. Well over 2,000 strophic songs for single voice have survived from the rich production of the 12th- and 13th-century trouvères of northern France, preserved in about two dozen chansonniers and other manuscript sources dating from the 13th and 14th centuries. Almost half of the texts are unique, while the rest occur in up to ten or more versions; about two-thirds survive with their music. The trouvères, like their Provençal counterparts, the troubadours, were poet-composers who singlehandedly created both poem and melody as a unified whole. However, the vagaries of oral and written transmission, producing intended or unintended changes by performers (jongleurs) or scribes, have left us numerous instances of significant variation among redactions. For the same reasons, but also and more strikingly as a result of deliberate imitation or borrowing among trouvères, we have many a poem with two or more musical settings and many a melody accompanying two or more poems; in particular, many devotional songs, contrafacta of secular compositions, fall into this last category. Opening with the earliest known French lyrics, the 150-year span of the trouvère repertory closes with the abandonment of its principal genres, the emergence of “fixed” forms, and the advent of a verbal lyricism not tied to music.
About half the corpus shows some kind of authorial ascription, but many of the roughly 250 trouvères identified are otherwise unknown; many of the attributions are uncertain; and the distribution is extremely uneven, running from over 130 trouvères credited with one or two pieces each to only a dozen with more than twenty, but four of these—Gace Brulé, Thibaut de Champagne, Jehan Bretel, and Adam de la Halle—with upward of sixty. Socially, the trouvères were quite diverse, including men better remembered for other literary achievements, such as Chrétien de Troyes (the earliest known composer of lyric in French), Guiot de Provins, Richard de Fournival, and Adam de la Halle; powerful feudal lords, such as Thibaut de Champagne; and even artists who doubled as itinerant jongleurs, such as Colin Muset and Rutebeuf. But most of them seem to have belonged to some rank of the nobility, especially in the early, “classical,” decades that produced illustrious figures like Blondel de Nesle, Gace Brulé, and the Châtelain de Coucy; or, particularly in the 13th century, to the bourgeoisie of the commercial north, a group including, among others, Guillaume le Vinier, Jehan Bretel, and Perrin d’Angicourt, as well as Adam de la Halle. Though the activity of the first group was centered in aristocratic courts, the artistic arena of the trouvères of Artois and Picardy tended to be poetic guilds (puys or confréries), notably the Puy d’Arras. Communication among the court-centered trouvères appears to have been just as intense as among the bourgeois, and to a great extent the two milieux were in contact with each other, elaborated the same lyric themes, and cultivated the same genres.
With few exceptions, their subject was love, and in the first-person chanson d’amour, or grand chant courtois, which celebrated—but less ecstatically—much the same courtly idea of true love that the troubadours had developed as fin’amors, they brought to the subject a high seriousness that made the genre, like the troubadours’ canso, the ultimate expression of their artistic abilities. They sang of amorous longing and of the interplay between desire and creativity in terms that, for all their depersonalizing abstractness and conventional vocabulary, could yet reveal individual inventiveness, even virtuosity, and communicate an intense human experience. Different from the canso—never venturing into the hermeticism of trobar clus, for example, and veering away from the southern emphasis on joy, youth, and the power of love and the beloved to refine the sensibilities of the lover—the grand chant is nevertheless of the same genre and clearly a product of Provençal inspiration.
The prosody of the grand chant, as of the other genres, with the notable exception of the lai-descort, allows great freedom within the fundamental constraint of isostrophic form: that all stanzas be set to the same melody and therefore show not only the same number of lines but also an unvarying succession of (syllabically measured) line lengths. Most poems are five or six stanzas long, with stanzas normally comprising eight to ten lines and lines tending to be hepta-, octo-, or decasyllabic. Isometric stanzas are more usual than heterometric, which, though frequent, are more restrained in shape than the heterometric stanzas of lighter genres, such as the pastourelle. As for homophony, it is rhyme rather than assonance. Rhyme scheme reveals much the same stanza-to-stanza invariability as line-length succession, though the array of rhyme words in a given text rarely shows any repetition. The rhymes themselves, that is, the sounds that rhyme, may be repeated through all stanzas (coblas unissonans), change after every pair of stanzas (coblas doblas), or, much less commonly, change with each stanza (coblas singulars); other arrangements occur, too, as well as smaller rhyme-based devices serving to structure the text. The modern principle of alternating masculine (oxytonic) and feminine (paroxytonic) rhymes is unknown. A further structuring is sometimes achieved, though only rarely among the classical trouvères, through the adjunction of a refrain, normally invariable, at the end of each stanza. The initial stanza of a grand chant is always marked as introductory, whether by an evocation of nature or the desire to sing or by other exordial material. The conclusion is usually marked as well, whether in the last stanza or in a following partial stanza (the envoi), by a statement that “sends” the song to the beloved or some other auditor. The intervening stanzas tend toward an inherently lyrical semantic discreteness, a result of which is that it is not uncommon for the several manuscript redactions of a given poem to present them in different sequences. The usual internal structure of the grand chant stanza is bipartite, the first section (frons) being divided into two subsections (pedes, sing. pes) that are identical in meter and rhyme, and the second section (cauda) showing a freer sequence, as in: 8a 8b/8a 8b//8b 8a 8a 8b or 10a 10’b/10a 10’b//10a 10a 4’b 7c 7c.
This structure is widely paralleled by the overall melodic form AAB, in which musical pes and prosodic pes coincide, but in which the line-by-line development of B may readily diverge from the pattern suggested by the corresponding rhymes. The melodic construction of the grand chant, as of the other genres, is modal. Compared with other such music, the trouvère corpus is unusually rich in accidentals, including not only B-flat and B-natural but also E-flat, F-sharp, and C-sharp; extensive in range, with most melodies developed within the range of a seventh to a tenth, but others within considerably narrower or broader intervals; and ample in both its choice of finals and its ways of relating the final to the melodic ambitus. The grand chant is variable in its overall density of melismatic ornamentation, but it is infrequent for a given ornament to include more than four notes. In all these respects, there is broad variation from songbook to songbook, each of which, or each family of which, tends to show stylistic individuality; a consequence is the often marked diversity within multiple redactions of the same melody. But the most striking feature of the trouvères’ melodies, and the one that has not ceased to generate heated controversy, is that, with only few exceptions, the manuscripts transmit them in nonmensural neumatic notation, that is, with no indication of rhythm. Theories have been proposed to fill the void—an undertaking essential to any performance of the music. Their spectrum moves from a strict application of the principles of modal rhythm, which would apparently deny the text, to the advocacy of a free declamatory rhythm that would reduce the importance of the music; propositions between these poles argue for a modal usage somehow responsive to poetic rhythm or a sort of isosyllabism effectively eliminating the ebb and flow of rhythm altogether. Cutting across all these theories are such questions as whether all lyric genres, including dance songs, are to be treated in the same fashion and, if not, how to differentiate among them, or whether certain melodic features point to particular rhythmic interpretations.
From the deep source of Provençal lyric, the trouvères derived not only the grand chant but also, in combination with local materials, the related crusade song and the heterostrophic lai-descort, both of which are well represented in the French corpus. The political or religious serventois, however, is of only passing importance compared with the southern sirventes, and the troubadours’ planh is barely reflected in the few, heterogeneous death laments of the trouvères; much the same may be said of the alba/aube. The Provençal debate songs, on the other hand, proved a popular model, with the jeu-parti in particular showing a much greater development among the trouvères, especially in the bourgeois circle of Arras; similarly, the pastourelle, documented first in Provençal, came to be cultivated above all by the trouvères.
In addition to the lyric types deriving wholly or in part from the troubadours, the trouvère repertory includes genres indigenous to northern France. Though the Provençal-inspired tend toward a certain aristocratic tone, the natively French types incline, relatively speaking, toward a popular, even folkloric, character; while the former, moreover, are almost exclusively masculine in poetic voice, the latter give prominence to the feminine voice. Indeed, women’s songs, embracing the chanson de toile and other types, form a significant segment of the trouvère corpus. Other purely French genres, certain of which came to be represented in Provençal as well, include some defined chiefly by their content, such as the chanson pieuse (devotional), sotte chanson (parodic), reverdie (springtime reverie), satirical songs, and songs of jongleur life, and others defined by their prosodic/musical form, sometimes reflecting a dance function, like ballette, rondet (or rondeau), rotrouenge, estampie, motet. Frequently occurring throughout this repertory—and in some genres, such as the ballette and rondeau, constituting a structural sine qua non—is the refrain, an apparently independent one- or two-line utterance that, like its modern counterpart, is invariable, cited recurrently at fixed intervals through the song (chanson a refrain), or else is variable, one of a succession of such utterances strung through the song at fixed intervals (chanson avec des refrains).
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