Music and Letters

The two distinct but related song traditions of the troubadours and trouvères together occupy an iconic space in the histories of music and literature. The number of surviving songs, with and without melodies, by the later, northern trouvères is vastly greater than those of their southern forerunners. It may surprise readers, therefore, that Mary O'Neill's is the first book-length study to treat the trouvères in English. It is an extremely welcome start. An earlier scholarly interest in origins attracted to the troubadours the lion's share of literary and musical attention, with the trouvères all too often viewed as the epigonal tail-end of a dying tradition polluted by increasing numbers of low-style elements. Courtly Love Songs of Medieval France provides an admirable corrective to this view. Furthermore, the perspective from which O'Neill views these songs is enhanced by her treatment of their sources as reflections of an intrinsically oral composing and performing tradition.

As one who teaches late medieval song to undergraduates, I have my own wish-list of what a first book on the subject ought to contain. It should allay student frustration at how unmanageable the music of the period—in particular the secular repertory—is to a novice, especially onewho does not read French. O'Neill's perfectly proportioned book is awilling genie in the lamp. Much of it is admirably clear; it introduces basic concepts at reasonable length and rarely assumes prior knowledge. As she readily acknowledges, it is only a start. Its focus on love songs lessens the attention to other genres (although these are treated representatively in ch. 5), and her emphasis on song per se means that contemporary genres—especially those related by refrain citation, notably the motet—as well as polyphonic songs are barely mentioned. Nevertheless, I recommend it highly, and what follows is more overview than critical discussion.

In an accessible Preface, O'Neill explains the problems with the musical sources for this repertory and in particular with their notation, whose interpretation has brought musicologists quite literally to blows. With a light touch on delicate and controversial issues, she dismisses the doubtful gains of the early years of musicological scholarship in this field: a few facsimiles and editions of poor quality. She mentions in passing subsequent editions—those of Hendrik van der Werf and Hans Tischler—and notes their different approach to the notation of rhythm, a feature of interpretation that has distracted generations of scholars of this repertory. In the main, she sidesteps it through a focus on the grand chant, a genre which does not permit of easy rhythmicization, and she broaches the issue again only in a brief, but appropriately measured, discussion of the more popularisant song of the later thirteenth century (pp. 151-2).

The structure of the book is plain. The first two chapters introduce the grand chant of the trouvères and its sources and notation. Chapter 1 is a readable introduction to the poetry and music of the grand chant, illustrated through the discussion of particular songs. The second includes an illuminating overview of the organization of the chansonniers (by author, alphabetically, or by genre), details of later additions to them, and a general sense of chronological change in these regards (noting especially the increased role of genre).

Towards the end of the opening chapter O'Neill cites two opinions that her book sets out to challenge. She diagnoses van der Werf 's claim that the poem was of more interest than the melodies as being inspired by the presentation of music in the sources, an issue addressed in her second chapter. Deborah Hubbard Nelson's idea that trouvère songs are conventional and uniform, showing that originality was not valued as an aesthetic good in this cultural context, is countered by the rest of the...