CHAPTER 2
1. Compare and contrast troubadour and trouvère song. What are some common topics and
poetic genres in each repertory?
Both troubadours and trouvères sang of the political, religious, and moral existence of medieval
France, often taking as topics their courtly life, feudal relationships, and amorous endeavors.
While love was often the subject of their works, it was always presented in a highly idealized and
refined fashion, which the troubadours termed fin’ amors.
The most obvious difference between the two is their preferred tongue: The troubadours were of
an Occitan-speaking Southern French set, while the trouvères sang in Old French, the language
of the north. The later trouvères also preferred narrative genres more elaborate than the
troubadour canso, such as the lai, romance, and the chansons de geste, and were unafraid to
depict a feminine point of view in their works.
2. To what extent was troubadour music an oral style?
Troubadour music was oral in conception: It was only almost a hundred years after its
beginnings, as the art was in decline, that it entered into notation at all. And even in its surviving
manuscripts, the chansonniers, the music of the troubadours is rhythmically unspecific and is
therefore still something of an oral art even when performed today.
3. What is the difference between trobar clus and trobar leu? How do the debates on the
relative merits of the two styles reflect questions about music that continue to be debated in
the present day?
The trobar clus was an art based upon a difficult and elite poetry which would be understood by
a rare few, while the trobar leu was a more accessible entertainment which drew upon light and
popular verse. The dialectic these schools represent is present throughout the record of music
history, and can be seen today in the opposition between the “high art” of classical music and the
popular idioms of rock, hip-hop, and pop.
4. Discuss the diffusion of secular monophony in Iberia (Spain and Portugal), Italy, and
German-speaking regions. What were the main genres?
Secular monophony in Iberia was greatly influenced by the troubadours, and the great Castilian
lyric song, the cantiga, is the direct successor of the troubadour canso. Germanic monophony of
this time was instead influenced by the trouvères, and evolved into what is today known as the
Minnesang, a broad style which included the Leich, a narrative descendent of the lai, the Leid,
the descendent of the canso, and the Tagelied, a song about daybreak roughly equivalent to the
troubadour alba. In Italy, the lauda spirituale and ballata were often refigured popular tunes set
to pious and liturgical texts.
5. Describe the music of Adam de la Halle. How does it reflect his time and place?
Adam’s music is above all learned: He was the only trouvère capable in a polyphonic style, and
he expressed it brilliantly in his motets, compositions of both musical and literary virtuosity. This
style was made possible by the new rhythmic notation coming into practice; and a Paris
invigorated by its then-burgeoning university provided an artistic base which could understand
and appreciate the subtlety of his excellent motets.
6. What type of polyphony flourished at the abbey of St. Martial in Limoges in the twelfth
century?
The St. Martial organum reversed the previous organum style in creating a florid added line,
while reducing the existing one, through rhythmic augmentation, to the stationary and drone-like
role. The original voice, now situated in the bottom of the texture, is what we would today term a
“cantus firmus,” and the added voice above it could, in this style, deal in either secular or sacred
terms.
7. What sources of information do we have about the polyphony that flourished at Notre
Dame Cathedral in Paris in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries? How have historians
pieced together the surviving bits of evidence?
There are few historical sources concerning polyphony at the Notre Dame Cathedral in the
twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Not much of the music survives: Four manuscripts have
survived to the present day, and they lack attribution. Historians have therefore relied heavily
upon the treatise De mensuris et discantu, an anonymous tract written around 1270 by an English
student in Paris (and more popularly known today as Anonymus IV, the name under which it was
published in the nineteenth century). In this text, which resembles lecture notes, the author
names the two most reputable composers of the cathedral, Leonin and Perotin, and describes
their work and standing in the public at large.
8. What are the rhythmic modes? How did they originate, and how are they indicated in
notation?
The rhythmic modes were the earliest system of rhythmic notation. They describe six patterns of
long and short durations, based upon the meters used in poetic scansion. They were indicated to
the performer by the patterning of ligature: Instead of the individual note shape indicating
duration (the system we use today), an initial pattern of the ligature indicated the rhythmic mode
which was to be used throughout the following passage.
9. What is mensural notation? How did it differ from older rhythmic notation?
Mensural notation (also called “Franconian” notation for the theorist who most fully expounded
the idea) is a means of expressing, entirely within the shape of a given note, its rhythmic
duration. This differs from the older rhythmic notation in that it is not dependent upon a set of
patterns: it can freely move in and out of any rhythmic mode, or eschew the modes altogether,
without causing the performer any difficulty.
10. In Chapters 1 and 2, we have seen a progressive move from an oral tradition to a
written one, with increasingly precise notation. Trace this change through Gregorian
chant, troubadour and trouvère music, and different types of polyphony.
Gregorian chant drew upon the earliest methods of notation existent, but the limited nature of
this notation meant that oral transmission was a necessity, since it could not express the range
and scope of a melody but only its general movement (to say nothing of its rhythm). Troubadour
and trouvère song was originally not recorded at all, but later generations would record these
songs in the chansonniers, which are explicit melodically but not rhythmically. By the thirteenth
century, composers of high-art music in the West had adopted what we now term the rhythmic
modes, which, while limited and cumbersome by our modern standards, is nevertheless a far
more specific system than any which preceded it. This new type of notation enabled the great
flowering of polyphony, particularly the motet, in this time.
11. What aesthetic values are reflected in the medieval motet?
The medieval motet, with its thorny intertwined texts, reflects not only an eclectic esthetic but a
learned and elitist one, for the many subtexts and allusions present in the typical motet are
dependent, in their reception, upon a well-read and educated audience.
12. What does Johannes de Grocheio’s treatise Ars musica tell us about thirteenth-century
musical practice and the social roles of different genres? What was Grocheio’s attitude
toward the motet, and how does it reflect the growing presence of an intellectual elite in
Paris?
Grocheio’s attitude toward the motet tells us much about thirteenth-century society. Grocheio
held that the motet was “not to be propagated among the vulgar, since they do not understand its
subtlety nor do they delight in hearing it.” This open elitism is both a means of putting social
distance between the upper and lower classes and of celebrating the ascendance of the university
and education in general.