuesta's. See notes 24 and 25 below for references. One can make similar objections to the other Provençal songs classed by Gennrich under this term on pp. 183‑84 of his Grundriss.

[22] Oda continua is the term coined by Dante for a form without repeated units; "ABAB form" is not Gennrich's, but has been used by others (and will be in the present study) for forms that present this pattern of repetition in their opening lines.

[23] B. Stäblein, Hymnen, Monumenta monodica medii aevi I/1(Kassel, 1956; and "Hymnus," in Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, ed. F. Blume (Kassel, 1949‑68).

[24] The term is highly interesting nonetheless as an indicator of possible links with the paraliturgical versus of St. Martial. See J. Chailley, "Les premiers troubadours et les versus de l'école d'Aquitaine," Romania 76 (1955), 212‑39.

[25] Further discussion of Gennrich's formal studies is found in Chapter II, with particular reference to the analyses presented with his edition of the melodies.

[26] A somewhat different typology of song forms is found in Hans Spanke's Beziehungen zwischen romanischer und mittellateinischer Lyrik mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der Metrik und Musik, Abhandlungen der Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen, philologisch‑historische Klasse III/18 (Berlin, 1936). Spanke sees the metrical form of the text as the main determining factor for formal structure in the majority of medieval song forms, though he allows the musical form as primary in sequence‑related forms. His many works on Latin and Romance lyric can therefore be taken as a corrective to Gennrich's, although neither seemed able to recognize a relationship between text and music in which the two elements work together in a more balanced way, as I believe they do in the troubadour canso.

[27] U. Sesini, "Le melodie trobadoriche nel canzoniere provenzale della Biblioteca Ambrosiana (R. 71 sup.)," Studi medievali 12 (1939), 1‑101; 13 (1940), 1‑107; 14 (1941), 31‑105; 15 (1942), 189‑90; issued separately as a book, Turin, 1942.

[28] Sesini's frequent valuation of G's versions as superior to those in the other manuscripts seems somewhat subjective, and based as much on the manuscript's Italian provenance and location as on any tangible criteria.

[29] Sesini's transcriptions are ostensibly modal, but by using the sixth mode, he produces what amounts to an isosyllabic reading. His method of scansion in feet, based on accentuation patterns, is not considered valid for Old Provençal or Old French verse by most experts.

[30] F. Gennrich, Der musikalische Nachlass der Troubadours,1. Kritische Ausgabe der Melodien; 2. Kommentar; 3. Prolegomena. Summa musicae medii aevi 3, 4, 15 (Darmstadt, 1958, 1960, 1965).

[31] It suffers from other weaknesses besides the use of modal rhythm (applied in a wholly subjective manner) and the inherent deficiencies in the formal classification system. Gennrich did not balk at freely emending the form of any melodies he considered erroneous, without giving notice that he had done so; although over 65 songs appear in more than one version, Gennrich gives only a single, presumably "best" version for each song, without specifying which manuscript(s) it is taken from. I. Fernandez de la Cuesta's edition, Las Cançons dels Trobadors (Toulouse, 1979) gives the pitches in unmeasured note values, with the original note forms above the staff. It too contains many errors, and practically no commentary, except for the reproduction of Gennrich's formal graphs with each song. The most acceptable edition is that of H. van der Werf and G. Bond, eds., The Extant Troubadour Melodies: Transcriptions and Essays for Performers and Scholars (Rochester, N. Y., 1984), although it too has texts for only the first stanza of each song.

[32] B. Stäblein, "Zur Stilistik der Troubadour‑Melodien," Acta musicologica 38 (1966), 65‑90. An earlier article by H. Anglès, "El canto popular en las melodias de los trovadores provenzales," Anuario Musical 14 (1959), 3‑23 and 15 (1960), 3‑20, purports to reveal evidence of a folk style in the troubadour melodies, but the argument presented is somewhat circular and has more to do with rhythm than objective characteristics of musical style. Anglès finds that many of the transcriptions in modal rhythm are unappealing or uninteresting, while the use of duple rhythm can render certain songs more effective; from this he suggests that duple rhythms, associated with a folk style, might be more appropriate than the triple time of modal rhythm.

[33] Van der Werf's articles deal with trouvère songs, but the conclusions are intended to apply to the troubadours as well, though it is true that the author often fails to distinguish the two. The articles referred to are the following: "The Trouvère Chansons as Creations of a Notationless Musical Culture," Current Musicology 1 (1965), 61‑68; "Recitative Melodies in Trouvère Chansons," in Festschrift für Walter Wiora, eds. L. Finscher and C.‑H. Mahling (Kassel, 1967), 231‑40; "Deklamatorischer Rhythmus in den Chansons der Trouvères," Die Musikforschung 20 (1967), 122‑44; and "Concerning the Measurability of Medieval Music," Current Musicology 10 (1970), 69‑73. Many of the ideas from these articles are incorporated into van der Werf's book, The Chansons of the Troubadours and Trouvères: A Study of the Melodies in Relation to the Poems (Utrecht, 1972).

     Theodore Karp also authored some major articles that should be mentioned, but they deal with matters more specific to the trouvères than the troubadours. See his "Borrowed Material in Trouvère Music," Acta musicologica 34 (1962), 87‑101; "The Trouvère Manuscript Tradition," in Twenty‑fifth Anniversary Festschrift of the Department of Music, Queens College, ed. A. Mell (New York, 1964), 25‑52; and "Modal Variants in Medieval Secular Monophony," in The Commonwealth of Music, in Honor of Curt Sachs (New York, 1965), 118‑29.

[34] Van der Werf's own edition of trouvère melodies, Trouvères Melodien, 2 vols., Monumenta Monodica Medii Aevi, 11 and 12 (Kassel, 1977‑79), gives all the versions available for each song. The problems of transmission and variants in the troubadour melodies entail a thorough examination of the sources for their proper treatment; for the largest manuscript, this has been carried out by Elizabeth Aubrey in her dissertation, "A Study of the Origins, History and Notation of the Troubadour Chansonnier Paris, Bib. Nat. f. fr. 22543," (University of Maryland, 1982).

[35] Van der Werf, The Chansons, 63.

[36] Van der Werf, "The Trouvère Chansons," 67.

[37] One of the basic texts for the literary side is Paul Zumthor's Essai de poétique médiévale (Paris, 1972). The marked formalism found in troubadour versification has found some resonance in the French avant‑garde, and one of the members of Oulipo, Jacques Roubaud, has written a book on this aspect of the subject; it is titled La fleur inverse: essai sur l'art formel des troubadours (Paris, 1986). In musicology, a number of studies can be grouped together by virtue of their common structuralist affiliation: N. Ruwet, "Méthodes d'analyse en musicologie," Revue belge de musicologie 20 (1966), 65‑90, which is discussed in the following chapter; D. Halperin, "Distributional Structure in Troubadour Music," Orbis musicae 7 (1980), 15‑26; A. Pearce, "Troubadours and Transpositions: A Computer‑Aided Study," Computers and the Humanities 16 (1982), 11‑18. Certain of Gérard Le Vot's articles have a marked structuralist orientation, most evident in an article he co‑authored with P. Lusson and J. Roubaud, "La sextine d'Arnaut Daniel  —  essai de lecture rhythmique," in Musique, littérature et société au moyen âge. Actes du colloque 24‑29 mars 1980, eds. D. Buschinger and A. Crepin (Paris, 1980), 123‑57.

[38] G. Scherner‑Van Ortmerssen, Die Text‑Melodiestruktur in den Liedern des Bernart de Ventadorn (Munster, 1973).

[39] M. L. Switten, The Cansos of Raimon de Miraval: A Study of Poems and Melodies (Cambridge, Mass., 1985).

[40] Studies which assume a more or less improvised melodic idiom based on a skeletal melodic framework include: E. Aubrey, "Forme et formule dans les mélodies des troubadours," in Actes du Premier Congrès International de l'Association Internationale d'Études Occitanes 4‑11 août 1984, ed. P. T. Ricketts, Association Internationale d'Études Occitanes 2 (London, 1987), 69‑83; R. R. Labaree, "'Finding' Troubadour Song: Melodic Variability and Melodic Idiom in Three Monophonic Traditions," Ph.D. diss. (Wesleyan University, Conn., 1989). The following articles by Vincent Pollina suggest that the finest details of a melody's form may be worthy of attention as clues to the composer's intentions: "Troubadours dans le nord: observations sur la transmission des mélodies occitanes dans les manuscrits septentrionaux," Romanistische Zeitschrift für Literatur‑geschichte / Cahiers d'histoire des littératures romanes 9 (1985), 263‑78; "Canso mélodique et canso métrique: ‘Era.m cosselhatz, senhor' de Bernart de Ventadorn," in Actes du Premier Congrès International de l'Association Internationale d'Études Occitanes 4‑11 août 1984, ed. P. T. Ricketts, Association Internationale d'Études Occitanes 2 (London, 1987), 409‑22.

[41] One would have gathered that van der Werf's view on rhythmic interpretation, for example, as presented in his book The Chansons, was comparable in practical terms to that of John Stevens, since the former took the spoken delivery of the text as a model, and the latter also seeks to maintain textual values by advocating an isosyllabic performance. Stevens' ideas are outlined in his Words and Music in the Middle Ages: Song, Narrative, Dance and Drama, 1050‑1350 (Cambridge, 1986), and he is there (esp. pp. 502‑03) at pains to distinguish them from van der Werf's; van der Werf's disagreements with Stevens are set out in his review of Stevens' book in Journal of Musicological Research 8 (1989), 378‑86.

 

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