Eight Centuries of Troubadours and Trouvères: The Changing Identity of Medieval Music

by John Haines

Overview

From the medieval chansonniers to contemporary rap renditions, this book traces the changing interpretation of troubadour and trouvère music, a repertoire of songs which have successfully maintained public interest for eight centuries. A study of their reception, therefore, serves to illustrate the development of the modern concept of "medieval music". Important stages in their evolution include sixteenth-century antiquarianism; the Enlightenment synthesis of scholarly and popular traditions; and the infusion of archaeology and philology in the nineteenth century, leading to more recent theories on medieval rhythm.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521826723
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	07/08/2004
Series:	Musical Performance and Reception
Pages:	360
Product dimensions:	5.98(w) x 9.02(h) x 0.94(d)

About the Author

John Haines holds a Canada Research Chair at the University of Toronto, where he teaches at the faculty of Music and the Centre for Medieval Studies. His primary area of research is thirteenth-century monophony and its reception, and he has published related articles in Revue d'Histoire du Theatre, Early Music History and other journals.

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Cambridge University Press
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Introduction

When I first set out to find out more about the death of musicologist Pierre Aubry, I never imagined it would lead to this book. At best, my immoderate curiosity about a footnote-sized anecdote might grow into a single publication of interest to a handful of medieval musicologists old enough to remember some vague story about two scholars who nearly duelled in 1910. It did. My article relating these findings was published in 1997, and I assumed then that I would promptly leave behind this dust on academic dust for more important research directly related to medieval music.¹

But after making a string of apparently unrelated discoveries, most deriving from personal correspondence and work notes, I was drawn to the broader context surrounding Aubry's fencing death and realized that there was more to this story than faulty rumours about an academic duel. The various details shaped a longer narrative which began to answer another question that had occurred to me before my interest in the Beck-Aubry affair: why was rhythm considered so important in medieval song? In reading the secondary literature on the troubadours and trouvères, I found that the issue of rhythm frequently came up; the topic was either lengthily discussed (mostly earlier writers) or cautiously avoided (mostly recent writers). Either way, the 'rhythm question' loomed over the subject of French medieval song, and few stopped to ask why, although many wrote to explain how. Finding out why rhythm had taken on such importance - and ultimately the whole explanation of Aubry's death - took me back further than even the early nineteenth century, and eventually reaching the Middle Ages, the beginning point of both medieval music and its reception. I realized a proper answer would require a historiography which included writers and readers, players and listeners outside official historical turf. That is basically how this book came into being, as a rather long answer to a simple question. It is not a definitive answer, neither is it the only possible one, and I hope that it will receive further refinements.

I believe that this kind of study is at least two decades overdue, and I suspect it would have been written at some point by someone.² Throughout this book, I have made use of reader-response and reception theories, which are well known especially to students of literature.³ Rather than emphasizing the author of a given text, these lay stress on its various readers as contributing to its meaning or even its existence. As Hans-Robert Jauss, one of the founders of Rezeptionkritik, has argued:⁴

A literary work is not an object that stands by itself and that offers the same view to each reader in each period. . . . It is much more like an orchestration that strikes ever new resonances among its readers and that frees the text from the material of the words and brings it to a contemporary audience.

Each reader brings to the text his or her own 'horizon of expectation' (Erwartungshorizont), as Jauss has put it, and redefines it to fit within the parameters of this horizon. The text therefore differs with each group of readers; history shapes literature. Another eminent reception theorist, Wolfgang Iser, has written of the 'text as an event',⁵ a simile which, if perhaps striking in a strictly literary context, actually better fits musical texts, which are usually intended for, or at least imagined as, performances.

Reception theory is especially pertinent to the field of medieval music. One of the characteristics of medieval texts is their prediliction for different interpretations of a single work, or what one writer has called, in a term which has unfortunately nearly become a cliché, mouvance.⁶ Medieval musical texts can claim the further advantage of orality, as products of societies which were far less dependent on writing than ours. Add to this the distance of the Middle Ages, its continuing lore in contemporary life, and the evanescence of ancient musical traditions, and we have in received medieval song a treasure of multiple and contrasting horizons of expectations. One might even say that reader-response theory arises naturally from medieval art. For example, early medievalist Lacurne de Sainte-Palaye expressed a similar insight when he noted that medieval romances varied according to the royal audience which the narrator was seeking to please, and that this was also a feature of similar works closer to his time such as La Princesse de Clèves (1678) which pandered to Louis ⅩⅣ by evoking the glory days of Henri Ⅲ.⁷ It should come as no surprise that Jauss, for instance, was first a student of medieval literature before becoming a founding member of the Constance school of Rezeptionkritik.⁸

For some time already, reception theory has infiltrated musicology, where, as Mark Everist has pointed out, it has tended in its worst moments to reproduce uncritically journalistic criticism of famous works.⁹ Indeed, musicological work in reception has focused on well-known composers such as Ludwig van Beethoven. Already in the 1920s, Arnold Schmitz was distinguishing between the 'real' Beethoven and his mythical, Romantic image; henceforth, it was necessary to strip the latter away to reveal the former.¹⁰ From the 1970s on, Beethoven-Rezeption became an official label. The real Beethoven became elusive, always filtered through and perhaps even just the sum total of his various receptions. So dependent has this composer become on his reception that Scott Burnham has recently dared suggest that 'perhaps Beethoven will go out of fashion for the next two hundred years'.¹¹ The importance of Beethoven reception studies to medieval music is that they reveal the degree to which musical repertoires are shaped by cultural forces. If this is the case in the relatively short span from Beethoven's death to our time, how much more for repertoires which have experienced over 800 years of reception? The change in the musical interpretation of Beethoven's music pales by comparison to that of troubadour and trouvère song, where two different receptions can sometimes lead to two very different works, as illustrated throughout this book. While Beethoven's music will more than likely be heard in one shape or the other several hundred years from now, entire medieval works, such as many troubadour songs or trouvère refrains, are forever lost. Other music, such as certain lais attached to the Tristan and Isolde story, whose power we are told in their time was so great that it brought performer and audience to tears, are now practically ignored even though about a dozen survive.¹²

Considering the interest in reception since the 1970s, it is something of a surprise that studies in the reception of medieval music have taken so long to appear. To be sure, scholars in all fields of medieval music have long been concerned with its interpretation, but this has usually been confined to a preface in the context of a study on the repertoire in question.¹³ Of all areas of medieval music, certainly the one with the greatest potential in the application of reception, simply because it is the largest repertoire, is that of plainchant. It is no wonder that forays into medieval music reception in the 1990s have begun with plainchant, and have focused on one of the most colourful periods of its historiography, the nineteenth century.¹⁴ These have initiated, but by no means exhausted, a broader field of medieval music reception.

The troubadour and trouvère repertoires offer singular advantages in developing a reception of medieval music. First, they are much smaller repertoires than chant, and therefore manageable in a single study which proposes to survey eight centuries. They are also limited geographically; a good deal of my study concerns mainly French writers and readers. By their very vernacular nature, these songs are therefore more explicitly connected to nationalistic causes. At the same time, the two different repertoires offer clear geographic and nationalistic contrasts which a single body of music might not. For instance, the 'querelle des troubadours et trouvères' discussed in chapter 3 pits north against south and puts into clear focus the importance of French regional disputes for the historiography of music in a way not found in plainchant of that same period. The reception of these repertoires also offers idiosyncratic problems which differ from those of plainchant. For example, the historiography of trouvère songs is interconnected with that of vernacular polyphony; this relationship leads to particular interpretations of troubadour and trouvère song, from Enlightenment trouvère harmonizations to early Romantic interpretations according to mensural principles. It is not enough just to say, as one interlocutor recently put it to me, that 'well, everyone just interpreted trouvère music differently at different times'. That may be true, but it is a mere suggestion of a story which is, I think, worth knowing in its full details. The web of receptions of these fascinating medieval repertoires has long deserved a closer scrutiny than previously granted.

As I have already suggested, I see nationalism as playing a definitive role in the reception of French vernacular monophony. If defined as 'loyalty to . . . one's national state', nationalism is largely a product of the late eighteenth century.¹⁵ Indeed, medieval song has played a role in the emergence of modern nationalism, most notably in the work of Johann Gottfried Herder, discussed in chapter 3. But if we define nationalism more broadly as certain groups' 'specific sentiment of solidarity in the face of other groups',¹⁶ then it is a force which existed long before this time. In his classic study France: A Nation of Patriots, Roland Hayes has emphasized that French nationalism did not suddenly appear but was apparent in the Middle Ages and had already reached a high point by the time of Louis ⅩⅣ.¹⁷ Nationalism of one kind or another runs through the narrative I propose here: the genesis of troubadour and trouvère art begins with regional French dialogues which, from the sixteenth century on, are expanded to Italy, Germany, the United States and other lands.

In conclusion, I must confess to having entered my topic in an unusual and even incorrect way. As one German scholar told me recently, 'I thought these sorts of things one saved for later on in one's career as a medievalist'. He was right of course, and the recent spate of medieval music reception literature confirms this: Anna Maria Busse Berger, Daniel Leech-Wilkinson and Elizabeth Aubrey are just a few whose study of medieval music reception was prompted by first reading these interpretations as secondary literature on a primary topic.¹⁸ What their work has begun to suggest is that medieval music for us consists of the total sum of its various perceptions and receptions. That is to say, the reception is the music. My reception narrative takes place for the most part in times outside the Middle Ages, where there is more talk of printed notes and piano accompaniments than scribes or harps. But the former have much more to do with our Middle Ages than we often care to admit. Medieval music comes to all of us first as an impression, unacknowledged or not, and that impression is the result of a lengthy reception process. I have written this book first to understand my own impressions of medieval music. If I have wandered away from the Middle Ages for a time, I hope to have returned equipped with a clearer sense of those many things which for me constitute the music of the troubadours and trouvères.

NOTES

1.	John Haines, 'The "Modal Theory", Fencing, and the Death of Pierre Aubry', Plainsong and Medieval Music 6 (1997), 143-50.
2.	Something of a much abridged version of this book appeared in 1995: Margaret Switten, Music and Poetry in the Middle Ages: A Guide to Research on French and Occitan Song, 1100-1400 (New York: Garland, 1995), 27-37. However, Switten's is a sweeping historiography limited to mostly academic reception, and encompassing both literary and musical aspects of monophonic and polyphonic French repertoires up until the fourteenth century. See also Robert Lug's historiographic synopsis entitled 'Drei Jahrhunderte Transkriptionen: Eine Bestandsaufnahme' in his forthcoming Der Chansonnier de Saint-Germain des Prés (Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France f. fr. 20050): Edition seiner Melodien mit Analysen zur 'vormodalen' Notation des 13. Jahrhunderts und einer Transkriptionsgeschichte des europäischen Minnesangs (Peter Lang), vol. 1, section ⅭⅠ.
3.	See Robert Holub, Reception Theory: A Critical Introduction (London: Methuen, 1984), chapter 3.
4.	Hans-Robert Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, trans. Timothy Bathi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), 21; a bibliographic synopsis of Jauss' important lecture is found in Mark Everist, 'Reception Theories, Canonic Discourses, and Musical Value', in Rethinking Music, ed. Nicholas Cook and Mark Everist (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 382, note 15.
5.	Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 125.
6.	Paul Zumthor, Essai de poétique médiévale (Paris: Seuil, 1972).
7.	Jean-Baptiste de Lacurne de Sainte-Palaye, Mémoires sur l'ancienne chevalerie, considérée comme un établissement politique et militaire (Paris: Duchesne, 1759), vol. 2, 123-32; cf. Iser's similar comments on eighteenth-century writer Laurence Sterne in his Act of Reading, 108.
8.	See Jauss, Alterität und Modernität der mittelalterlichen Literatur: Gesammelte Aufsätze 1956-1976 (Munich: W. Fink, 1977); and Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic, chapter 3.
9.	Everist, 'Reception Theories', 381. Already in the late 1960s, Carl Dahlhaus could write of the upsurge of interest in reception history; see his Foundations of Music History, trans. J. B. Robinson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 150.
10.	Arnold Schmitz, Das romantische Beethovenbild: Darstellung und Kritik (Berlin: F. Dümmler, 1927).
11.	Scott Burnham, 'The Four Ages of Beethoven: Critical Reception and the Canonic Composer', in The Cambridge Companion to Beethoven, ed. Glenn Stanley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 272.
12.	See John Haines, 'Espaces musico-poétiques dans le Roman du Tristan en Prose', Cahiers de civilisation médiévale, forthcoming.
13.	See for example, chapter 4, note 6.
14.	See K. A. Daly, Catholic Church Music in Ireland, 1878-1903: The Cecilian Reform Movement (Blackrock: Four Courts Press, 1995); Ruth Wilson, Anglican Chant and Chanting in England, Scotland, and America, 1660-1820 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996); Katherine Bergeron, Decadent Enchantments: The Revival of Gregorian Chant at Solesmes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); and Bennett Zon, The English Plainchant Revival (Oxford: Clarendon, 1999).
15.	Louis Snyder, Encyclopedia of Nationalism (New York: Paragon House, 1990), 246.
16.	Max Weber as cited in Peter Alter, Nationalism, 2nd edn (London: Edward Arnold, 1994), 6.
17.	Roland Hayes, France: A Nation of Patriots (New York: Columbia University Press, 1930), 3.
18.	See Anna Maria Busse Berger, 'Friedrich Ludwig, Jacques Handschin and the Agenda of Medieval Musicology', in Perspektiven auf die Musik vor 1600: Beiträge vom Symposium Neustift/Novacella 1998 (Hildesheim, forthcoming); Elizabeth Aubrey, 'Medieval Melodies in the Hands of Bibliophiles of the Ancien Régime', in Essays on Music and Culture in Honor of Herbert Kellman, ed. Barbara Haggh (Paris: Minerve, 2001), 17-34; and Daniel Leech-Wilkinson, The Modern Invention of Medieval Music: Scholarship, Ideology, Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

CHAPTER I

The first readers

Deficit quia deficiebat in exemplari.
Troubadour chansonnier R, fol. 111v, lower margin¹

Quot sunt notatores, tot sunt novarum inventores figurarum.
Walter Odington, De speculatione musice²

Sometime in the last three decades of the thirteenth century, two medieval scribes sat down to write the melody for the song 'Pour conforter ma pesance' by Thibaut Ⅳ count of Champagne and king of Navarre, then some thirty years deceased. The one we may call scribe T was writing in the Artois region of France while scribe O was located further south-west, most likely Burgundy or the Isle de France.³ Despite their geographic distance, these two readings are remarkably similar in pitch, something which we might expect given the relative closeness of these scribes to Thibaut's time. But this is not so for their rhythmic interpretations of Thibaut's melody. Scribe O, who has a decided tendency to interpret trouvère songs rhythmically by indicating long and short values, has here abstained from doing so (example 1.1), while scribe T, who elsewhere does not give rhythmic values, has done so in this case (example 1.2); his reading clearly alternates long and short values, creating a rhythmic pattern called a 'mode' (modus) by medieval theorists. For some reason, for this particular song, both music scribes decided to change their habits, switching rhythmic camps, so to speak. Clearly, at the end of the thirteenth century, not only were there different ways of writing and reading trouvère song, but these differences were not always as predictable as they may seem.

These medieval scribes were not just mechanically copying the music for which they were responsible. They were interpreting it, refashioning it to fit the book being compiled. Already for them this was old music, already their perspective differed substantially from those who had first performed these songs, and already these scribes interpreted these melodies using new rhythmic notation. It is sometimes assumed that medieval music lay buried

Example 1.1: Beginning and ending of O's reading of 'Pour conforter ma pesance' (fol. 95r)

Example 1.2: Beginning and ending of T's reading of 'Pour conforter ma pesance' (fol. 4r)

in its manuscripts until it was unearthed and read in the nineteenth century. But the first interpreters of troubadour and trouvère music, which flourished between 1100 and 1250, were its medieval readers. Such was the case for scribes O and T in the late thirteenth century. By the early fourteenth century, literary audiences were appropriating the musical heritage of the troubadours and trouvères in several ways. Legends about them were written down, some of which gave prominence to their musical abilities. Other readers assimilated their musical style, and occasionally their melodies, in the new polyphonic motet. By far the most important written interpretations of troubadour and trouvère music are the many song collections compiled between 1230 and the early fourteenth century. Called chansonniers from the late eighteenth century on, they represent idiosyncratic late medieval interpretations of melodies which were more often than not over a century old, or at least, as in the example described above, several decades old.⁴ Before considering how the chansonniers transform this earlier music, it will be useful to give a brief overview of the southern troubadours and their northern followers the trouvères, and to introduce some of the chansonnier melodies which we will encounter again in subsequent chapters.

The earliest troubadour songs are unknown. Their initial inspiration, first creators, performers and melodies all belong to a period which predates extant sources. Songs in Old Occitan had probably been created for some time before the first troubadour whose poems have survived, Guilhem (William) Ⅶ count of Poitiers, Ⅸ duke of Aquitaine (1071-1126), came on the scene. This nobleman was a singer as well as a poet, so his biography assures us: 'saup ben trobar e cantar' ('he knew how to create poetry and sing'). The sophisticated style and subtle allusions to earlier works in Guilhem's surviving eleven poems suggest that trobar ('finding' or composing) and cantar (singing) in Old Occitan were already well-established traditions before his time. It is unfortunately typical of early troubadour song transmission that none of Guilhem's melodies has survived. Things

Example 1.3: Bernart de Ventadorn's 'Quan vei l'aloete moder' (W, fol. 190/B180v)

are only slightly better for the next generation of troubadours, Jaufre Rudel and Marcabru, from Poitou and Gascogne respectively, for whom only a handful of melodies each survive.⁵

Sources are musically richer for poets from the second half of the twelfth century, by which time the Occitan art de trobar had spread to other parts of southern France such as Provence. The adherents of the art de trobar are many and varied during this rich period for troubadour song, the end of the twelfth century, from the pauper turned courtier Bernart de Ventadorn to the merchant turned bishop Folquet de Marselha. We may classify the intense artistic activity of this time into two extremes of musico-poetic style, trobar leu and trobar clus. Although not all-inclusive, this distinction provides a helpful initial approach into the rich musical world of the troubadours.⁶ The simpler trobar leu ('light' or 'easy') is seen in the opening lines of Bernart de Ventadorn's 'Can vei la lauzeta mover' (PC 70,43) - here spelt 'Quan vei l'aloete moder' by a northern scribe. The melody given in example 1.3 is taken from troubadour chansonnier W

Example 1.4: Arnaut Daniel's 'Lo ferm voler' (G, fol. 73r)

written about a century after the song was composed (see table 1.1 below; troubadour chansonniers sigla follow Pillet and Carstens' bibliography).⁷ This and the remaining transcriptions in this chapter approximate the manuscript's musical notation and follow its line divisions; only the first strophe is notated, as is the case for most songs.

The straightforward simile between the poet's passion and the restless lark is matched by the sinuous melody which nonetheless rests firmly on D, the end point of its middle and final cadences. Though it is free of strict phrasial repetition, this memorable melody nonetheless is the perfect, improvised expression of Bernart's boundless desire, of his trobar leu. Compare the plain pathos of this song with the virtuosic cool of the trobar clus ('closed'),

Example 1.5: Marcabru's pastorela 'L'autrier jost' una sebissa' (R, fol. 5r)

filled with subtlety and word play. One of its chief representatives is Arnaut Daniel. Transcribed in example 1.4 is the opening strophe of his so-called sestina 'Lo ferm voler' (PC 29,14), from chansonnier G (see table 1.1), dated over a hundred years after Arnaut died.

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© Cambridge University Press

Table of Contents

Introduction; 1. The first readers; 2. The changing song; 3. Enlightened readers; 4. The science of translation; 5. Recent readings; 6. Conclusions; 7. Epilogue; Bibliography; Index.

Editorial Reviews

"This volume provides an interesting examination of the repertory of troubadour and trouvère music. The author's final conclusions and discussions of modern-day appearances of this repertory are especially enjoyable. Highly recommended." B.L. Eden, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, CHOICE

"John Haines' book tackles several large tasks: expounding the historiography of a musical repertoire; dilineating and contextualizing their reception; and illuminating the epistemological pitfalls for the curren scholar who studies them." - Elizabeth Aubrey, University of Iowa

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