Vernacular Song Flashcards
Chansonnier/”song-book”
A book/manuscript that contains a selection of songs, or polyphonic/monophonic settings of songs
Chansonnier St Germain (trouvère) does not rely on a specific motif
Eg there is a 3-note group of a falling 2nd>falling 3rd, but this only occurs once in the book
This occurs in 30 songs in l’Arsenal and 6 times in Cangé
Ian Parker 1979
St Germain contains 352 lyric songs, mostly in French
Only less than half are notated
St Germain- ‘belongs to the central tradition of trouvère song’ in ‘textual and melodic composition’
Ian Parker 1979
St Germain is striking for a trouvère composition, because it contains lots of lacunae (extended passages where no notes are played)
Ian Parker 1979
Argues that St Germain is unique for its early date (explains why only half is notated?); many manuscripts are relatively later
Raynaud (early 1400s)
St Germain- ‘rich and complex oral tradition’, ‘modest and everyday use’, may have been a performance instead of royal library copy
Ian Parker 1979
Features of St Germain manuscript- no illuminations, ‘frequent erasures and crossings out’, blank spaces filled by another scribe who used sweeps on uprights when copying
Ian Parker 1979
Scribal error in St Germain
Monophonic song ‘A l’entrada del tens clar’- also appears as one of the voices in a 3-part conductus in the Notre Dame manuscripts.
This Notre Dame version is a tone higher- notation error?
Explanation- scribes of both manuscripts copied from a faulty source
Falsa musica
Errors arising in manuscripts from copying, variation etc
Evaluation- St Germain
We still need to consider the authenticity of the many accidentals in St Germain (there were flats inserted to ‘correct’ tritones) by investigating the inks used to copy
St Germain likely was a ‘haphazard collection’, for a ‘private collector’ before it was made into a royal copy, which has now been lost
The troubadours and trouvères
Lyric-poets/poet-musicians in France, 12th and 13th centuries
Troubadours
South of France, wrote in Provencal
Trouvères
North of France, wrote in French
Timeline
Troubadours’ early songs > 100 years > Trouvères
Troubadours- ‘earliest and most significant exponents of…music and poetry in medieval Western vernacular culture’
Stevens 2001
460 troubadours, 2600 surviving poems (but only 1/10 had melodies)
Pillet and Carstens 1933
Pillet and Carstens’ ‘Bibliographie’ (1933)
Lists all the known troubadours
Considered an important reference work as it includes an anthology of poems by 122 poets
Troubadours’ social status in 19th century (Stevens 2001)
Seen as romantics in 19th century, but later on, more ‘careful’ and ‘realistic’ view by scholars
This realistic view is that the troubadour was ‘serious, well-educated and highly sophisticated’ as a ‘verse-technician’
‘Well placed in courtly society’
Middle Ages romanticised troubadours- ‘highly romanticised fictions’ of their lives from surviving poems
Troubadour Jaufre Rudel
Fictitious account- nobleman and prince, composed songs with good music and bad poetry
Recovered sense of hearing and smell as he saw his love interest, the countess
Reflects how music and poetry are combined in courtly love, fin’amors
Fin’amors
Ideal love, 12th century trope
Troubadours’ ‘distinctive contribution… to Western literary culture’
Modern term ‘courtly love’
Coined by Gaston Paris, 19th century
A more nuanced understanding between medieval literary love and Middle Ages’ ‘changing social and ecclesiastical structures of love and marriage’ (Stevens 2001)
Meaning fin’amors is not ‘exclusively literary’ but ‘cultural’
Concepts central to love in troubadour poetry
Refinement/being a ‘worthy lover’
Longing/unattainable women
Secretiveness
‘Social and personal benefits of love’
‘Tension and contradiction’- ‘sacred/profane’, ‘idealism/messy social realities’
Love being the ‘source of all goodness’- ‘quasi-religious’
Women and power
Women and power in troubadour poetry
Different types of power ascribed to women
Because trobairitz had an ‘exalted…definition’ despite their ‘context of female suppression’
However, some scholars argue that the troubadours worked in ‘self-contained masculine circles’, where women were instead ‘excluded’
(Stevens 2001)
Critical approaches to vernacular song/poetry
19th-20th centuries- attention to the genesis of troubadour lyric and what experiences they conveyed
Recently- less focus on origins of medieval attitudes, ‘fresh examination of the social and historical contexts’ (Stevens 2001)
Recent scholarship- less focus on origins/more on contexts, examples
Bloch and Duby
Huchet and Cholakian
Gruber
Zink and Kay
All of this has turned scholars away from ‘formalism as an end in itself’
Bloch and Duby
Marxist approach, feudal terms/class-based views to look at poetry; poetry to unattainable female desires was for ‘younger…disaffected aristocratic sons’ (Stevens 2001)
Huchet and Cholakian
Psychoanalytical approach, saw poetry as an expression of ‘male anxiety’- ‘loss of social and erotic control’, ‘inter-male rivalry’ (Stevens 2001)
Zink and Kay
See the “subject” of troubadour lyric as a ‘complex, shifting rhetorical position’, shifting between ‘personal’ and the ‘general’ (Stevens 2001)
Gruber
Investigates intertextual relationships between songs and groups of authors, ‘semantic, metrical, and musical terms’ (Stevens 2001)
Motifs in troubadour love poetry
Love and courtesy
Idolatry of the lady, ‘service’ of love
Power of the lady
Joy of love
Love as creative inspiration
Genres- created from the troubadour love motifs
Vers (c.1100-1150 troubadour songs)
Post-1150s: Canso, Tenso, Descort
Canso
Courtly love song
Occitan lyrics- meaning ‘predominantly serious content and high style’
Usually have 5/6/7 stanzas, with one or more shorter tornados
Have some basic rhyme schemes, some involving repetition/different schemes within stanzas
Tenso
Songs in debate form, 2 named participants, but not always joint compositions
Peirol- ‘Quant amors trobet partit’- debate between the poet and Love
Descort
A “discordant” song
Individual stanzas
‘disagreeing and variable in rhyme, melody…and in languages’
Style in troubadour poetry
Self-conscious
Mostly strophic (except descort)
Stanzaic- modern analyses describe using rhyme/syllables
The trouvères (Stevens 2001)
French form of the word troubadour
‘Earliest surviving view of the troubadours’- reactionary group, had the historical position to analyse, parody and reinvent them
However, mostly discussed as a ‘footnote’ to the troubadours
The language of the trouvères
Their French was a ‘collection of related, regional languages’
Champagne, Normandy, Picardy, England etc
Social status of the trouvères
Poet-musician, usually of ‘high birth’- eg Thibaut IV was King of Navarre
Some were ‘jongleurs’- ‘professional instrumentalist, singer, entertainer’
However, unclear distinction between the poet-musician and jongleur
Muset was a jongleur, but became known as poet-composer due to his talent
(Stevens 2001)
Links between troubadours and trouvères
Fine amour- trouvères’ version of fin’amors- learnt directly from the troubadours
Meaning their repertories were not completely ‘distinct’- there were chansons in both Occitan and French
However, compared to troubadour poetry, trouvères’ have more sense of public mixing with the social and personal
(Stevens 2001)
Themes in trouvère poetry/song
Like the troubadours, dominated by references to fine amour
Can turn to parody, self-mocking
Above all for courtly ‘social entertainment’
‘The poet-lover’s eloquence and elegance’ but keeps ‘commonplace feeling’- eg common genres like Pastourelle, Lai
Common trouvère genres
Pastourelle
Sung and spoken forms eg the Lai
Refrain-chanson
Unique to the trouvères
Strophic repetition of music was broken into verses, inserted refrains; this was unlike the troubadours
Chanson de toile
Unique to trouvères
‘Courtly, mock-popular song’, which was not actually popular
(Stevens 2001)
Religious/serious chansons
Trouvères
Crusade songs and songs to the Virgin
De Coincy was a pioneer
Words and music in troubadour and trouvère songs
Rhythm- greatest debate, because of idiosyncratic medieval notation, presented in diverse ways; ambiguous medieval theoretical writing, many unresolved questions about form
Define song by its text or melody?
For later Italian troubadour chansonniers, there was no preparation for music, as it was circulated orally- song texts therefore had different values to ‘compilers’ and ‘patrons’
The trouvères’ ‘rhetoric’, eg stanza patterns and rhymes, were ‘artificial and calculated’ but in a positive way
Dragonetti 1960
Increasing literacy in the Middle Ages
Meant scribes could learn how to ‘represent vernacular compositions in written form’- high and low art forms?
Troubadours and trouvères did not see their art as ‘self-sufficient’ (Stevens 2001)
‘Their verse achieved life mainly through the performance of the singer’
Major sources of troubadour poetry
36 manuscripts and fragments from 13th-16th centuries
Significant that 50 chansons are accompanied by music in multiple sources
Many surviving troubadour manuscripts do not have melodies
Major sources of trouvère poetry
24 manuscripts and fragments from the 13th-16th century
More trouvère manuscripts than troubadour
Most survive with music, but assumed that the poet and composer are the same person
Divided into distinct families- eg by content, order of content, textual variants
Trouvère- Arsenal poetry family
Contrasts with other families, because there are not many variants in the melodic readings
Members of Arsenal were ‘unquestionably copied from a common archetype’ (Stevens 2001)
In different families where there are variants- oral tradition
Musical features of the troubadour/trouvère songs
‘Richest modally constructed repertoire of the Middle Ages’
Many songs have a melody which ‘[oscillates] between two centres, usually a whole tone apart’ (focus on text?)
Stock imagery matched with ‘standard melodic outlines’
Repetition
Most works have balanced phrases/structures
Musical structural dividing points only occur a line or rarely two earlier/later than the poem’s corresponding point
Cangé chansonnier
Chief source of information about trouvère rhythm
There are symbols for longs and breves, but no distinguishing between notes occurring in ligatures
Van der Werf- main function of melodies is to support the text
The rhythm is constantly being reshaped to meet poetic demands
Stevens 2001
Razos
Explain why a troubadour wrote a particular song, like a commentary
Razos are some of the earliest prose text we have in Romantic languages
Jaufre Rudel
Reputation as the troubadour poet of distant love
His vida about falling in love and dying in the countess’ arms seems fictitious
He was in the Second Crusade of 1147
Vida claims he wrote many poems with good music and poor words
Bernart de Ventadorn
Important early troubadour
Early 12th century
Vida- humble origins, he was a foot soldier, mother was a baker/servant
However, this is told satirically by his student in his vida, which could reveal his high status
More melodies survived than any other 12th century poet
4 of his songs are contradicted (reused by other composers)
Other troubadour melodies were through composed, but he used ABABX form, pioneer of structure
Bernart de Ventadorn, ‘Can vei’ (song)
Poet talks about his love interest and how she deceived him for not being what he wanted
Compares himself to a lark flying towards the sun, unattainable
Ending tornada- doom, she is not what he wanted but she controlled his life
Slightly tonal- first and last note D, movement away and to this ‘tonic’
One of the first troubadours to do ‘tonality’- this is modal, quite triadic, but not surely tonal
Restrained and plain text
No ligatures- moments of small flourishes only
Reflects how the man is bound by his ideals of the woman
Troubadour Manuscript H
Early manuscript, late 13th century
4 main scribes- collaborative
1st-all rounded
2nd- fidelity of text, corrections in margins
3rd- artistic, illuminations at the start (MS for rich benefactor)
4th- only adds an extra song at the end (owner?)
Emphasis on tensos, unlike mainstream, link with collaborative process/debate
As time passes, more layers of subjectivity about the MS, can there be a ‘perfect’/complete edition?
1880 onwards
Industrial Revolution- people looking for reasons based on technology and not God
Means 19th century philologist readings demanded one single authentic meaning
Adler- ‘Musikwissenschaft’, the science of music
Text and music of MS studied as one
Because the music of manuscripts might have only staves and not music, due to oral tradition, so music was not written down
If staves are empty, there was still potential for music to be written there
Troubadour MS O
An important troubadour MS written for the King of Navarre
More deluxe than MS X (St Germain)
A typical deluxe MS for a king/local lord
Age of narrative, finding ‘one ultimate goal’, researchers do not want to look for historic differences between X and O
Meaning they would mostly look at the rhythm, as there were few rhythmic modes, determined using stems for value of the note length
1976- Meg Begin published her edition of trobairitz poems, sparking many ‘critical appraisals and analyses’
Revival of Middle Ages women studies in late 19th century
Sankovitch 1999
Women as ‘domna’ (Sankovitch 1999)
Function is ‘mainly…the necessary object of the poet-lover’s desire’, ‘passive and silent’
Kristeva- the domna is the poet’s ‘mirror’, because fin’amor ‘holds only nothingness’ for the other sex (woman?)
Lack of research and attention to trobairitz (Sankovitch 1999)
Many anonymous texts, with ‘linguistic implications’ that women wrote them
Little biographical information even on the women poets we know- only 5 women with vidas
Zufferey- ‘discrimination based on anonymity’
Other critics- believe that some named trobairitz were ‘fictitious’
Trobairitz mainly write…
Cansos and tensos (only exist a few of each)
One of these tensos is a conversation between two unnamed women, ‘domna’ and ‘donzela’ (female invisibility coming from the female writer?)
Why is there disparity between women and men poets?
Some of the women’s texts were not recorded at all- difficult to self-articulate and enter Occitanian culture like men
But by 1170-1260, this was achieved, and women poets’ ‘expression’ was considered ‘dynamic’ for the time
This meant they broke from the ‘circumscribed sphere of the domestic’ (Sankovitch 1999)
Why was the trobairitz’ breakthrough into Occitanian culture possible?
The trobairitz seemed to have belonged to nobility
Meaning they had a larger role in organising culture and audience
However, still ‘essentially voiceless’ (Sankovitch 1999)
How was trobairitz poetry different to male poetry?
Ferrante- ‘specifically female rhetoric’
Bec- ‘psycho-poetic values’ (fidelity, emotivity) over ‘socio-poetic’ ones (reputation, moderation, generosity)
Sankovitch- courtly literature is made up of ‘man-made notions’
Meaning that the woman must take on the courtly role of the man, flip the mirror (Kristeva) and recreate herself in the man’s view
Female corporeality is presented as evil in the Middle Ages, but increasing number of female texts, where the women assert themselves against this mode of thinking
(Sankovitch 1999)
‘Ar em’ (Canso by Azalais de Porcairagues, trobairitz)
‘obvious lack of thematic unity’, ‘fragmentation and incoherence’
Conventional ‘nature’ opening depicting winter, where there is less procreation
This is a metaphor for the trobairitz’ suppressed creativity (they frequently used metaphors)
Topic of ‘assag’ (sexual test) occurs twice, a test by the domna on the man, which Bec sees as a ‘guarantee’ of female power
However, ‘assag’ is more about ‘male accomplishments’ (Sankovitch 1999)
‘Estat ai’ (Canso by Contessa de Dia, trobairitz)
‘Questions essential elements of the courtly code’, by talking about loving a knight to excess, which is against moderation
The husband figure is named instead of being unnamed in the masses of ‘false flatterers’ and ‘jealous ones’
This means she articulates her own pleasures and preferences
This is unlike how men cause female erasure, and Contessa de Dia does not present the lover as an ‘absent foil’ (Sankovitch 1999)
‘Na Maria’ (Canso by Bieiris de Romans, trobairitz)
Sexuality is explored, as it is a love poem addressed to a woman
Role reversal- the female poet uses terms a troubadour would address a domna with
This is done using unexpected literary schemes
However, Bieiris de Romans knows that she has a feminine identity under the ‘linguistic cross-dressing’, by using the expected, she ‘erases’ the “manliness” of the poem
(Sankovitch 1999)
Trobairitz and tensos (dialogue/debate genre)
Tensos are ‘clearly privileged’ by the trobairitz compared to the troubadours
Dialogue offers the woman ‘ready access to the realm of song’ (social status)
This is because dialogue is ‘situational’, highly related to courtly conversations, and women were accepted in these ‘patroness/hostess’ roles
(Sankovitch 1999)
‘Lombards volgr’eu eser’ (Tenso between Lombarda and Bernart Arnaut)
Bernart woos Lombarda by pretending to submit to her, changing his name to Lombard
Shows that she possesses him, but also links to his possession of properties in Lombardy. This objectifies the woman
He mentions other women, Allamanda and Giscarda
Lombarda confronts him with these women- bringing four extra ‘mirrors’
Her last mirror is used for self-reflection (without Bernart)
All this means she ‘[makes] fun of hoary courtly topoi’
(Sankovitch 1999)
‘Interest’ in trobairitz ‘follows the rising and falling tides of feminism’
Current climate is ‘in theory, pro-feminist’
Bruckner 1995
Why did trobairitz studies receive special attention in the 1980s?
Because of Meg Bogin’s “The Women Troubadours”, which reproduced and translated 23 poems
Before this, the last edition of the trobairitz as a group was 1946
When were the trobairitz active?
Mid 12th to mid 13th century
Gaudairenca (Trobairitz)
None of her poems survived
Mentioned in two razos- how the troubadour/husband Raimon de Miraval argued ‘there were too many poets in one home’, divorced her
(Bruckner 1995)
Azalais d’Altier (Trobairitz)
She significantly self-titles, naming herself as the author of a poetic letter
Here, she takes on a masculine, mediating role on behalf of a male lover who quarrelled with his lady
(Bruckner 1995)
Anonymous poems by trobairitz
Some named poets do not correspond to real women poets
Eg- tenso between ‘Na Carenza’ and ‘Na Alaisana Iselda’ mentions 3 women instead of 2
Some tensos by trobairitz were feigned
Shapiro (1981)- identifies 10 fictional tensos between male and female speakers, fictional dialogues between troubadours and anonymous women
Why is the tenso important?
Shapiro (1981)- because the cans ‘only offers one half of a potential dialogue’, ‘realises [the] potential in the interplay of debate and disagreement’
Bruckner (1995)- argues that all ladies are domnas
Troubadour lyrics suggest that domnas are ‘loved by troubadours’ or ‘loving in turn’
‘Described using the same adjectives’- ‘noble, beautiful, charming, educated’, eg Garsenda (a trobairitz and powerful noble patroness)
Social status of the trobairitz (Bruckner 1995)
Occitanian society (South) favoured women, and had ‘economic and cultural expansion’, meaning there was a significant group of trobairitz in the South (despite the troubadour lyric spreading across the Continent)
‘Politically active and powerful women’ eg Eleanor of Aquitaine and Ermengarde of Narbonne were ‘exceptional’ cases
‘All readers would agree’ that trobairitz poetry is situated ‘within the poetic system of the troubadours’
They ‘operate’ and are ‘conceived’ by this ‘masculine system’
Bruckner 1995
Where does courtly love originate?
The troubadour canso (Gaunt 1995)
Macarbru- a ‘misogynistic satirist’ (Gaunt 1995)
The writer is actually a woman, who ‘attacks courtly troubadours’, using the rhyme ‘amador/amor/traitor’, against dominant sexist narratives
However, the song was preserved under the man Raimon Jordan’s name, probably because the subject interested him
Does this force men to look misogynistic?
