Troubadours and Trouvères

In the 12th and 13th centuries, the troubadours in Occitania and the trouvères in northern France composed songs with texts in the vernacular and monophonic melodies. For the troubadours, the vernacular was Old Occitan; for their northern counterparts, Old French. This difference in idiom is sometimes held to mark a distinction between two separate but analogous traditions of medieval song. The medieval practices of compiling multilingual lyric anthologies and of borrowing melodies seem instead to affirm the contiguity of song culture across different languages. The term “lyric” during this period typically designates a text set to melody, but not all manuscripts of troubadour and trouvère lyric preserve song melodies. Music survives for nearly half of the trouvère repertory (about three thousand songs) but only about 10 percent of the twenty-six hundred extant troubadour songs. The compositional period for troubadours and trouvères is conventionally defined rather rigidly as 1100–1300, and the songs themselves as strophic and monophonic. However, the troubadours and trouvères also composed in non-strophic genres (lais and descorts), and the trouvères composed in non-musical lyric genres (congés, dits) as well as in polyphonic forms. Adam de la Halle and Jehan de Lescurel, for example, produced small but significant collections of single-text polyphonic pieces. Of course, the composition of French and Occitan song also continued beyond 1300, albeit in different social and cultural contexts, by which point the long history of its study and reception had already begun. Some of the most important reference works, such as the Pillet-Carstens Bibliographie, date from the early 20th century and come from France and Germany, while Anglophone publications on troubadour and trouvère music only began to emerge in the second half of the 20th century. Modern scholars continually renew this material by bringing it into conversation with critical theory (Giving Voice to Love: Song and Self-Expression from the Troubadours to Guillaume de Machaut, cited under General Studies), feminist theory (Songs of the Women Trouvères, cited under Anthologies), and social history (The Owl and the Nightingale: Musical Life and Ideas in France 1100–1300, cited under Musical, Literary, Social, and Political Studies; The World of the Troubadours: Medieval Occitan Society, c. 1100-c.1300 and Parler d’amour au puy d’Arras: Lyrique en jeu, both cited under Regional Studies). The vibrancy in troubadour and trouvère scholarship also comes from interdisciplinary collaboration and exchange among musicologists, historians, paleographers, and literary scholars. Despite their shared primary sources, the fields of musicology and of literary studies have approached troubadour and trouvère material differently, and with different emphases. In part, these differences can be ascribed to the difficulty of defining a corpus of study, which does not always overlap for the two fields. The organization of this article echoes some of these tensions between older but fundamental reference works and newer directions of inquiry, and the sometimes separate, sometimes unified, treatment of troubadour and trouvère song.

The Elements of Contemporary Turkish Composers’ Solo Piano Works Used in Piano Education

It is thought that to be successful in piano education it is important to understand how composers composed their solo piano works. In order to understand contemporary music, it is considered that the definition of today’s changing music understanding is possible with a closer examination of the ideas of contemporary composers about their artistic productions. For this reason, the qualitative research method was adopted in this study and the data obtained from the semi-structured interviews with 7 Turkish contemporary composers were analyzed by creating codes and themes with “Nvivo11 Qualitative Data Analysis Program”. The results obtained are musical elements of currents, styles, techniques, composers and genres that are influenced by contemporary Turkish composers’ solo piano works used in piano education. In total, 9 currents like Fluxus and New Complexity, 3 styles like Claudio Monteverdi, 5 techniques like Spectral Music and Polymodality, 5 composers like Karlheinz Stockhausen and Guillaume de Machaut and 9 genres like Turkish Folk Music and Traditional Greek are reached. It is thought that the results will contribute to the field because it will cause a better understanding in the artistic viewpoints of contemporary composers, as well as being a step for the piano and music educators and the students who have studied academic piano education in order for them to be able to understand the contemporary music.

Challenging the Patronage Paradigm

This chapter revisits the portrayal of poet-prince relations in late-medieval francophone literature to expose writers’ use of these accounts to critique nobility’s role in literary production. A consideration of select texts from Guillaume de Machaut, Eustache Deschamps and Jean Froissart will show that literary portrayals of the poet-prince relationship frequently served to challenge patrons’ authority over literary production, criticize the failure of nobility to recognize the power of poetry, and acknowledge the increasing presence of a dynamic literary network that stretched beyond the prince’s reach. Far from serving as mouthpieces to the prince, these writers used the patronage paradigm to assert, often at the prince’s expense, the inestimable value of poetry and the wisdom of writers.

Machaut's motets on secular songs

ABSTRACTIn his three motets with tenors taken from secular songs, Guillaume de Machaut experiments with upper voice structures that borrow from the talea principle used in chant-based motets, creating hybrid forms that reflect aspects of the motet's overall subject. In two cases, Machaut sets up upper-voice taleae that do not coincide with their song-based tenor but interact with it in interesting ways. Trop plus est bele / Biauté paree de valour / Je ne sui mie certeins (M20) balances these formal principles to reflect a perfect love balanced between the dedicatory and the sacralised, while Lasse! comment oublieray / Se j'aim mon loyal ami / Pour quoy me bat mes maris? (M16) creates three opposing forms that reflect a Lady looking in two different directions, towards a beloved and a husband who abuses her. Dame je sui cilz qui weil endurer / Fins cuers doulz, on me deffent / T. Fins cuers doulz (M11) does not define regular upper-voice taleae, but rather uses the tools by which taleae are defined in the upper voices – long rests, hocket sections, and melodic repetition – to merge disparate formal principles in the service of a motet that discusses a woman who merges a soft appearance with a hard reality. Here Machaut also uses hexachordal punning, combining sharps and flats to express the Lady's contradictory qualities.