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Lo trobar reven, navèm de besonh! Vaici mai sirventes e tenson e cançon … After maintaining eight centuries of interest, it does not seem that troubadour and trouvère music will loosen its hold anytime soon on professional or dilettante imaginations. The survival of this music as both cultural lore and object of scholarship implies a certain durability in the future. At least for a few more years after this book is published, and hopefully many more to come, people will be singing, speaking and writing about the songs of the troubadours and trouvères. Theirs is an ongoing reception to which I will return at the end of this chapter. This continuing reception has evolved over eight centuries of persistent curiosity. So it seems appropriate, even important, to summarize the fluid shape of this reception which I have detailed over the last five chapters. It offers a lesson, at times even a model for the maintenance of other older repertoires, and equally a lesson in their ontology. A good deal of earlier music cannot boast such a consistent profile over time; indeed, the survival of much old music is hardly guaranteed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Habitant des pays d'Oc, méridional mon frère, tu le sais que nous sommes tous riches et musiciens? Riche en mots et musiciens de phrases. In 1996 two books on the troubadours appeared, both substantial studies, both the product of over a decade of research, and both offering an in-depth look at individual figures, their music and its sources. Yet each presented a different point of view. Elizabeth Aubrey's The Music of the Troubadours described and inventoried manuscript sources, transcribed melodies either in a rhythmically neutral notation or in an approximation of medieval note shapes, and described their tonal characteristics. It was the product of a well-established German-American academic study of both the troubadours and medieval music, and copies would quickly find their way on to college and university library shelves; it was recently reissued in a paperback edition. Gérard Zuchetto's Terre des troubadours was a view of the troubadours from one of their descendants, a singer-composer and native Occitan speaker born and bred in the Languedoc who had founded an international centre for troubadour research. His book was a luxurious coffee-table edition twice the weight of Aubrey's tome, with colour illustrations on nearly every page – a book partly funded by the Languedoc-Roussillon region and little known in North America. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Man weiss schon genugsam dass sie der Ausbund eines poetischen Zeitpunktes sind, der mit schoenen Geistern in einer Nation, die man fyr roh und barbarisch gehalten hatte, mit keiner geringen Anzahl derselben und von vornehmem Stamme, geschmyket war. Les fondateurs de l'esprit moderne sont les philologues. In the last years of the nineteenth century a little book entitled Huit chants héroïques de l'ancienne France appeared, an anthology of eight songs spanning the twelfth to the eighteenth centuries whose theme was France at war. The editor of this unassuming collection was a student at the prestigious Ecole des Chartes and an up-and-coming scholar of medieval music; Pierre Aubry was soon to coin the term musicologie, thus becoming, strictly speaking, the first musicologist. In the preface of Huit chants, Aubry's guest author, philologist Gaston Paris, narrated the courage of the countless and nameless men and women who comprised ‘the invincible force of … a nation which has been fighting and singing for ten centuries’. Paris also provided a roster of known heroes including Roland, still the subject of French stage works and songs. Aubry opened Huit chants with two medieval crusade songs, the first simply entitled ‘Chant d'une fiancée’ (‘Song of a betrothed woman’). Its author was given as an anonymous trouvère (‘trouvère inconnu’) standing in for all brave French warriors and their longsuffering lovers at home. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Qual poi fusse il canto che usavano i mentovati, a noi non s'appartiene investigarlo: contuttociò perchè maggiormente rimanga paga la curiosità de’ lettori, diremo che egli per nostro avviso dovette esser molto semplice, per non dir grossolano … La Musique étoit le beau & le véritable Plain-Chant, que l'on nomme Gregorien: les notes en étoient quarrées … sans mesure marquée. Readers paging through the second volume of English music scholar Dr. Charles Burney's imposing General History of Music (1782) were probably surprised to find a troubadour melody reproduced in its original notation (figure 3.1). Burney had found it – and of this he was rightly proud – buried in the bowels of the Vatican. The tune was a famous one, Gaucelm Faidit's lament on the death of Richard I the Lionhearted, king of England, and was thus of historical interest to its English readers. Its original format, with the plain ‘square notes’ sitting lifeless on their medieval staff, might appeal to a strictly antiquarian reader. For his intended broader public however, Burney chose to provide a second version which might better make this strange medieval music leap to life. ‘As the original may be difficult to some of my readers in its antique guise’, the author explained, ‘I hope the rest will excuse my attempting a translation of it’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The visitor to Provins’ ville haute today will find a city filled with remarkably well-preserved medieval monuments, several inaugurated under the initiative of Thibaut, Fourth Count of Champagne and King of Navarre, Provins’ native son and the man whose reign marks that city's high point in the Middle Ages. Thibaut began constructing the city walls, founded the Couvent des Cordelières, and was largely responsible for Provins’ great fame as a textile and trading centre, thanks in part to its biannual fairs, the ‘foires de Provins’. To this day, the city remains proud of its most famous ruler. In the Church of Sainte Quiriace still stands a baptismal font into which it is said that King Philippe Auguste lowered the child Thibaut; in shops throughout the city is sold candy which is named after the famous rose which Thibaut is said to have brought back from the Orient for Queen Blanche. In these and many other ways, on practically every street, the strolling visitor can find reminders of ‘Thibaut le Chansonnier’ under whose rule Provins became a major medieval commercial and artistic centre. Did Thibaut write his songs on his palace walls, as Claude Fauchet and others after him claimed? And if so, do any remnants of these remain in Provins today? The legend has long been abandoned by historians as apocryphal (indeed, few now even appear to know that such a debate ever took place), and any questions surrounding it have not received serious attention for some time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Deficit quia deficiebat in exemplari. Quot sunt notatores, tot sunt novarum inventores figurarum. 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. 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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Au bon vieulx temps ung train d'Amours regnoit. Quando si incomincio à far versi volgari e da quali. It would at first appear that, between 1400 and 1700, little if any interest was taken in the music of the troubadours and trouvères. Or, at least, this was the way nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers viewed it: medieval music had lain buried and forgotten until it was resurrected in the late eighteenth century. Troubadour and trouvère song never really disappeared however, and, beginning in the sixteenth century, scholars were already discussing the notation of the chansonniers. Several other developments crucial to later reception took place before 1700: the creation of a historical category called the ‘French antiquity’ (i.e., the Middle Ages), the continuation and expansion of troubadour and trouvère legends, a nationalistic debate between France and Italy which set the course for medieval studies, and the earliest stereotyping of medieval music as primitive and naïve. The songs of the troubadours and trouvères were far from forgotten. They were being remembered, and transformed as the remembering went on. Of course, what we now call the Middle Ages only slowly came to be designated as such. Beginning in the sixteenth century, French writers frequently used the expression antiquité françoise or nostre antiquité; antiquité was by far the most common term to designate the Middle Ages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]